In a recent survey by Harris Interactive commissioned by PaidContent UK studying what the outcome would be if the newspaper industry started charging for online content. You can see from results below that only 5% of participants would continue to read the news.
The sort of numbers this would achieve aren’t unimpressive though! In June, ABCe announced that The Mail Online took the top spot in the UK, with 29.3m unique users in one month. If 5% of those guys paid £4.99 per month to read the news, that’s an income of £7,325,000. If the sell was compelling enough, those 10% who were not convinced or unsure might just be persuaded if it became the trend (bringing the achievable total of £21,000,000 per month)?
Will this change Rupert Murdoch’s mind when he recently announced he is to charge for access to much more of News Corp’s online news and entertainment content.
The graph showing the results is below:
