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Web users would pay to read Clarkson & Brooker
But research shows less than a third of users would pay for online content in the first place
They make extremely strange bedfellows, but motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker share one thing in common: they are the journalists who newspaper readers would be most likely to pay to read online.
While coming from ideologically opposed points of view - Clarkson the populist right, Brooker a more elitist position on the left - the pair emerged in the top two positions in research commissioned to discover whether new models of charging for content online would work.
Brooker (second) was joined in the top 10 by only one other journalist who could plausibly be seen as liberal, the Times's restaurant critic Giles Coren (fourth). Fellow travellers with the table-topping Clarkson (above left) - who writes for the Sun and Sunday Times on motoring and wider issues - were such pin-ups of the right as Richard Littlejohn (third, Daily Mail), the Daily Telegraph's Simon Heffer (fifth), and Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips (Mail on Sunday/Daily Mail), who came eighth and tenth respectively.
Rupert Murdoch may be happy to see that five of the writers in the top ten were from his own News International newspapers, which he is planning to put behind a paywall in 2010. But the wider question of whether people were happy to pay at all to read newspapers online produced an altogether more negative message.
Almost two-thirds (63 per cent) of respondents said they would not pay to read articles online. Those who were willing to shell out (26 per cent) were four times more likely to pay by the article than for an overall subscription - a blow for the model News International is believed to be planning.
Should any organisation bring in the so-called micro-payments system, there could be quite a few bruised egos at the sums that their work is valued at; a third said they would pay no more than 2p; another third say between 5p and 10p is the correct amount; while just six per cent would stump up 20p for each individual online article.
"The amounts may sound small but it is better getting a lot of people making small one-off payments than virtually no one paying higher for a subscription," said James Myring, who carried out the survey for Continental Research.
Alarmingly for the likes of Littlejohn, if even a mere 2p per article rate were introduced, he would have to attract around 40,000,000 readers to justify his reported £800,000 salary. ·
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I would pay to prevent Clarkson from writing and publishing a column.
Clarkson gets paid to much anyway! Entertaining maybe, but I suspect, with all likelihood of being right, that there are not 40,000,000 willing to read his tripe. Thank you very much.
£0.000000000002 would be too much for Richard Littlewit. This is the greedy gamble that's going to finish Murdoch for good.