Study: Most won't pay for newspaper, magazine content online
- 17 November, 2009 08:14
- Comments 2
Bad news for newspaper and magazine publishers hoping to boost their flagging businesses by charging for content: Most consumers in the U.S. won't pay for it.
That's the finding from a new study from Forrester Research, which polled around 4,700 U.S. consumers, 80 percent of whom indicated they're unwilling to pay for access to newspaper and magazine articles and other content.
Since the once red-hot online advertising market has cooled off considerably in the past 12 months, publishers are seriously considering charging for content as another alternative. That, however, will be a tough sell.
And catering to the remaining 20 percent of respondents who are willing to pay for content won't be a slam dunk either. These group is splintered in its preferences for payment methods.
Eight percent would like a subscription fee for accessing all online content; another 8 percent would like a subscription for access to content on the Web, in print and via mobile devices.
The other 3 percent lean toward micropayments, shelling out dough for individual articles.
The findings indicate that publishers have to continue offering free content monetized through advertising, while also setting a price on premium content that consumers can pay for via a variety of methods, according to the study's lead author Sarah Rotman Epps.
"There's no one delivery platform, and no one pricing model, that will satisfy all consumers. Consumer willingness to pay is so modest -- and, in general, we find it tends to over-report in surveys -- that publishers need to be extremely flexible to accommodate the needs of these precious customers," she wrote in a blog posting.
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Comments
kcbill13
Only want to pay for real analysis, not opinion by corporate lie
If the publishers want us to pay, they have to offer value, which they cannot do if they keep playing a no win game for the people who are their potential customers.
They keep distracting us from the real news, and during the leadup to the iraq war, they blatantly helped Howard lie to us to keep us fearful, and justify a war which was for bigger oil company profits.
And now, they want us to pay for content while they mostly want to distract and mislead. No thanks!
Anonymous
This is NOT new news at all -this has been known for many years!
So, 80% don't want to pay for online content!
There is nothing new here and this is not a surprise as the software industry has been facing this issue for years and its getting worse - see http://www.pcprofile.com/Its_Soft_Therefore_Its_Free.pdf
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