On the Search for New Revenue Models: An Empirical Investigation of Personalized News Aggregators

News consumption is evolving from offline newspapers to online news. Nevertheless, no profitable business model exists for online news, and publishers are still reporting drops in revenue. Personalized news aggregators (PNAs), which rely on new information and communication technologies, provide a new way to aggregate content that might provide the basis for a revenue model in order to design a business model. Nonetheless, there is very little research about user willingness to pay (WTP) for a PNA service, in part because WTP strongly depends on the ideal configuration of a PNA. Based on an adaptive conjoint analysis (ACA) with 146 participants, this study explores the importance of different attributes in a user’s estimation of total utility and a user’s WTP for changing attribute levels. We show that price, contract duration, and revenue model are the most important attributes. €2.50 per month would be acceptable in combination with an advertising-based revenue model. Changing the contract duration from 12 months to one month shows the highest WTP. However, even if the importance of personalization functionalities is high, there is limited WTP for it.