Growth stalls in readers paying for online news

The media industry failed in 2013 to persuade more customers to pay for its online news services, in spite of experimenting with new ways of charging for content, new research has found.

According to a survey of 19,000 people in 10 countries, conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, only one internet user in 10 was willing to pay for digital news -- exactly the same proportion as in 2012. However, the study did contain some encouraging news for media groups as, even though paying customer numbers remained flat, the proportion willing to commit to subscriptions -- as opposed to one-off payments, day passes or app downloads -- increased.

Of all those paying for online news, 59 percent now have a subscription, compared with 43 percent in 2012. As subscribers generally pay more than occasional customers, they are likely to have boosted the online revenues for many publishers. This phenomenon is consistent with the findings of another report by US research group Pew that concluded “more revenue is being squeezed out of a smaller, or at least flat, number of paying consumers.”