Re: Will They Pay? was RE: Salon.com and taller ads
JOHN GASKILL <gm_at_info-central-usa.com> WROTE:
>That MOST people are unwilling to pay for content
>is no different than most people not paying for content
>in the offline world. If a news provider could attract 4%
>of U.S. web surfers to a paid subscription model the
>result would be 2,600,000 x $ X.XX (assuming a
>U.S. adult web surfing population of 65,000,000).
What is at issue here is whether the majority of the
online business
community can reasonably expect to charge for content.
It cannot. Not unless the current market grows.
That will happen in one of two ways: either more people
who are currently surfing the Web agree to pay for
content, or more people who would be willing to do so
must come online. But no news provider is in a
position to charge 4% of the surfing market for content,
let alone several of them.
The pie is too small for the business community to
feast upon. Paid-content models are not paying off
sufficiently to make this a viable option for most
business sites. That has nothing to do with how
compelling a site's content is. Is has to do with
the size of the
marketplace. The vast majority of people are not
willing to pay. The small minority who ARE willing to
pay can only produce X number of dollars.
Michael Martinez
Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
http://www.xenite.org/
Received on Wed May 23 2001 - 11:08:18 CDT
