The evolution of the media discourse on the implementation of media companies' new digital business models

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse of Spanish media outlets to justify changing their digital business model by introducing paywalls. For the last few years, this sector has been introducing new payment models to supplement its income from traditional digital advertising and other revenue models. This article analyzes the evolution of the informational and commercial discourse used by the media to overcome barriers to the implementation of new business models. The sample was defined as a linguistic corpus comprising all content related to the Spanish term for “paywall” from January 2008 to December 2021. Using software designed for this purpose, word association and co-occurrence analyses were carried out. A non-supervised clustering process was also used as the basis for thematic analysis.