Online newspapers: To pay or not?

The debate whether those reading newspapers online will pay for the free access they now enjoy is hotting up.

If surveys are anything to go by then the online publishers ought to be wary of going down the path of trying to charge for online access.

MediaDailyNews reports:

"The latest plan to save newspapers -- charging for online content, perhaps with a system of micropayments -- has been slightly deflated by a new survey from Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD, which found that over half of online readers said they wouldn't pay for online content.

This is due partly to their conditioning over the last decade of Internet use, when they grew accustomed to getting online content for free. That's an irony, considering that free delivery was the newspaper publishers' own online strategy.

Specifically, the survey of 2,404 American adults by Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD found that 55.5% of respondents said they would be very unlikely to pay for online content from newspaper or magazine publishers, versus 16.5% who said they might pay (including a number of fence-sitters)."

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