Note that the past tense definitely applies here; Pew’s question included the phrase "if you have ever paid," so it’s hard to draw conclusions about future or even current spending patterns.

One other major point: Pew made clear in its report, "Of those internet users who have purchased online content, nearly half (46%) have purchased only one or two of the types of content covered in our survey."

Still, Pew contacted 755 Internet users in the course of this survey, so the data is hard to ignore.  And you can have a look at Pew’s findings for yourself below.

-33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
-33% have paid for software
-21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
-19% have paid for digital games
-18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
-16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
-15% have paid for ringtones
-12% have paid for digital photos
-11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
-10% have paid for e-books
-7% have paid for podcasts
-5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
-5% have paid for "cheats or codes" to help them in video games
-5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
-2% have paid for adult content

Pew also reported, "The average expense for those who have paid for content was approximately $47 per month for material they have downloaded or accessed, including both subscription (an average of $12 per month) and individual file access (an average of $22 per month).  However, some extremely high-end users pull the average higher, with most purchasers spending about $10 per month."

Original Article: The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has released a study (pdf) this week looking at the impact the web has on Americans, and among the nearly 200 issues explored is that of paying for online services and content.

Believe it or not, most don’t want to pay. For example, the study found that 49% of respondents have used free micro-blogs like Twitter, but "zero percent" said they would be willing to pay to use them.

Would you pay to use Twitter if it charged a fee? Let us know.

"Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the school.

"Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users," added Cole. "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free."

Obviously this is an obstacle some newspaper publishers are hoping to overcome. Last week, reports surfaced that News Corp’s The Times’ site visits fell to a third of what they were when it began requiring users to pay.

"Internet users can obtain content in three ways: they can steal it, or pay for it, or accept advertising on the Web pages they view," said Cole. "Users express strong negative views about online advertising, but they still prefer seeing ads as an alternative to paying for content. Consumers really want free content without advertising, but ultimately they understand that content has to be paid for — one way or another."

WikiLeaks has also shown how far the web can go when it comes to free, important content. By making over 90,000 Afghanistan war-related documents available to the public, readers are treated to an escalating plethora of free analysis to choose from (not to mention the raw source material).

What content is worth paying for? Tell us what you think.

There are still a lot of details to be worked out from the sound of it, and since the change won’t go into effect for a year, maybe they will have enough time to get it right. However, publishers have been trying to get this right for years already, and are still struggling to find that true answer. You have to wonder, what makes them think they can get the details ironed out by then?

It would be one thing to announce it and start doing it. Other publications do this, but a year is an incredibly long time in the online world. There are so many things that could happen and questions that may still remain unanswered in the online news industry. News Corp. for example, has set off a firestorm over whether or not people should be able to freely link to free content on the web. There are just so many things that come into play that it seems rather strange to assume everything will fall into place a year from now. Who knows what condition the industry will be in by then? Publications that are using paid models right now may decide it’s not working and switch to a different plan. To reiterate, a year is a long time, particularly in an industry with so many question marks.

"This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about," Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company chairman and publisher of the newspaper is quoted as saying. "We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right."

I would say the thought process has been in motion for some time, and it’s hard to imagine setting a deadline for the discussion to wrap up in such a timeframe. Does setting such a deadline suggest a hint of desperation? The Times says that any changes will be closely watched by other publishers of online content, and there is no doubt that this will indeed be the case.

The publication refers to Nielsen Online and analysts’ data indicating that NYTimes.com is "by far" the most popular newspaper site in the country with over 17 million readers a month in the U.S. alone.

Do you read the New York Times? Would you pay for frequent access or get your news from other sources? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> New York Time’s Could Announce Paid Model This Week

> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?

> Is This the Answer for Online News Revenue?

With the policy, Google users have been able to access one article from a publication that has a pay wall in place, but are then unable to access other content via links on the site without registering. However, users have been able to get around this in the past, simply by searching for the desired piece of content and starting over from Google.

Now Google has implemented a change that will only allow users to view five pages of content from such a source in a 24 hour period. In a post today on the Google News Blog, Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen explains, "If you’re a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you’ve clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis."

"In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as ‘free’ any preview pages – generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story – that they make available to us," Cohen notes. "This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it’s not cloaking."

Google would label stories like this as "subscription" when indexed in Google News. According to Cohen, they would rank based on the same criteria as other sites (paid or free).

He points out that paid content may not rank as well, simply because of the popularity of the content. Less people are likely to link to content that requires a subscription to read, particularly if there is a similar piece of content that is available for free. Google has always favored links and it would be not different in this case.

Related Articles:

> Obvious: People Don’t Want to Pay for Online News

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

In an informative piece at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan interviews Google News business product manager Josh Cohen about how Google handles paywalls. "For me, I find it puzzling publishers believe they have to make a choice," says Sullivan. "They can have their paywall AND Google traffic combined, via Google’s First Click Free program. Are there many publishers who simply aren’t aware of this program?"

"First Click Free is only one example of the ways that publishers can make subscription content available," says Cohen. "They can do previews, they can block it in different ways. I think there are a lot of those questions about the nuts and bolts of how you can work with us, subscriptions just being one of them."

Sullivan highlights the following ways in which Google handles free and paid news content. They boil down to four basic scenarios: free content, first click free, subscription, and preview. First Click Free puts content behind a paywall, but Google indexes it and makes it searchable, and users can get to it from Google and read the entire article for free, but can’t access other stories from the site without paying, unless they go back to Google and start over.  The subscription option puts the content behind a paywall, and Google indexes the whole article and makes it searchable, but people can only read the whole thing if they pay. The preview option puts the content behind a paywall, and Google does not index the entire story, but only a preview. People can then pay to read the whole thing.

