News Corporation, which is just one of a number of publishers considering charging for online news coverage, should take note of a recent UK survey which revealed just five per cent of respondents would pay to access walled content.
Unsurprisingly, three-quarters said that if their favourite online news source decided to charge for access, they’d simply find another free site instead, while eight per cent said they’d just look at the service’s free headlines and forego access to complete content.
With news aggregation services such as Google News and NewsNow piping free content from trusted news sources 24/7, it would seem that those organisations looking to charge for content are doomed to fail, unless their content is either spectacular, niche, or both.
Not everything online has to be free, of course, and there are people that are doing just fine from subscription-based models, but I don’t think the general news outlets will ever fall into that category, particularly when a lot of what they push out is just regurgitated from the wire and press releases.
Originally posted on September 21, 2009 @ 5:23 am
