Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, has advised publishers that it may only be possible to charge readers for specialized online news content, due to the proliferation of general news.

He commented: "News sources that have highly differentiated content may be able to make pay-for-access work. This will likely be difficult for more generic news sources.”

Publishers are increasingly looking at charging for online news content as they lose out on circulation and print advertising revenue.

However, Varian believes that publishers will need to encourage readers to spend even more time reading online news. At the moment, people spend an average of 70 seconds per day viewing online news content, as compared with 25 minutes per day reading a newspaper, he stated.

Varian pointed out that there are large cost savings to be made with online news, including savings on printing and distribution costs. He added: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”

There is also a trend for people to get news on mobile devices like electronic readers and phones. Varian predicted that reader involvement and multimedia content will grow as a result of this.

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