I've posted several times here about a big question facing legacy and new news organizations: Will people pay for news online? 

There's some new data that purports to answer that question. The results could be viewed as glass-half-full (yes, a lot of people will pay) or glass-at-least-half-empty (but they won't pay very much at all). One big question is to what extent the results can be considered representative of the entire market of online consumers. I have my doubts.

Today the Boston Consulting Group released results of a survey in nine countries that purported to find about half of American online consumers and upwards of 60 percent in several western European nations say they would pay for only news -- but what they'd pay ranges from only around $3/month in the United States and Australia to $7 in Italy. For one anecdotal comparison, I currently pay $46/month for a seven-day-a-week subscription to the dead-trees edition of the major metro in my area, and around $25/month for the six-day-a-week local paper.

The BCG news release quoted one of the firm's senior partners saying this new revenue could help offset one to three years of expected declines in advertising revenues. Neither the release nor the New York Times report on the study addressed whether that estimate factored in possible further declines in ad revenues from imposition of online pay walls, which inevitably would significantly reduce traffic to sites that go that route (by half or more, if we can extrapolate from the willing-to-pay data).

The full survey does not appear to be online and I've been too busy today to explore this further with BCG but their news release says this about the survey methodology:

The survey was conducted via the Web in October. A total of 5,083 respondents participated in nine countries: the United States (1,006 respondents), Germany (1,006), Australia (529), France (510), the United Kingdom (506), Spain (505), Italy (504), Norway (259), and Finland (258). The respondents were equally divided between men and women and among four age ranges. Respondents came from throughout each country, except in Australia, where the results were deliberately skewed toward Melbourne and Sydney.  

I'm going to guess these were not probability samples but drawn from volunteer online panels. Aside from the broad question of the validity of non-random surveys, I would suspect a real possibility of bias for a survey on the topic of online news when respondents are sampled from a panel of people who are so active online that they sign up to take Internet surveys. I can only speculate but they may differ from online users in ways that make the BCG survey -- as fairly bleak as it is for the news industry -- overly optimistic in its assessments of who would pay for online news and how much. Other questions to ask about this survey include how the would-you-pay questions were worded, and how (if at all) the results were weighted -- for example, do the proportions in the four equal age ranges match the age distribution of the online population?

UPDATE: Still more data out today, this time from Forrester, which estimates only 20% of Americans would pay for online content. This is from a U.S. mail survey of 4,711 consumers. Again, sorry I don't have the time to dive deeper into this (nor do I have $499 to shell out for the complete Forrester report) but one question I'd ask is: Does the 80% of Americans who say they wouldn't pay for online content include the 20% who still don't have access to the Internet? If so, re-percentaging the results so they're based only on online users would bump that 20% to around 25%. I'd also ask the usual questions about sampling (was the sample drawn from a panel or from all U.S. households or ???), question wording, data weighting, etc.