Paying the piper
Regular readers will be well aware of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's crusade to find new revenue streams for News Corp's content in an era when consumers expect it for free and advertisers are keeping their wallets shut.
He wants to get end-users to pay for news in the same way they (sometimes) pay for other media, like music. So it must have been with some trepidation that News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal Europe commissioned market researcher GfK to survey 16 European countries and the USA to find out how willing people were to shell-out for digital content.
Unsurprisingly, only 13 percent of the total survey said they would be prepared to pay for online information. However, it looks like us Brits are a bit more receptive to the idea, with almost 20 percent of us (and 17 percent of Americans) willing to pay for digital content.
On the negative side, a third of all survey participants reckoned online content should not only be free, but that there shouldn't even be ads!
When asked what they use the Internet for, email came top, closely followed by searching for information. Reading the news came third, while social networking came fourth, with around a quarter of all those surveyed participation.
Here's a table.
