An estimated 10,000 Croatians pay for 'locked' content in online media, and with a share of 8 percent, Croatia is in the last place among the 20 EU countries in which readers pay for online news subscriptions, according to survey by the Society for the Protection of Journalist Copyrights (DZNAP).

On the market of Slovakia, which is comparable to Croatia in terms of population, purchasing power and number of media publications, the Dennik N media, specialised in investigative stories and in exposing irregularities among political elites, has collected as many as 70,000 subscribers since 2014, when it was founded, according to the survey “Digital subscription – a new direction for quality and independent journalism,” funded by DZNAP, and carried out by Jutarnji List journalist Goran Penic.

The survey also points out that the Croatian figures are small and reflect the attitude of the audience, but the publishers claim that they are satisfied, considering the size of the market and the short period of time since the “locking” of media content on the Internet.

The survey also refers to Reuters data, according to which, with a share of eight percent, Croatia ranks last among the 20 European Union countries where readers pay for news. The share is the highest in Sweden – 33 percent of the audience pay for online media content. Finland has reported the percentage of 19%, as well as Belgium, in Denmark it is by one percentage point lower (18%), the Netherlands 17%, Ireland 16%, Germany 14%.

“Although at first glance it could be said that readers are more willing to pay for news in richer countries, this is not the case, so the data for Romania is surprising, where 16 percent of people have media subscription, while, for example, in France only 11 percent of readers pay for news on the Internet. We are also at the bottom in terms of the number of subscribers, which is nothing unusual since we were the last to introduce digital subscriptions,” Penic said.

Penic collected data from all publishers that introduced content charging (Hanza medija, Styria and Telegram Media Group) and sent a questionnaire to Index Promocija, because he wanted to get an answer as to why they did not introduce a subscription, but Index refused to participate in the project.