Who knows how much paid content is actually porn-related (since these figures weren't broken out), but the Online Publishers Association reports that U.S. Net users spent $748 million on content in the first half of 2003. This InternetNews story reports growth is slowing, but that's really missing the point -- growth always slows as you move away from zero revenues.
The top three paid content categories - Personals/Dating, Business/Investment and Entertainment/Lifestyles - accounted for 65 percent of online content spending in the first half of 2003, up from 61 percent in 2002. Online Personals/Dating remained the leading paid content category, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all paid content spending. U.S. consumers spent $214.3 million on Personals/Dating content in the first half of 2003, up a robust 76 percent from the first two quarters of 2002. However, this percentage increase was eclipsed by the Personal Growth category, in which spending nearly doubled from $20.8 million in the first half of 2002 to $41.4 million in the same period this year.
In other words, Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, Deepak Chopra and evangelicals are probably looking at the best growth opportunities.
Interesting to note that micro-payments (one-off payments in cents or a few dollars) are staying steady at eight percent of total spending, so there is still a long way to go before the micro-content market starts to take off. We want our information in subscription-sized chunks.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 24, 2003 11:22 AM | TrackBackThe micropayment number is even worse than that.
It's 8% of non-subscription sales, which is 12% of the total. So, it's actually 1% of the total, or about $15 million/yr. I wouldn't be surprised if the NYT and WSJ were getting more than half of that.
Posted by: Barry Parr at September 26, 2003 11:00 AMGood point, Barry. I've heard a lot of talk about BitPass and other new systems that are supposedly going to change all this, but doubt they will. One could make a case that 99 cent music downloads are "micro-payments," however when you add up the number of songs on the typical album and compare it to buying 12 or 14 songs one-at-a-time, I think you'll probably see more pre-payment or subscription plans that aggregate music purchases into larger chunks. You'll also see discounting based on buying more music at one time (not just a whole album from one artist, but buying an album's worth of music from several artists).
Posted by: Mitch Ratcliffe at September 26, 2003 11:24 AM