Newspaper charging: consumers will pay
The debate over whether newspapers will be able to charge for their online offers is little better infomrmed today thanks to a survey commissioned by paidContent:UK which reveals only five per cent of online readers say they are prepared to pay… but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
The last few years have seen the rapid development of a generation of newspaper readers who have quickly become accustomed to getting their news for free, but this is an aberration. For as long as printing presses have been commercially viable, people have been prepared to pay for their news. Even today, many thousands newspapers are printed and sold each day and their cover prices have been increasing. Sure circulations have fallen, but print is a long way off being dead.
More and more people choose to read their favourite newspaper online, but despite that apparent success free content shows no sign of making money. Newspapers that continue to give themselves away will either run out of capital and close, or find wealthy proprietors prepared to prop them up as vanity projects.
Ninety-five per cent of readers say they won’t pay, but when their favourite content really does disappear behind a pay wall most of those will relent, provided the fee is fair. And of those who really won’t pay… so what… let them go, they are parasites sucking the industry dry.
The real issue is not whether to charge, but how to charge. Fair payments for single articles means pennies; pennies that may disappear in transaction costs.
While many people have floated the idea of micropayments, Google appears to have a solution. They want to become the internet’s newsagent a place where you can go to buy any publication. This will happen.
And a raft of additional internet newsagents will follow suit. Hell, we may even see Murdoch open up whatever charging system he has in mind to the competition.
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