Pew Documents What Some Info Vendors Will Learn the Hard Way
March 17, 2010
There are some tricks to learning. To memorize a list, put each item in a room of your house and walk the rooms, recalling each item by association. One of my classmates remembered the names of the Great Lakes with a mnemonic word. I prefer to look at survey data and let the numbers do the talking. The write up “Pew: Readers Prefer Ad Supported News to Pay Walls” provides me with some evidence that the dreams of traditional publishers to make yesterday’s revenue from gizmos like the iPad and the Nook might be just a figment of the imagination.
According to Pew, the oh-so-reliable research outfit, the article reports:
when it comes to online news, getting people to pay for content they otherwise value is “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons.
Yikes. People must not know this factoid which is pretty well understood among the savvy, but ageing commercial database publishing crowd.
I found this passage fascinating:
First things first: Pew notes that last year, online advertising saw its first decline since 2002. Numbers from eMarketer said that revenues fell by a total of $1 billion between 2008 and 2009. Still, a full 81 percent of Internet surfers say they’re cool with online ads if it means the content remains free, although “much of that is because they find them easy to ignore.” Further, 21 percent said they click on ads “at least sometimes”—much higher than we expected—and that number goes up when the user is more active. For example, among daily Internet surfers, 28 percent reported clicking on ads. For people who visit at least six sites per day, the click rate is as high as 37 percent.
Where’s the revenue going to originate? In my opinion, the former country club owners will be looking for regulatory help in the form of a “news tax” or some financial piece of the online revenue action from the new owners of the information country club. I caddied for peanuts and I don’t think the new country club proprietors will be too keen to give up too much cash to run “real news”.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
Free, free as a goose. No one paid me to write this article. My reference to a goose reminded me of the Bethesda Country Club member who bludgeoned a swan to death decades ago to much fanfare. I will report my killing of this story to the new manager of that country club in suburban Washington.
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