There are many talking points on these options, and Sullivan does a wonderful job of going through them with Cohen. The real question, however, is whether or not it is worth it to even have a paywall. If the latest research from Forrester is any indication, offering only paid content is not the wisest decision, because 80% of consumers wouldn’t access news sites if they had to pay.

Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps says the data suggests two things:

1. Publishers should continue to offer free, ad-supported products to the 80% of consumers who won’t pay for content online; and

2. Publishers should offer consumers a choice of multichannel subscriptions, single-channel subscriptions, and micropayments for premium product access.

As she says, consumers want choice. "The need for a multichannel product and pricing strategy is further reinforced by the ‘what if’ scenario of print being discontinued," says Epps. "When we asked consumers, ‘If the publications you read were no longer available in print, how would you prefer to access that content?’ we found that no single channel dominated responses."

37% of US consumers said they’d prefer to access content via a web site, 14% said by mobile phone, 11% said by laptops and netbooks, and 3% said by eReaders. 10% said by PDF by email.

Related Articles:

> Obvious: People Don’t Want to Pay for Online News

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

No longer the province of tax accountants, lawyers, and politicians, an elaborate loophole has been developed by Andy Beard proposing how to get around Google’s paid-link vigilance via robots.txt and paid reviews.*

Beard’s explanation is complicated, lengthy, and loaded with historical context so visit Beard’s blog for further clarification, complete with nifty diagrams. What we will provide here is an overview and basic introduction, and not necessarily an endorsement.

Beard’s proposal (or as he describes it, a red flag in the face of the charging bull) involves strategic use of robots.txt to redirect Google crawlers away from paid reviews. This is intended to take the penalty sting away as Google can’t penalize for what it’s not supposed to crawl in the first place.

In addition to the paid review that is blocked from crawlers, the author creates a follow-up review at another domain that is not paid and links back to the original review, with link juice in-tow. According to Beard, a client would pay for the original domain link, but the not the follow-up on a separate domain (but I imagine the price just got higher, huh?).

The link on the paid review is not a nofollow link, meaning that it will still also pass PageRank since Google shouldn’t know or care about it if it can’t be crawled, and the link on the follow-up review is also not a nofollow because it’s, technically, not a paid link.  

In theory, the original, blocked review will still pass a reduced amount of PageRank because Google still links to "dangling" pages, or pages it can’t see, if there are backlinks pointing to the page. The link juice it passes, however, is reduced, as is the link juice coming from backlinks to it. What happens next is a matter of determination and scale.

With enough backlinks (according to my understanding), especially authority backlinks, the decrease in link-juice can be overcome, thereby raising the blocked page’s PageRank eventually, which is then passed on to its intended paid review/link recipient.

Phew! So, it’s kind of like link-laundering.

Your first objection is probably that Google’s pretty vigilant about link-spam, too, and bursts of low-quality links over a short period of time will raise the spam alarms, thus either earning penalties anyway or negating the collective power of those links.

Quite right, which is why Andy has a plan for that too. This is where it gets a bit harder, since it involves a real commitment to getting that paid link some good juice to pass along. But it probably should be a part of your overall web-marketing campaign already and anyway. 

Beard proposes getting authority links via:

Social bookmarking: A short description, a title, and a link from BloggingZoom, Digg or other social site is all that is needed to carry a decent, relevant amount of link juice to the target.

Targeted RSS syndication: Syndicate the article, make sure it links back. Send to "hub pages" on content sites that accept syndicated articles via RSS (because Google won’t be looking in RSS feeds, either). Aggregators (which will index a snippet and a link) like Technorati also make use of RSS feeds.

Authorized and unauthorized article syndication: Beard syndicates his articles to other publications with high PageRank. Link back to an un-crawled page from there and you’ve given it some much-needed power. What he calls "unauthorized syndication" we usually call "scraping." On the bright side, publishers can make the most of scrapers by not making a fuss, and instead requiring a link.

Targeting Universal Search: Use images, video/audio descriptions, etc., in unpaid content (which is also syndicated, I assume, to sites intended for that type of format) to point back to paid content.

If Google doesn’t find a way to penalize, it could be a viable (if involved) strategy. But it is also more akin to traditional web marketing—taking advantage of the channels you have to promote.** It’s doubtful that less legitimate paid linkers will take the time and effort to promote this way, but you have to admire Beard’s never-say-die attitude.    

*This all hinges, of course, on whether it will work and for how long, and how much you rely on Google as a search-traffic generator. The hard truth is that Google is the defacto search engine on the Net, so making el Goog happy whether or not you agree with el Goog’s decrees is an important part of the game. And nobody likes unhappy el Goog.

**Google’s penalties seem also to be forcing webmasters to do (nearly) legitimate content and marketing work, which is an interesting side-development.  
 

Editorial content sharing deals like the one noted by Paid Content could be a more widely seen event. Jeff Jarvis called it "a model for other news organizations to take care of commodity news."

Business news forms the commodity in question here. Paid Content noted the IHT’s agreement with Bloomberg for business content expired, giving Reuters the opportunity to slip in and seal the deal.

"This is more than syndication: buying a piece of content. This is a form of outsourcing – you take care of that so I don’t have do (and so I can concentrate on my real value – hint: local)," Jarvis said on his blog.

That’s a truer statement than Jarvis may realize. Reuters has been a presence in outsourcing writing to places like India.

The outsourcing could apply to other areas. Jarvis cited several brands with strength in reporting on niches – ESPN in sports, People in entertainment – that could fill a publications content while reporters focus on local stories.

Reuters’ agreement with IHT may be a stepping stone toward deals with other publications like the New York Times. "Business by Reuters" launches on January 7th online and in print.

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