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Why Won't You Pay for Content?
"For the record, I don't approve of the RIAA/MPAA/etc. money-grubbing, but even if all content in and of itself suddenly became free (and I won't get into that argument), content is meaningless in a vacuum--there has to be a way to get that content to people, and that costs money, whether it's money to run the printing press, burn discs, or send data. Somebody's got to pay for that, or it just won't happen. What do you find so wrong about sharing part of that cost--and what would you suggest as an alternative?"
The problem with this stems from the fact that not everyone assigns the same value to content. Let's say Joe finds a piece of info on the Internet and he's willing to pay $10 for it, Jack finds that same piece of info but only thinks it is worth $2, and Jill finds the information not useful at all. Now if the information provider sets the value of that piece of information at $5, he's lost 2 customers, not one. Content providers need to find their way around this problem if they want to start reaping monetary rewards. Micropayments may be the answer, but even in that camp there are still more questions than answers (for one, a good International micropayment system needs to be in place). Why do you think people are so unwilling to pay for content (without all of the "information wants to be free" arguments, please).
Nevermind that the same machine with the same software is capable of handling more. You have to pay to have a certain few bits flipped in your own hardware to enable more "users".
Is it any wonder that Linux is making huge inroads in the server environment?
It's the war on "unlimited use" software.
the reason micropayments don't work is easy. People assign the value to things what they pay for them. Say I paid $1 for a ferrari because some old woman wanted to get back at her old husband. Now do you seriously think that I'll treat this ferrari the same knowing I paid only a buck for it? Probably not. The same thing holds true for micropayment. Charge a very little amount, and people either think of it as 1. a tax or 2. That the content itself is "cheap" (in the bad sense of the word). The fix to this of course is to provide higher quality content with a higher user liking to that content, and charge more for it. Sometimes, charging a small amount is actually a bad thing. (Although consumers will flame about this, because on the inside, everyone always wants to get everything as free as possible, but on the outside, people do not want to appear like a cheapskate (especially if they're rich.))
1) People won't pay for content because they're already paying for access - why pay twice?
2) Make it easy to do a micropayment, a simple one-click thing, and you'll see more people do it. I know I can't be bothered to enter payment info for a few cents...
If somebody found a magically convenient, fraud-resistent method of managing micropayments, they'd succeed only on making users tentative to look in new places for content, thus making it even harder to run an independant website. After all, why check out www.indymedia.org if you know that www.cnn.com seems to provide reasonable news coverage?
--
- Much fewer first posts and goatse trolls -- they're just high school kids with no money and who only want free content
- No (or rare) Slashdot effect
- Fewer, but higher quality posts
I don't know if I'd pay or not, but it might not be the world's worst idea.---
Seriously, much of the thinking on this subject is already obsolete. People are talking about the Web like it's TV. It's not- the key parts of the Web are where people interact with each other, getting involved. There are a lot of places where it would make sense to pay the participants, not charge them.
Then there's the next level: I personally have run two articles on Slashdot. Anyone can. You just have to do the work. Even without loading your to-be-slashdotted target pages with banner ads, exposure of that sort is valuable- but it is most valuable when it is not a hollow victory, when the person's put some serious effort into what's being reported on. Now, in a context of payment, does Slashdot pay those people- or expect to be paid by those people? What if there is such demand for Slashdot publicity that 'pay for publication' becomes as prevalent as 'pay to play' in live music?
At that point you're looking at a pretty ugly situation- and to go that direction belies the amount of benefit you get just from being Slashdot. Because of the freewheeling, non-paying nature of the site, a huge amount of activity has been spawned, and Slashdot's got name recognition among linux geeks comparable to Campbell's for soup or Crest for toothpaste. This is a tangible benefit while it's in force- if you run Slashdot and interact with others while your site is thriving, you are treated differently from just a run-of-the-mill geek.
If you can't turn that into money- well, maybe money isn't your first priority. But it's the kind of situation that could _lead_ to entrepeneurial activities- and the situation has a value beyond a simple counting of the money it directly produces. Income is cash but reputation is credit...
