Digital Future Study: No one would pay for Twitter

Although 49 percent of Americans say they've used free microblogging services like Twitter, zero percent would be willing to pay to tweet according to the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism's annual Digital Future Study. In early June, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said the service now attracts 190 million visitors per month, with users generating 65 million tweets per day--as of mid-April, Twitter is also adding more than 300,000 new users daily. Even so, consumers express no interest in paying for services they already receive for free: "Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users," said Center for the Digital Future director Jeffrey I. Cole in a prepared statement.  "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free."

Other findings of the 2010 Digital Future Study:

• For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans, reaching 82 percent.
• Americans now spend an average of 19 hours per week online.
• Text messaging has more than doubled in just two years: Overall, mobile users who send text messages average 38 messages per day, compared to 16 in 2007. However, texting is almost exclusively a medium for younger subscribers--the number of messages sent per day is highest among users under 18, reaching 81 per day in the current study compared to 33 per day in 2007.
• More than 70 percent of mobile users credit their phone with helping them to maintain their social relationships, up from 64 percent in 2008.
• The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place declined to 56 percent, down from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
• Sixty-one percent of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable --a new low. Fourteen percent of Internet users said that only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable, with only 46 percent of users expressing some trust or a lot of trust in the web in general. Nine percent of users have no trust in the Internet.

"Internet users deal with an unprecedented level of online connections and communication beyond basic e-mail that did not exist a decade ago: social networking sites, online video, PDAs, texting, IM, e-readers, portable video devices, and most recently the iPad and competing devices to come," said Cole. "Through this technology, users must rely on the Internet more than ever before, yet at the same time this survey is identifying growing concern about reliability of the technology and user trust in it. Have we reached the point at which users are going into ‘online overload?'"

For more on the 2010 Digital Future Study:
- read this release

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