The internet is increasingly splitting into two information ecosystems – people who subscribe, and those who don’t.
Vilnius, Lithuania, June 18, 2026. – A new analysis, conducted by Oxylabs, a web intelligence company, reveals that around 60% of the platforms maintain a hard paywall, while 83% of Americans have not paid for news in the past year. Those who pay for news and other subscriptions, spend an average of $219 per month – equivalent to more than eight hours of work at the median U.S. wage.
With most of that spending going toward entertainment rather than news, and with news prices rising faster than other categories, staying informed through quality outlets is becoming a lower priority, or simply out of reach, for many.
“Free resources on the open web are shrinking year by year. Publishers are adapting to real economic pressures, but the result is a widening gap between those who can afford quality information and those who can’t. At the same time, through Project 4β – our initiative supporting journalists and researchers – we’re seeing bad actors exploit these shifts. They are spreading disinformation to fill the gaps left by quality journalism,” said Denas Grybauskas, Chief Governance and Strategy Officer (CGSO) at Oxylabs.
The research, which analyzed pricing and access models across 34 major news, education, and entertainment platforms, found that the cost of accessing information online has noticeably increased over the past several years, with average annual subscription prices rising over 17% between 2020 and 2026.
News subscriptions had the highest increases, with publications like The New York Times nearly doubling their monthly price from $18.47 to $32.59 during the studied period.
Education platforms like Coursera Plus, Skillshare, and Udemy were the most expensive and volatile category, with subscriptions averaging $25.89 per month across the period.
Entertainment, which in this research was included as an informal learning category, stayed at the opposite end: platforms like Netflix, and Apple Music cost an average of $9.39 per month, the lowest of the three categories and the most stable.
The Intersection of Information Access and Technological Progress
The implications extend beyond household budgets. As more of the formerly open web moves behind paywalls and registration walls, the pool of publicly accessible data available to train AI systems, conduct independent research, and build next-generation digital tools is shrinking. This change is reshaping access at a critical moment in AI innovation, while consumers absorb the price.
At the same time publishers face challenges of their own. Google search traffic to news sites dropped 33% globally last year, with AI-generated answers reducing the need to visit sources directly. For many outlets, paywalls have become one of the few ways to sustain journalism.
“What the subscribers and non-subscribers read is, increasingly, not the same thing. Essentially, they’re operating in different information ecosystems, with different emphases and blind spots. That’s the part of this trend we find most troubling. The open internet was meant to broaden access to reliable information, not stratify it by income. We believe the public web should remain something everyone can navigate, measure, and learn from – and that the data describing how it is changing should be available to anyone trying to understand it.”
Even when the content is free, 74% of the platforms require account registration, which means it requires payment with personal data. Paying for a subscription does not mean ads don’t interrupt access either – 60% of platforms still show them to paying subscribers.
For consumers, there are ways to save money when it comes to accessing information behind paywalls. While an average American pays $16.70 per month for an individual plan, the introductory rate averages $4.21 per month and is the cheapest entry point.
The full research report is available here.
PR Contact
Zivile Kasparaviciute
Senior PR Manager at Oxylabs
About the Expert
Denas Grybauskas is a Chief Governance and Strategy Officer (CGSO) at Oxylabs, leading legal, risk management, ESG, and communication teams. He shares his knowledge with students and professors at numerous universities, such as the University of Michigan, and is a major voice of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI). Grybauskas is a thought leader in the public data acquisition industry, regularly providing comments to the media, including Forbes, Fast Company, Computer Weekly, and niche podcasts such as Temidy.
About the Oxylabs Research Team
Oxylabs Research is the research and storytelling team at Oxylabs. We use ethical, compliant Oxylabs scraping tools to collect only publicly available web data – never private, paywalled, or personal data – and turn it into clear, timely insights that help everyone make sense of a fast‑changing technological, economic, and social reality. Our work is designed to support original reporting and analysis by journalists and to serve the broader public good. If you’re working on a story or investigation and need reliable web data to back it up, get in touch at [email protected].
About Oxylabs
Established in 2015, Oxylabs is a web intelligence platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data. Constant innovation, an extensive patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the web intelligence collection industry and forge close ties with dozens of Fortune Global 500 companies. Oxylabs was named Europe’s fastest-growing web intelligence acquisition company in the Financial Times FT 1000 list for several consecutive years. For more information, please visit: https://oxylabs.io/
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