Why not have some industry-wide cooperative system to piggyback content payments on your ISP bill? Say that right now you are paying $20 a month for access. Raise that to $30 and let your ISP keep $20, leaving $10 for distributed payments. When you visit a site that recieves payments under this new system, it tracks how much you have used it and sends this information back to your ISP. Your ISP keeps track of what you have visited and how much, and at the end of the month divides up the $10 among all the pay sites according to these weights and sends that data to their ISPs, who then deduct that from the pay site's bill that month.
The important concept here is to make the payment completely transparent to the user; no one would use cable TV if they had to drop a quarter in their cable box every time they turned it on. The privacy problems could be avoided through heavy use of encryption ("100 hits to [unique ID corresponding to www.goatse.cx] for customer [unique ID consisting of encrypted account information understood only by the payment server] on [encrypted]/[encrypted], 2001").
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I know I'll get flamed for this, but how can I get modded down as "overrated" if no-one has yet rated me through moderation?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
I would have been happy to do that, since Salon did have some good content. But, I didn't, because I don't think they'll be around for another year. They've already laid off a bunch of people. By actually finding a way to make money they may have actually shortened their life, unless they're getting much more CPM for those huge ads they have now.
Heh, maybe the Democrats could bail 'em out... ;0)
And piracy is the boogeyman used to justify most of this. Unlimited use software, and infinitely reviewable movies will someday be redefined as "theft". Its about taking control away from you. Patented+homesteaded land cannot be taken away by gov't for any reason, so they don't allow this anymore. Europeans already scoff at "lucky bastards with flat rate phone service" in the US." while phone companies move towards eliminating this ancient practice.
It must pain the IP holders no end that their media must, in its final form, be presented unencrypted and in good quality to the eyes and ears.
Ultimately, it'll be pay-per-thought. We'll have cybernetic devices inplanted into the bas of our skulls to meter incoming content. Video/audio can then be sent encrypted all the way to our brains where final and untappable decryption takes place. Even think "Exit light... Enter night! Taaaake my hand! Off to never never land!" and ka-CHING, your credit account is charged a small fee.
1984 almost had it right, but misses profit as the basis of Big Brother.
I find the ads on sites like kuro5hin.org and slashdot are often quite helpful. I generally am actually interested in the things that get advertised on these sites. I would almost pay for more ads, and would certainly not be interested in seeing them removed. In that respect slashdot is no different from any other publication. They have the opportunity to market to a unique niche of people that they can pretty much guarantee is going to be interested in a certain set of products and services. Eventually advertisers are going to realize that this is the case and sites that are able to build large targetted audiences will be able to sell advertising without too much trouble.
You are such an idiot. Jack wasn't willing to pay $10, he was willing to pay $2. And Jill wasn't willing to pay any money. So the only person who still wanted it was Joe, who would pay $10. Charging $5 for it lost two customers (Jack and Jill).
Either pay attention next time, or go back to second grade and brush up on the fundamentals.
The dream of free and easy money pouring in from a web-site is proving to be just that, a dream. It doesn't matter if you're pets.com or some schmork with a reasonably interesting idea and some web-space. The money AIN'T comin' in, even if people's attention does.
Slashdot is the Prime Example. It is easily one of the most popular and dynamic sites on the web, yet it's only real hope for revenue is by selling access to readers eyeballs through banner ads and maybe some 'product placement' in terms of story content. That's it.
So very, very much is possible and available on the web at virtually no cost, that the idea of paying for content seems ludicrous, which it is.
All the same, I can imagine the frustration that must arise when you create a popular site that draws billions of eyeballs only to find that you still have to work for a living!
The Web is poised for a return to Glory Days like we've never seen before, where Information, Creativity and Communication are there own rewards.
The Wild West of the Internet has proven to be extrememly fertile, but money still doesn't grow on trees, even though for a while there a lot of us thought it did. On with the Show.
**>>BELCH
REALITY: On the Net, space is cheap. Once you're in you're in. There is no easy way to leverage eyeballs into cash. Weep. Mourn. Get over it.
You wan't micropayments? Get a job in Human Services.
**>>BELCH
VALUE is for the most part based on scarecity, but on the web there's no scarcity of real estate OR attention to soak it up. A very unique situation!
The attention a clever site recieves is the only reward it will ever get. It's a very powerful reward, but it won't pay the rent.
