Why pay for paper? An analysis of the Internet's effect on print newspaper subscriber retention

The goal of this paper is to quantify the effect that increases in home internet access had on the print newspaper subscriber retention for an anonymous newspaper during the years 1998 through 2003. Using weekly, subscriber-level transaction data from the newspaper and internet usage statistics from the Current Population Survey Internet and Computer Use Supplements, a discrete-time duration model is used to estimate the effect that home internet access had on the probability of a current subscriber canceling her subscription. I find that on average, increasing the probability of internet access from the 10 th to the 90th percentile value increases the probability of a customer canceling her subscription in a given month by 50.5%. The same increase in internet probability also reduces the probability of continuing a subscription for longer than 167 months from 0.736 to 0.597 on average.