Three-quarters of Brits would consider paying for digital content if it only cost 10p or per article, with Jeremy Clarkson the most likely columnist to entice punters to hand over their cash, according to a new survey. The report, by Continental Research, found The Sun’s Jeremy Clarkson, the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker and the Daily Mail’s […]
Three-quarters of Brits would consider paying for digital content if it only cost 10p or per article, with Jeremy Clarkson the most likely columnist to entice punters to hand over their cash, according to a new survey. The report, by Continental Research, found The Sun’s Jeremy Clarkson, the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker and the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn are the UK national press’s most “valuable” columnists online. The poll indicated that micropayment systems looked more palatable to consumers than monthly or annual subscription systems.
12/11/2009
Three-quarters (75%) of consumers who would consider paying for digital newspaper content would be willing to pay only 10p or less per article.
Continental asked respondents to choose which columnists whose content they would be most to likely pay for online.
The survey found that 63% of respondents would not pay at all for online articles.
Of those that would, 21% would consider making small micropayments for content, compared with just 5% who would be happy with a monthly or annual online subscription.
When it came to micropayments, 35% of respondents said they would be prepared to pay 2p per article, 22% would pay 5p, 13% 10p and just 6% 20p for each piece of online content.
James Myring, the head of media at Continental Research, said: “The amounts may sound small but it is better getting a lot of people making small one-off payments than virtually no one paying higher for a subscription. For a comparison think of the mobile industry profiting from the lots of amounts of small payments for text messages.”
Top 10 national newspaper columnists people would be most likely to pay for online:
1. Jeremy Clarkson, the Sun, Sunday Times
2. Charlie Brooker, the Guardian
3. Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail
4. Giles Coren, the Times
5. Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph
6. Gordon Smart, the Sun
7. Lorraine Kelly, the Sun
8. Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday
9. Jane Moore, the Sun
10. Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail
Source: www.continentalresearch.com
