A new Nielsen survey revals that 85% of people wordwide would prefer that news content remain free.

From Nielsen Wire

Nielsen asked more than 27,000 consumers across 52 countries, and the answer is a definite “maybe.” As expected, the vast majority (85%) prefer that free content remain free. Yet there are opportunities to be found in the details. Indeed, when asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before.

Will Pay / Won’t Pay
Online content for which consumers are most likely to pay—or have already paid—are those they normally pay for offline, including theatrical movies, music, games and select videos such as current television shows. These tend to be professionally produced at comparatively high costs.

Consumers are least likely to pay for content that is essentially homegrown online, often by other consumers at fairly low cost. These include social communities, podcasts, consumer-generated videos and blogs.

In between are an array of news formats—newspapers, magazines, Internet-only news sources and radio news and talk shows—created by professionals, relatively expensive to produce and, in the case of newspapers and magazines, commonly sold offline. Yet much of their content has basically become a commodity, readily available elsewhere for free.

Publications are still caught up in the belief that the public will pay for conetnt if it means saving a newspaper or magazine from extinction, but after more than a decade of free content and the xplosion of blogging and social media, the value of the news that the old media provides has only diminished and not increased and there is little hope that a pay model will work except in very limited instances.

 

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