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)

Now here’s a subject close to my heart, the continued usefulness or otherwise of the age old press release. Publisher Ragan Communications and PollStream carried out a survey in the States, which found that only 49% of PRs think ‘it’s as useful as ever’, while 33% thought it was a ‘necessary evil.’

Ragan’s Lindsey Miller says press releases are becoming ever less useful due to – yep, you guessed it – social media. According to Marketing Charts, Ragan’s take is that communicators are using social media to get around ‘canned’ information and to target and reach journalists. And obviously via Twitter lists is yet another way that can be done.

I guess it all depends what you define a ‘press release.’ Does it really have to follow the conventional standard for it to be classed as one? For example, some companies have started using blog posts in place of standard releases – Twitter is a prime example. It’s something that makes sense in certain circumstances but to my mind, a corporate post is a release of sorts.

Image – Bohman

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