There are a lot of very clever sites out there and more being borne every minute. If KuroShite or Slashcock or whatever close their doors to non-micro-paying customers, they will have given up a full half of that which drew so many eyeballs in the first place, that is to say the ability to observe and/or participate without any sort of payment, be it in terms of cash or personal information. The tide of eyeballs is massive but extrememly delicate. It turns and shifts elsewhere at the slightest resistance.
All this pseudo-intellectual drivel of mine cowers, of course, at the altar of Porn Almighty!
Vices, real or imagined, will always get a quick buck from someone.
Once again, weep, mourn, get over it.
**>>BELCH
#1 - It cost money. There is a huge difference in peoples minds between free and even the smallest amount of money. Free can be enjoyed without thought, but if it cost money, then immediately you must think about money. Do I have enough for this? Will this eventually cost too much and I'll have to stop? Every time I click, it's costing me money.
#2 - Ease of use. Almost every pay system takes time to use and they are not easy. If it were easy then I wouldn't have to think about the fact that it cost money. (see #1)
Neo
Well, in reality I can. The point I was sort of fuzzily trying to make was that the units of currency themselves are not necessarily a barrier to making transactions smaller than those units.
-- Old Man Kensey
The problem with your Ferrari example, and others like it, is that there is a cost to produce every single automobile that rolls out of the factory. With electronic content, there is no per-unit cost, and so there is no starting-point upon which margins can be based. If we are indeed a capitalist society, our people probably know this innately, and so they begin to smell a rat when content providers, who traditionally have means of support (from advertising or fixed-rate subscription) start charging per unit of content.
First off, there is always a per-unit cost. It may be, as it is with online content, that the cost of distribution is much greater than the cost of production. But even then, just because you don't see something you can point to and say "there's an expense", that doesn't mean it's cheap or easy to make that content available to the public.
You're also missing my point, and in the process making it for me -- the price of certain goods is dependent more on what people will pay, than what it actually costs to provide it. Consumer Internet access is a perfect example -- price pressure has pushed the typical price below the cost of production (though it seems to be rebounding a bit in various ways), making it a loss-leader in any place that a national ISP is providing service. People just aren't willing to pay what it actually costs.
Put another way, somebody will pay $250,000 for a Ferrari, but there's no way it costs that much to build one.
I could get into elastic vs. inelastic demand too -- demand for luxuries tends to be elastic (meaning, among other things, that the demand goes down as the price goes up) while necessities like milk and bread tend to have inelastic demand -- you need those things no matter what the price is (note that for all the talk about the "digital divide", the market still treats Internet access as a luxury, not a necessity). Cornering the market on an item with inelastic demand is a quick ticket to riches (till you get hit with antitrust action, at least).
Monopolies do have to watch out that they don't jack up prices to such a point that they force the market to elasticize -- such as the increased use of fuel-efficient cars in the wake of the OPEC-induced gas shortages in the 70s. (Insert comment about software monopolies here.)
Books and newspapers cost money because they are tangible things.... The content itslef has no innate value.
Want to say that at a writer's convention? I'd pay money to see what happens next.
-- Old Man Kensey
First, everything's "worth" or "value" is subjective. I don't have much use for a hot-rod Ferrari, because I can't drive a stick and I'm not into the prestige factor of owning one. It will, however, get me to the grocery store, so I'd still pay some amount of money for one -- say $10,000.
Some guy with a lot more money than me may like really fast cars, or want to impress his rich buddies, so he's willing to shell out a quarter-mill for the same car.
In the Jack-Jill-Joe example, the smart thing for that content provider to do is price the content at $10. Joe pays his $10. If you price it lower, Joe will still buy it, but Jack won't buy it till it hits $2, at which point you've made another sale, but you lose a net $6. Jill's never going to buy it, so we don't worry about her.
This is basic econ, folks. It's not about cost, except insofar as cost of production provides a lower bound on price. It's all about how much money you make at a given price, taking into account that you may make more or less per unit, which may or may not balance out the difference in sales.
I agree with some here that we need a good micropayment system. What nobody seems to understand is that single-use pay-as-you-go and micropayment are incompatible with each other, but that is not a real barrier to micropayments. Most ATMs where I am (DC area) won't dispense less than $20, but if I need to buy something smaller than $20, I'm not screwed -- I write a check drawn on my account.
