Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Hesbon Hansen Owilla

Department

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Abstract

Newspaper publishers in Kenya continue to amass and grow numbers of online consumers having migrated to social media in the wake of the digital disruption. Despite the huge following online, newspapers continue to give out most of their content for free. But with the continued loss of advertising and sales revenue for the newspapers, some have started to seek ways of supplementing the lost revenue through charges on some of the content on their platforms. The objectives of this study were a) To analyse and understand The Star Newspapers online consumers, b) To establish the pay structure that is most preferred by online consumers of The Star and c) To determine the kind of content The Star newspaper consumers are willing to pay for. The study adopted a quantitative research approach and employed the descriptive design. The study was anchored on the disruptive innovation theory. Data was collected through questionnaires administered to online consumers of The Star. Data was coded on Excel and analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The study found out that majority of the consumers of The Star online were youthful, fairly educated, most with an income and that there was also a group of retirees consuming the online news content. The study also established that subscription remains the most preferred mode of payment with majority willing to pay a maximum of 200 shillings a month. Some of the consumers also preferred the pay-per-article model. The study found that content on cooking, how to buy a house, making and saving money was most preferred by the online consumers and that exclusivity was key in influencing the decision to pay. The study recommends that The Star ventures into niche content behind its paywall and a further research into the shift of preferences from politics to more empowering news.

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