Interesting post on MediaWeek saying that 9 out of 10 UK consumers won’t pay for web news. What’s most interesting about this study of 2,000 UK consumers by Lightspeed Research (apparently commissioned to challenge Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge users to access news content on his websites) is that 1 in 10 respondants said they would pay for online news (4% even saying they would be “happy” to pay a subscription”).
If 65% of the UK’s population is online, then potentially nearly 4 million people would be willing to pay to read news. Sky currently has 9 million customers in the UK, so 4 million seems like quite a healthy amount of people to market online news to. If each person spends only a tenner a year on online journalism then we’re looking at a £40m annual industry which is nothing to be sneezed at!
What this survey has really pointed out is that like the music industry before it, news outlets can expect to be able to charge for top tier versions of their content and that news content is a commodity that consumers are willing to buy at the right price.
