Brits won’t pay for web content

Posted: Wednesday, 28 July 2010 - 9:37pm Bookmark and Share

More specifically, Brits, more than other nations, are particularly in opposition to the idea. This may give some indication as to how successful pay walls for news sites will actually be.

Four out of five say no way

The KPMG survey, which had 5,627 respondents from 22 different countries, found UK citizens the most unwillingly to pass over their hard-earned pounds for news content. Of the Brits quizzed, 81 per cent said they would not shell over money for web content.

What were the findings?

Speaking to The Telegraph, Tudor Aw, who heads up technology at KPMG Europe, explained that: ‘UK consumers still haven’t come around to the idea of paying for digital content and are clear that they will move to other sites if pay walls are put up.’

He went on to explain that customers have, however, become receptive to the necessity of advertising models and in allowing sites to track their user profiles (presumably for hyper-specific ad targeting). But what Mr. Aw did not explain is that the average cost advertisers pay per impression has dropped notably in recent years, and that most newspapers cannot sell out their advertising capacity, making a certain percentage of these ‘free viewers’ worth nothing to the news publications.

More ... http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/industry-news/6033/brits-won%E2%8...

Comments

Anonymous's picture

Submitted by Anonymous on 29th July 2010
Surely this story is about the lack of sites producing compelling content which is worth paying for rather than the nationality of the people paying? Specialist publishers will be, and are, able to charge for content and non-specialist titles will have to work out a way of reviewing/repackaging/slicing and dicing their content to make it compelling, unique and worth parting with cash for. Once again it comes back to the quality of content and the need to turn that content into analysis and meaningful commentary - something that was possibly lost with excitement of being able to load everything up free on the internet and allowing everyone else to comment on it.
eyemags.com's picture

Submitted by eyemags.com on 30th July 2010
I think the statement that "Brits won't pay for digital content" is badly worded. It's clear with the iTunes model Brits are indeed paying for digital content in the form of music and apps. The study found Brits would not pay for news. This makes more sense. The BBC and organisations like the Guardian are never going to charge for news, and for this reason it's difficult for anyone else to successful charge for the same content. Financial Times succeeds because the content is niche and has a value. It's currently a matter of an experiment to see if the Times can charge for content and maintain a substantial readership.

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