Another study to put the nail into the paywall coffin comes from the Gfk Group (via NewTeeVee), which found that only 13% of people will pay for online content. And that’s 13% across the US AND Europe, with 16,800 people being surveyed, so a pretty heavyweight study.
Even worse, 42% of European and 21% of US consumers expected absolutely everything online to be free in the truest sense of the word - i.e. without even any ad support!
Things do look marginally better in some countries, in Sweden (the home of Spotify…and also the Pirate Bay) almost a quarter (23%) will pay for content while here in the UK the figure is 18%. By contrast in France, 50% even expect everything to be free with no ads, while in Spain the figure is 54%.
I’ve translated the table from the German press release (Click for bigger image)
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The good news for content providers is that there are huge numbers of people who will pay for content. Some will; some won’t; so what.