A poll from the UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) says about half its members currently charge for some or all content on their websites, while a further 20% said they were planning to begin charging in the next 12 months. Big change from a similar poll two years ago when 54% of AOP members said they had no plans to charge for online content.
In the AOP 2009 Content & Trends Census, association members were asked about digital opportunities, threats and trends, as well as paid and free content; user-generated content (UGC); social media; content delivery mechanisms; mobile sites and mobile applications.
Not surprisingly, the biggest opportunities were seen in
Mobile Web (85%), UGC (75%), High speed broadband (75%), Community/social networking (73%) and behavioural targeting (73%).
And the threats:
The economy (70%), Competitors (53%), BBC (50%), Google (38%) and Government and legal restrictions (35%).
Lee Baker, Director of AOP, was quoted as saying:
“We’ve all been talking about a tough year for industry and particularly for publishers, but again our Members show their ability to adapt and take on new challenges in the form of exploiting new formats. A strong vote for Mobile and Mobile Apps is encouraging for the industry as a whole; and use of Twitter is a particularly interesting development in terms of use of new mechanisms to publish content.”
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The latest poll on whether people in Britain would be willing to pay for online news content makes gloomy reading for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp hounds looking to reverse their enormous £2.1 billion losses in 08/09. If they were looking for a glimmer of hope, they are unlikely to find it in the paidContent:UK/Harris interactive poll published this week.
In a nutshell — and this comes a s no surprise to me — people want to pay nothing or next to nothing.
Let’s let the graphics speak for themselves…
It seems to me that if as a news publisher you are dishing up the standard fare of general stories covering politics, celebrity tittle tattle and sports you are really not going to get very far with building an online revenue stream from your content alone. The key is — and will always be — just how essential, unique or exclusive is your content? If it is set to make a big difference somehow and enable people to make money or create competitive advantage then the price that can be charged is directly proportionate to the value of the information. What hope then for the consumer monsters competing against each other, huge publicly funded organisations such as the BBC, and the legions of bloggers, twitterers and others feeding the social networks? Brand is no longer sufficient to keep and monetise readership. The days of hearing: “Don’t you know it was in The Times, dear chap” as an expression of assurance that something was fair and true are long gone.
Faced with ever expanding choice and being swamped with information, disinformation, opinion and libellous streams from each and every direction, the reader has become far more discerning in its ability to discover, verify and react. While there remains rich and varied streams of content from numerous sources, the reader will remain reluctant to pay. In the paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll, a huge 68% say they would be willing to pay just a penny or two to access articles, while the majority, if faced with having to pay and no choice, have indicated they would not pay more than £10 a year. Seems the thumbsuckers need to get sucking again.
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