Willingness to Pay Fees for Accesses to WWW Sites
Notes:
- One of the most stable characteristics of previous surveys has been
that one of five users stated outright that they would not pay for access
to WWW sites. For the Fourth Survey, this segment of the population has
increased from 22.6% in the Third Survey to 31.8% in the Fourth Survey.
- This is indeed alarming for those wishing to apply a subscription
business model to the Web. This may also very well reflect the perceived value
of the material and resources currently available on the Web by its users.
This also places the financial burden upon sites wishing to generate monies
on advertising or other sources. Related, the Fourth Survey reports that
over 3/4 of the sites do not allow advertising (See:
Site Policy Towards Advertising).
- Most users reported that their willingness would depend on both the
cost of access as well as the quality of the material provided (58.7%).
As with the Third Survey, Europeans tend to be slightly more concerned
about the quality of information if they had to pay for access (7.3% Europe
vs 3.2% US).
By Location
Notes:
- There were no statistically significant differences found between the
Weekend and Weekday response distributions for this question. This implies
that as the Web increases its user base, we'd expect to continue to
find that more that a quarter of the users would not pay for access to
WWW sites.
By Access Time
Notes:
- More women were flat-out opposed to paying for access to sites
than in the Third survey (20.5% Third vs 33.7% Fourth). This same
upward rejection of fees was also observed in men (22.7% Third vs
31.0% Fourth). No statistically significant differences were observed
across gender.
By Gender
Table of Data for All Categories
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