Less Than Half of 'Regular Internet Users' Willing to Pay for Content

How much are Americans willing to pay per month for online content? Less than they'd pay for a Grande Latte from Starbucks, according to a report from the Boston Consulting Group, as recounted by the New York Times' Richard Pérez-Peña.

Less than half the respondents (48 percent) of "regular Internet users" in the Boston Consulting Group's report said they'd pay for online content. If they did pay, they'd be willing to pony up just $3 a month. That's compared to the $7 a month Italians said they'd pay—but with the value of the dollar against the Euro, that's pretty much $3 anyway.

All Things Digital's Media Memo blogger Peter Kafka thinks the percentage of those actually willing to pay might be much lower, but he notes that many of those "regular Internet users" are already paying as much as $115-a-month for access to content via their Internet service.

The question of how—and if—news organizations can get users to pay for content online has been kicking around for months (if not years), but has recently taken on a new urgency as News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to put most (if not all) of his vast media holdings behind subscriber walls and making his content "invisible" to Google's search bots. The Wall Street Journal's already-successful pay wall, one of the factors that has made the paper the highest circulation paper in the U.S., was even used as a joke on last week's episode of The Office on NBC, a plug very much appreciated by the Journal's Speakeasy staff.

Last week at the Dow Jones and Nielsen-sponsored Media and Money conference, Journalism Online co-founder and pay-wall evangelist Steven Brill told the crowd, "The jig is up. If any newspaper that thought they could make it with all this fabulous online ad revenue they were going to get in 2008, and today thinks, 'Well, it's the economy that's bad,' that's insane."