Newspaper paywalls? 9/10 consumers will give them a miss

Oct 21, 2009 by Dirk Singer

This chart is fairly conclusive: The Wall Street Journal might be doing just fine in charging the suits for news. But here in the UK, other papers in Murdoch’s stable such as the tabloid, The Sun, and even The Times have a tough sell ahead of them.

According to MediaWeek, 91% of UK consumers wouldn’t pay for news and 90% wouldn’t pay for analysis. However, just over one in five would pay for sports content, which does provide news publishers with an area that they might be able to monetise, were the offer good enough.

The fact is, why should most consumers pay for news?

BBC online pretty much supplies everything the casual news consumer might want. And as PwC pointed out in a recent report, we should now be talking about generic news brands as what BBC News and The Times offer online is pretty similar in being primarily articles interspersed with multimedia content.

Which is of course a key reason why both Murdoch senior and junior have been railing against what they see as unfair competition from the public broadcaster.

Via George Hopkin

Related articles by Zemanta

• Murdoch to close thelondonpaper with threat to 60 jobs (telegraph.co.uk)
• News Corp. Setting Up an Internal Wire Service (nytimes.com)