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).
MICHAEL MARTINEZ REPLIED:
>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.
What is this "business community" you write of?
Is it publishers? Customer service web sites?
E-tailers? Newsgroups? Discussion lists?
Of those five types of online businesses it
seems that publishers have the best shot at
getting paid subscriptions.
If you are suggesting that customer service
web sites, e-tailers, newsgroups and forums
such as this one have no expectation of charging
I might agree with you. But this thread spun
off from a discussion of Salon, a publisher of
internet content.
Regards all,
John
John Gaskill
jg_at_info-central-usa.com
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Received on Thu May 31 2001 - 11:53:25 CDT
