Paid content could help struggling publishers as online market grows
Published March 10, 2010
The solution to the grievous sales decreases suffered by the print industry in recent years could be found on the internet, according to a report from digital marketing news site eMarketer.
While the phenomenon is most pronounced in the newspaper industry, eMarketer's study points out that sales of ebooks, driven primarily by the success of Amazon.com's Kindle reader, have risen sharply in the last year. The study says that ebook net sales numbers for members of the American Association of Publishers went from $61.3 million in 2008 to $169.5 million in 2009.
But doubts remain about the long-term viability of an online paid content model. Paul Verna, eMarketer analyst and author of the study, says that "consumers will resist paying for content, especially in cases where they feel they can find the same information elsewhere online for free."
This would seem to indicate that any move to paid content would have to be more or less industry-wide, since even a lone holdout could reap untold benefits from portraying itself in strategic marketing as the only free content provider.