Eventually we'll reach the point where a few players have well-known, trusted micropayment account systems. Don't look for that latter bit for a while though -- it took a long time for people to regain their trust in the banking system after the Great Depression. I know people who still haven't.
-- Old Man Kensey
Certainly for micropayments anyway. If you have a professional/business account (necessary to implement e.g. a "pay me" link on your page or other arrangement) they skim a minimum of $.30 US plus some (small) percentage from every transaction. Obviously, that doesn't make sense for very small payments (~$.10 US), let alone micropayments (~$.0002 US).
DNA just wants to be free...
"But I'm stupid and don't think through my ideas"
Explain to someone that having a computer and the internet is like having a TV. You paid For the TV (computer) and you have access to some content (installed software).
Pay a little more for basic cable (internet), and there's a lot more out there, but for the most part, it's not very good or very original, and is really just filler.
Pay even more, and you get premium channels (pay-for contect), where there is original work, new shows, and a better presentation.
And if it interests you, you can pay one-time fees for Pay-per-view shows (micropayments) fo content which is one-of-a-kind, short-term type viewing.
Ask the people you're talking about if they deserve to have HBO and Pay-per-view services for free just becuase they bought a TV and pay for basic cable. The ones that say yes are hopeless cheapskates. Most rational people understand how services break down, they just need to be educated on how that service layer model translates to the internet.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
MS wants a cut? Please. When people get nickle-and-dimed to death, they want to be the ones getting each and every last nickle and dime.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Compared to what? How much they make providing the website without any money coming in? If the ads drive away users who weren't helping to cover the overhead anyway (but did cause an increase, even if very small, in operating costs), are they supposed to feel bad about that?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As far as karma going down without corresponding down moderations, are you implying that there is some way to cause that other than meta-moderation, or some way to know who you're metamoderating so as to target someone in particular? I noticed that a post of mine to a different story seems to have been labeled informative without changing the score and without a moderation total appended to the bottom of it. Has someone with too much time on their hands found an exploitable bug in slashcode?
As to why you seem to think that they should have been modded down because somebody said it better on some *other* forum (is there anything said here that isn't?), I am unable to follow your reasoning.
No doubt someone will come along to moderate this post down as off-topic, which, of course, it is, or knock down the score with some other label.
I'll live.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
He/she (it?, they? that's the thing about anonymous posters, they're so...well...anonymous) didn't say that there was an abundance of know-nothing know-it-all posts in the rarified strata which you browse, so you could both easily be right on that point. As far as Slashdot being a good site, it is when one considers the price (free), but if the price went up (which was the thoretical possibility being discussed), then its faults would be more objectionable.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Re:Paying model (Score:-1, Troll)
... the list goes on and on.
by Anonymous Coward on 11:56 AM July 9th, 2001 EDT (#58)
No offense intended, just brutal honesty:
I honestly doubt Slashdot would get good response with any kind of pay model, at least not in its current incarnation. Insanely biased reporting, grammar and general english-language problems in the article write-ups that would make even a child cringe, an abundance of comments from know-it-alls who actually know nothing (and I'll save you the time, yes this is one of those)
Don't get me wrong, it's a good site, and I check it every day, but it's nothing I couldn't get somewhere else. Make me pay and I won't return. There are plenty of other places to go.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's like the recent article about "Premium [sic] Slashdot" - what is there here that's honestly worth paying for? Links to other people's content? Commentary and opinions by people no more qualified than myself? That's not even worth $0.076 to me...
Most people are perfectly happy paying for a magazine that is mostly ads, but complain when they have to pay for something online, right? Perhaps it's because when they buy a magazine they have something to show for it. A magazine can sit on the couch, can be carried around, can be shown to friends, can be cut apart and hung up, can be folded into paper airplanes, and all kinds of other things. It is a physical object that your $5.00US bought. It is yours, and you can prove that. But something online is just another pile of electrons that you can't do anyhting with but read and hope it will still be there the next day. I have little interest in paying for something that I can't see or feel or tear apart if I don't like it. I would guess that is part of the reason people don't like the idea of paying for online content...
Posted from the wireless couch.
So you have to ask yourself, do you want a professional, non-corporate, online press? One with professional reporters who research their articles and can write? Because if you do, you might as well just take a gamble and help them to exist.
The worst that can happen is that they do in fact go subscription-only. The best is that they continue to go both ways, because you helped them to stay afloat.
