The recent advances of smart devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs have allowed people to access to news content in real time. Today’s news readers are consuming news content more through various online channels, such as social media platforms and web portals, than traditional newspapers or TV broadcasts. However, this changing trend of online news consumption has made people (news consumers) accustomed to the free use of news content, and thus, online new providers are having difficulty in monetizing. The PWYW (Pay-What-You-Want) payment model, which allows readers to choose payment and its amount for their favorite article, has been introduced as an alternative profit model. Therefore, in this study, for a successful settlement of the PWYW model, we examined the comparative importance of heuristic-systematic attributes affecting news content readers’ voluntary payment. The comparative importance of attributes was assessed based on the result of a conjoint analysis with 314 news articles collected from a domestic online news content provider (i.e., Ohmynews.com) in which the PWYW payment model had been successfully adopted. Results show that ‘Share Articles’, ‘Article Length’, and ‘Article Readability’ are found to be important attributes among others. Overall, heuristic attributes are considered more important than systematic attributes.
