Why is paid reading so difficult
Jiangtianjiao
April 23 is the annual world reading day. With the rapid development of the Internet and new media, people’s reading methods and reading habits have changed. According to the 18th National Reading survey, in 2020, the contact rate of digital reading methods (online reading, mobile reading, e-reader reading, pad reading, etc.) of adult citizens in China was 79.4%.
Digital reading is welcomed and sought after by modern people. On the one hand, modern people tend to use network conditions and fragmented time to obtain reading satisfaction; On the other hand, modern people, especially young people, have an increasing demand for short, flat and fast reading, and reading is more likely to solve practical problems.
In recent years, readers are more and more willing to pay for online content. Taking Zhihu as an example, the average number of monthly paying members of Zhihu in 2021 was 5.1 million, an increase of 114.8% over 2020. Fandeng reading app has been in operation for 9 years, with more than 55 million users and stable profits.
However, it is not easy for more readers to pay for reading. WeChat’s official account is tortuous when it comes to testing water fees. Although the original intention of wechat to promote paid reading is to further activate the output of original content, readers do not seem to buy it. Sina technology has launched an investigation in micro-blog. If you subscribe to the WeChat official account, how will you do it? Among them, about 70% of netizens said they would take off, and most of the remaining netizens said they would see the specific situation of the article. Only about 2% to 3% of netizens were willing to pay for reading.
From the reader’s point of view, if only general reading content, free is certainly better than paying. If paid content has no irreplaceable value, readers will “vote with their feet” to free content. Throughout those charging and profitable content platforms, providing users with “dry goods” is the foundation for them to dare to charge. In the Internet environment of information overload, users’ pursuit of high-quality content will not be reduced, but will become higher. As long as the platform grasps the professional quality of content and provides products and services beyond their expectations, readers will not be stingy.
Paid reading has a lot of room for growth, but it can’t be achieved overnight. After all, reading is not “daily necessities” in life, and most people’s reading habits are still in the development stage. Therefore, the content platform may wish to plan different content libraries for payment and free, and match different product channels and corresponding revenue systems. On the one hand, free content can be used to fully activate sinking users, expand more territory and bring more increment to enterprises; On the other hand, efforts must be made to continuously produce valuable content, attract paying users and further meet users’ expectations for high-quality content. We should also see that the biggest obstacle to paid reading may not be membership fees, but piracy. The problems of illegal reprint, piracy, plagiarism and resource sharing are the crux of damaging the industry ecology. Only by protecting intellectual property rights can content payment win a better future.