For all the talk of erecting paywalls, implementing micropayments or bundling subscriptions for online news content, the one voice that seems to have been missing from the debate is that of the [potential] customer.
The publication of the
Guardian's paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll, then, brings that muted voice starkly to the head of the debate. And guess what? It doesn’t look like users want to pay at all – in fact, it seems that only five percent of online news consumers would be prepared to pay even a miniscule sum to access news content online.
To those of
us who’ve had significant experience of producing and delivering web content, this is wholly unsurprising - not because of a fundamental opposition to an Internet pay-model (it’s clearly worked for iTunes, the Apple App Store, and even FT.com), but because it represents such a fundamental U-turn from the status quo - and, more worryingly, pays little or no attention to user behaviour in what is an almost totally measurable medium.
For newspapers and magazines the payment model worked, and, to an extent still works, well. By paying a fee for a newspaper or magazine, customers feel a certain loyalty to the riches inside; they will undoubtedly read more than a single piece of content to ‘get their money’s worth’.
The exact breakdown of what they choose to read within that publication was never such an important issue though; the publisher had already earned its money when the publication left the shelf or landed on the doormat. Put simply, it didn’t matter if the half-page filler on P32 didn’t get read.
The web is different – and consumers have no such loyalty to a single publication or brand. Instead - guided by Google and increasingly by recommendations and shared links from friends across the social networks – users happily skip from site to site with a vigorous devotion to the content they seek –but not necessarily to the platform where that content is found (think BBC or ITV television programmes on YouTube).
Of course, consumers will still want to access content from sites they trust, but being free of any financial commitment they can still choose where they want to go at a particular time, for a particular need.
But – hold the front page - there is a positive in all this; the appetite for news doesn’t appear to be diminishing. People still want quality content, they just want to be able to access it in a different ways.
We need to find solutions to service that need, rather than trying to retro-impose the “come in and read all our content for a fee” rationale on an audience that behaves quite differently.
