Will Web surfers pay to point and click?

Citation

(2003), "Will Web surfers pay to point and click?", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aab.028

Will Web surfers pay to point and click?

Will Web surfers pay to point and click?

"It depends on the information you're providing, and how exclusive it is. Simple economics dictates that you can charge more if your content is proprietary, scarce or hard to find elsewhere. Fee-based online content is clearly gaining momentum. One South Korea game site now boasts four million subscribers. ConsumerReports.org has 880,000 paying subscribers, and RealNetworks and Dow Jones claim 700,000 and 640,000 subscribers respectively. Those numbers are only a tiny fraction of the 80 million people online in the USA, but tremendous opportunities still exist. While most online services are still struggling to find new ways of making money, some are already succeeding. In July, Yahoo!, which used to make almost all of its money from online advertising, produced its first profit after six quarters of losses, thanks to an increase in fee-based online services. Yahoo! now has about one million customers paying for services like auctions, personal ads, financial news services and consumer services such as e-mail. Its online advertising, meanwhile, has shrunk to about 60 per cent of revenues. Success stories like this are fueling the trend toward fee-based services. Content publishers considering the switch from free to fee should ask themselves three questions: Is the content unavailable elsewhere? Are you the premier source of that content? Can your content help readers make money or advance their careers?" (Information Highways October 2002, available at: http://www.informationhighways.net/mag/mcurrent/02oct02.html)

Source: Shelflife, No. 71 (from RLG).