I don't think the problem is the money. If I could surf around and get good content all day for $50/month, I'd do it. People pay that for their cable tv.
I see three problems.
First of all, as someone has pointed out, there isn't a good micropayment standard in place.
Second of all, I'd be very reluctant to participate in a micropayment system that wasn't anonymous. I think we need something similar to digicash.
I stopped buying non-geek books online, because I don't want big companies to have databases of the things I'm interested in or thinking about. Any micropayment system that's likely to be put into place will probably allow the coordinating company to put together a horribly intrusive database about its users. I'm amazed that people buy porn online -- some day that db will come back and bite them.
Finally, there are plenty of sites like this one that keep me entertained reasonably well for free. I don't feel the need for more content. I wish there was less, so I'd spend time doing more productive things.
I disagree. Regarding charging for a tallied payment, I must say that sounds suspiciously like a subscription fee, and not at all a micropayment fee. (I'd also addressed this earlier.) That's no more a micropayment fee than the offer from Dr. Dobb's journal that I got today: $1.45 / issue, paying everytime that the total hits $35. (ie, $35 for a two-year subscription.)
I also disagree about the feasability of such a group-aggregated micropament system. Though I think that it's a great idea in concept, I think that most people would hate it from both a privacy and a big-business standpoint. That system would likely require a single business (ie, PayPal) to handle all transactions, creating a little microeconomy, though controlled by a single company. Folks wouldn't like that, as you can well guess. Beyond that, we'd have to get some major credit cards to team up and work together to spread payments amongst themselves, which also sounds suspiciously unlikely.
They're both good ideas, IMHO. It's just that the former is dodging the question of micropayments, and the latter is effectively unworkable. I maintain the necessity of micropayments, and I maintain that it will happen when credit card companies make it possible through reasonable rate structures for merchants.
-Waldo
Credit card companies simply won't work with small-transaction systems. Further, it would be a disaster for a company. Let's say /. charges $0.001 / story. I load the front page and get 10 stories, which costs me $0.01. They charge my credit card $0.01. There's a $0.25 transaction fee from CyberCash, a 3% take from the credit card company and, likely, a $0.25 - $0.50 transaction fee from the credit card company, too.
Slashdot, of course, would go out of business within hours on a model like that. Of course, the credit card companies don't want 3% of a 1 cent transaction, either, and likely would not permit Slashdot to make such charges. And that's a shame, because I'd totally sign up for that. If they could bill my card monthly, based on my total views, perhaps that would be a bit less of a disaster (say, $0.60 / month), but we've still got a long way to go. Or, rather, the credit card companies still have a long way to go.
-Waldo
I'd pay for slashdot if there was more porn.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Another point is the economic difference between information and material goods. If Ford wants to build a million copies of its car, it has to spend about a million times more than for one car (more or less, after various overhead).
At this point, I enter commie pinko mode, though I don't typically see myself that way...
With software and information, making copies is close to free. This encourages people to take a communist (as in sharing) view, where each person pitches a contribution (intellectual, labor, economic, whatever) into the pot, and then we all share the fruit of the project.
The Internet (and its predecessors) were built on this sharing principal, and its adherents are defying the capitalists of the world who are still fixated on the brick and mortar view of production, capitalists who want to take the efficiencies of the information economy and apply them to their traditional system of greed.
Consumer Carl is web-surfing and comes across Vendor Vinny's website, which advertises something interesting to Carl, maybe an attractive GIF image to which Vinny holds the copyright, but he's willing to sell the image to Carl at a small fee. This sale does not entitle Carl to resell the image; he is licensing the image, not becoming its copyright holder. Let's suppose that Vinny is selling this image for a nickel.
One immediate problem Carl faces is determining that Vinny really has something worth a nickel. Vinny may offer a free low-res or blurry image to suggest what he's got, but ultimately Vinny can defect by accepting Carl's nickel and giving him nothing, or something obviously worthless. For now I will put aside this question and assume that defecting vendors will be selected against by market forces.
Carl isn't really going to mail a nickel to Vinny; a stamp costs more than a nickel. What Carl will do is agree to mail a $5 check to Vinny if a fair roulette wheel spin gives a prespecified outcome whose probability is 1/100. The roulette wheel will actually be a negotiation between Vinny and Carl.
