Will consumers pay for online news?
20 July 2010
Newspaper publishers are about to enter a series of ‘online payment’ trials to help bolster disappointing online advertising performance that alone will be unable to support full scale newsrooms
Publishers are on the back foot, however: they have been giving away their content for free for almost a decade, and their core content does not have the unequivocal unique attributes of a football match, a movie or a pop song
While there are a variety of options for management to explore, in aggregate they will never match the print model, and so news is destined to shrink as a commercial enterprise for newspaper publishers