Nielsen: U.S. Consumers The Most Likely To Pay For Content On A Tablet... Except When It's News
As developers hunker down and get into the business of trying to work out how to get consumers to buy more of their product on mobile devices, some revealing numbers out from Nielsen on what people …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen has been building the tablet picture piece by piece since 2010, when its survey first showed U.S. appetite for tablets beyond the iPad, and again in May 2011 when it found the devices functioning mainly as TV companions rather than standalone computers. This March 2012 read adds the monetization layer to that same panel: consumers say they are the most open to paying for content on a tablet of any device category — but news is the explicit carve-out.
First-order effects
- Entertainment and app developers now have survey-backed evidence that the tablet is their strongest paid-content surface in the U.S., justifying tablet-first pricing and premium tiers.
- News publishers get the opposite signal: the device where audiences most willingly pay is the one category where they resist paying for news, undercutting tablet-paywall business cases.
Second-order effects
- News organizations are pushed toward indirect monetization on tablets — advertising, bundles, or cross-device subscriptions — rather than per-article tablet purchases.
- Nielsen strengthens its position as the arbiter of where mobile monetization works, with this report syndicated across eight outlets including PC Magazine, FierceMobileContent and Mobile Marketing Watch within a day.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet economy bifurcates by content type: paid downloads consolidate around entertainment, while news competes on scale and advertising, shaping which publishers survive the shift from print revenue.
- Measurement firms like Nielsen gain structural influence over developer and publisher strategy, since category-level willingness-to-pay data becomes the input for investment decisions across the app ecosystem.
The trend: Willingness to pay for digital content is splitting sharply by category on tablets, leaving news as the outlier even on the device where consumers pay most readily.