Researchers at Oxylabs, a web intelligence company, used public pricing data from 36 news, education, and streaming platforms to build a longitudinal picture of how access to online information has changed since 2020.
The headline number is a 17% rise in average annual subscription prices over six years. News subscriptions rose fastest. The New York Times nearly doubled its monthly price over the period, from $18.47 to $32.59. Across the sample, 77% of platforms now operate a hard paywall with no content available without payment.
A parallel shift is visible even on nominally free platforms: 74% now require registration before any content can be accessed, up from a lower baseline in 2020. The combination of registration walls and paywalls means that the default experience of the open web — anonymous, free access — has become the minority case rather than the norm.
Oxylabs frames the research as evidence of a structural shift in how knowledge and information are distributed online, with implications for access equity across income groups and geographies. The company, which builds web data collection infrastructure, collected the pricing data using its own tools and noted it tracks only publicly available pricing information.
The data is available in Oxylabs' full report on subscription price trends.
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