The Internet surfer is now used to read content online for free. Many news sites, forced to face the economic Internet slowdown, have tried to make all or part of their content payable.

But setbacks has been more frequent than successes and most of these sites has disappeared or have tried to find other sources of income to be able to keep at least their readership, which represents often their only goodwill.

Jupiter Research, which is owned by the same parent company as InternetNews.com, a "content" site... has just published a survey

that shows that consumer spending on Internet paid content could jump to $2 billion in 2003 up 30 percent from a year.

Jupiter Research is quite optimistic as its study is projecting that paid content will grow at an annual rate of 20% until 2007. In 2007, the paid content market would reach $5.4 billion.

The same study shows also that online advertising spending should reach $14 billion in 2007, up from $6.2 billion in 2003.

At eMarket News, we are quite doubtful about these future paid content figures. Internet users are not ready to pay. So, we think that most of the business online for content sites will remain from advertising. In our opinion, any long term strategies based mostly on paid content should lead to disillusion.

Source : Jupitermedia