There's been quite a bit of talk about whether newspapers can restrict content to subscriber's since Rupert Murdoch said he was going to restrict his news outlets online. Rupert never says anything unless it serves his business interests, so I doubt it was a co-incidence restricting Google access while signing a deal with Bing in which they will have complete access (for a fee) happened at the same time as he was publicly trying to "save the future of newspapers." Today Neilssen released a study into what people will pay for. The PDF is at http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/reports/paid-online-content.pdf The key findings are:
78% believe that if they already subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, radio or television service they should be able to use its online content for free.
71% say online content of any kind will have to be considerably better than what is currently free before they will pay for it.
79% would no longer use a web site that charges them, presuming they can find the same information at no cost.
People are ambivalent about whether the quality of online content would suffer if people could not charge for it —34% think so, 30% think not; 36% have no idea.
62% believe that once they purchase content,... Read more
