Consumers won’t pay for online news

With the introduction of the Apple iPad and its pay-for-use apps model, publishers are hoping that they will be able to get consumers to pay for online news the way they used to pay for news on paper. The Wall Street Journal has a pay-for-content model already and the New York Times is forging ahead with its own next year. We have witnessed various online sites introduce pay-for-content models on the Internet only to remove them later because it severely limited their online audience, and hence their advertising revenues. But is the iPad an ace in the hole that may well cause a shift in this consumer behavior? A new survey from The Project for Excellence in Journalism report says that at most only 20% of consumers are willing to pay for any kind of content.