Comments on: New Study Probes What Readers Will Pay For Beyond Financial News

By: Maria

Maria — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:54:38 +0000

Most men are really into sports news. As much as possible, they want the newest update about any sports event as soon as possible. This gives them the courage to push through with this pay content stuff. Indeed, a publisher must spend an extensive research about the effectiveness of this approach that won't affect the number of their clients.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:21:21 +0000

Users' "willingness" to buy content is farther qualified by its price, the method of payment, its security and scale/popularity. Asking someone "will you or are you willing to pay for online news" is not enough and might, in fact, be misleading. It is a little like asking someone "will you be willing to pay more taxes?"

Once other than financial content is available for a fee, the fee is small, the payment easy and secure, prefereably "automatic" (the way some highway tolls are collected, for example) then the percentage of people not only willing but actually paying will be much larger.

Especially, when people realize that by paying a few cents for quality online content they can "clean" the web from all this "free" yet bogus or unreliable news, from unwanted ads and cookies, and actually even save money by limiting the use of energy and bandwidth. (free advertising is free to individual user but it costs a lot the society to broadcast and store the memory-hungry banner ads and pop-ups, and thus contributs a lot to the CO2 emission!)

I bet most of the Web users do not know that "free" advertising uses about 30% of the energy necessary to maintain the Internet. This translates into millions of dollars or euros and millions of tons of CO2. Paid content can help reduce these unecessary costs.

By: K. Warman Kern

K. Warman Kern — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:54:29 +0000

After scanning the report available on Price Waterhouse Cooper's website, I'm surprised by the conclusion implied by the headline on PaidContent.org.

Everything is relative. Relative to today's "oversupply" of free news, why would anyone say they would pay?

More importantly, the study suggests many needs are not filled by free news today and that newspaper companies have solid brand credentials to build from.

By looking at the glass as half full, the print industry is "leaving money on the table."

katherine at comradity

By: Prut

Prut — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:59:40 +0000

Consumers will only pay for financial news if their company is paying the bill.