Adoption and Diffusion of Digital Information Goods: An Empirical Analysis of the German Paid Content Market

The rapid growth of the Internet and electronic commerce stimulates new digital innovations. Electronic markets can influence both adoption and diffusion processes of digital innovations in significant ways. The difficulties for market transactions of information goods and the change from free to paid content on websites in the last years has led to research questions about how individuals decide whether and when to adopt paid content innovations and how this innovation diffuses throughout a population. This article presents empirical evidence about the adoption and diffusion process of paid content. It focuses on the differences of the adoption and diffusion process of different paid content product types if there exists an established, non-digital counterpart. The results in this paper help media managers to design business models for paid content by forecasting the adoption and diffusion process of the offered digital content product.