Paywalls and the Unthinkable
January 16, 2010
If you like surveys, you may find “Pay Walls Will Fail: Nobody Wants to Pay for Online Newspapers” interesting. If you work at a newspaper planning on making big bucks from for fee electronic editions, you may want to skip this blog post. The survey presents data that alleges lots of people will not pay for newspaper content offered on a for fee basis via the Web. Big surprise? Nope. Not many publications have sufficient content to pull enough online revenue to pay the bills. There were a couple of points in the write up of the survey data that I found notable.
First 10 percent of those in the sample of 2,000 people don’t read a newspaper. Yowza. I think that percentage will grow as oldster like me head to the big computer store in the sky. Second, a surprising 23 percent are willing to pay. That percentage struck me as high. In my experience, the pull of electronic content is a fraction of the audience for a traditional printed publication. The reason is that those who like paper and ink are not too keen on the online or electronic experience.
The unthinkable for newspapers and magazines spending big money on electronic publishing systems is that paywalls won’t work. So what’s plan B?
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Coast Guard. You know that is the outfit partially on call when ships and other constructs sink.
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