Why Would People Pay For Online Content?

Dec 13, 2006

The problem with the Internet, or with the PC is, everything is so easily available. First, take for instance software. I don’t know how stringent the piracy laws in the western countries are, but here in India 76 per cent PCs use pirated software. Now, many of these people are honest, upright folks — I myself have been exposed to a few of them — and they wouldn’t steal in their everyday lives. It’s just that, it’s so easy to get a pirated copy, that spending money on a licensed copy, to an ordinary person, seems so silly. Personally I feel, a theft is a theft, no matter how easy or difficult it is to carry it out.

And now about online content and why people don’t like paying for it.

People who take the Internet seriously are still in a minority. It is still considered something that is just there. So if it is just there, why pay for the information it has? And so many things have been free on the Internet, especially the written material. You can find on Google thousands of websites providing you free information. You can access newspapers for free, you can access so many magazines for free and just in the afternoon I stumbled upon a website giving you free but quality recipes. If I get these recipes for free, why would I go to a website that charges for them? Then you have scores of free email services. There is a rush for free software. With so many things freely available, how can you charge for your content?

There is a way out.

Give people something they cannot find anywhere else
Give people something irresistible that they cannot find anywhere else
Cater to professionals and not the free-sitters
Present it in an appealing manner

Recently I purchased Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and so many other people are buying it too — it’s an e-book in PDF format – because the information you have their can either not be found anywhere else, or you’ll have to spend months, or even years to glean it from different online resources like SEO forums, blogs, message boards and websites and even you may have to attend some expensive seminars. So it is something I really need to improve my website’s search engine ranking, and it is something I cannot find anywhere else.

People are used to not paying for the online content. Offer them something so compelling that they are forced to pay for it. Of course they would pay for such online content.

Oh! And how did I start writing this post? I read a post titled Figuring out online content that refers to a BBC article on the same topic.

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