Willingness to Pay Fees for Access

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Notes:

• This question has changed since the last survey, so a strict comparison of answers is probably not fair. In previous surveys, we asked if respondents willingness to pay depended on the cost and/or quality of the information provided. This time, we presented several different payment schemes to find out what schemes users preferred.

• With each survey, the percentage of respondents who have stated outright that they would not pay for access to WWW pages has been increasing. For the fifth survey, 65% said that they would not pay. This may reflect the fact that most people primarily use the Web as a source of entertainment and not necessarily a resource they are willing to pay for. Another reason might be the fact that so many users are now paying Internet service providers for Web access. They may not be willing to pay twice: once for access to the Web in general and again for specific Web pages.

• For respondents would would agree to pay fees for Web pages, the most popular models were a subscription model (12.1%) and pay-per-view (10.9%).

• Users in Europe were more agreeable to paying for Web pages, perhaps because more of their access is subsidized by universities and businesses.

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Notes:

• A slightly higher percentage of females indicated that they would not pay for access to particular WWW sites.

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Notes:

• The youngest users were least inclined to pay for access to Web sites (69.0%).

• For those willing to pay, the subscription model was favored by the youngest users (13.0%), while older users preferred a pay-per-view model (13.7%).

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Table of Data for All Categories

pay.fees	All	Male	Female	USA	Europe	19-25	26-50	50+
pay_fees_no	7623 64.95%	5102 63.42%	2521 68.30%	5697 66.17%	760 59.84%	1887 68.97%	4322 62.18%	605 62.11%
pay_fees_other	550 4.69%	411 5.11%	139 3.77%	409 4.75%	59 4.65%	104 3.80%	377 5.42%	45 4.62%
pay_fees_ppv	1280 10.91%	880 10.94%	400 10.84%	851 9.89%	188 14.80%	221 8.08%	853 12.27%	133 13.66%
pay_fees_sub	1415 12.06%	1007 12.52%	408 11.05%	1079 12.53%	129 10.16%	356 13.01%	831 11.96%	107 10.99%
pay_fees_time	295 2.51%	171 2.13%	124 3.36%	198 2.30%	31 2.44%	50 1.83%	184 2.65%	45 4.62%
pay_fees_yes	573 4.88%	474 5.89%	99 2.68%	375 4.36%	103 8.11%	118 4.31%	384 5.52%	39 4.00%

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For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.

GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280