At the beginning of the negotiation, Vinny generates Rv, a large random integer, and then computes H, a one-way hash of Rv. Vinny transmits H to Carl. After he receives H, Carl generates his own random number Rc and transmits it to Vinny. Upon receipt of the value of Rc, Vinny transmits Rv to Carl. Carl computes the hash of Rv to verify that it is equal to H. Both of them can now compute the roulette wheel spin value, which is ((Rv + Rc) mod 100), and if the value of the spin is zero, then Carl agrees to mail a check for $5.
In order to cheat, either party would need to manipulate the value of ((Rv+Rc) mod 100). Vinny can't cheat because he has committed to the value of Rv before Carl generates Rc, and Carl can use H to test his commitment. Carl can't cheat because he must generate Rc and transmit it to Vinny before he sees the value of Rv. Carl can't compute Rv from H because the hash function is one-way.
Both parties have equal amounts of work to do. Each must generate a large random integer and perform a one-way hash.
If it turns out that Carl must pay the check, Vinny's website will create a transcation record in Vinny's database, including a transaction number. Carl's browser will show a form, which Carl should print out or copy onto a piece of paper, giving the transaction number as well as Vinny's name and address, so that Carl has an easy time making his payment.
It is prominently obvious to Carl that the transaction has been recorded; if he welches on the check then Vinny will know about it, and Vinny may then deny him access to any other payable goods. There's the question of how Vinny can tell whether a later visitor is the same person who welched before; Carl could make up a new user-id, or telnet to a different host and visit from there to have a different IP address, or do other tricks, but these fall outside the scope of this protocol.
How hard would it be for a single vendor (say, Scott McCloud) to set up a system like this? He would need to provide the client-side executable for his visitors to perform their side of the protocol. He would need to explain the protocol clearly enough to convince them that it's fair. His customers would need to agree to the probabilistic micropayment idea at all, but that's actually easy enough to do: he puts a link from his website that says, "go here if you agree to the probabilistic micropayment protocol, and you can shop for stuff", and they go there and get to see low-res fuzzy versions of interesting and amusing comics. When they do the protocol, they get the high-res sharp versions, and in 1% of the cases, they are obliged to mail in a check.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Hahahaha! Hahahaha! Haahahahahaha!
Ahem. Hehehe.
If this ever happened, I might pay *JUST* to see integrity on Slashdot.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! BWAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH! HEHEHEHEEH!
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
And if I may expand on this a bit...
The content is going to stay free due to basic free-market effects. The barriers to entry are so low as to be non-existant. Therefore any idiot can start producing content. You can even produce pretty good content for next to nothing (like /.). In a market where anybody can enter, competition will drive the price down to the minimum amount that will allow the manufacturers to stay open. And since there are nearly no fixed costs, that cost is the marginal cost, which as stated before, is darn near zero.
A meatspace example is farming. The barriers to entry to farming are pretty low. Anyone can get a loan to buy a couple hundred acres, get a load for seed/equipment/chemicals, and pay someone else to actually do the work for a low hourly wage. As a result, the cost of food has approached the cost of producing it. That is because as soon as the price of food rises much above the cost of production, somebody else will enter the market and supply more.
The only reason that more products aren't that cheap is barriers to entry. Take, for example, CPU's. It takes a lot of money to develop a CPU, and it is very risky. The barriers to entry are quite high. There are, then, only a handful of major CPU makers (Intel, IBM (S390), AMD, Sun (UltraSpark), Compaq (Alpha)). Since there are only a few firms competing, they act like an oligopily (read: sorta-monopoly), and can charge a higher price. On the other hand, RAM is dirt cheap (as far as chips go), mainly because it is so easy to design and fab RAM, leading to low(er) barriers to entry. Can you even count the number of RAM-chip producers? I thought not.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can't charge for information. Copyright allows an easy way to manufacture a barrier to entry (legally too). For example, take a look at how much the ACM's Digital Library cost (for the lazy, $38 for students, $185 otherwise, must already be a ACM member too). I pay that (and get my money's worth), because there is no other way to get that particular (and very high quality) content. The material is copyrighted, and ACM is (usually) the copyright holder (sometimes ACM doesn't have the copyright, but is one of few holders of distribution rights).
So, yes, that's exactly it. It's cheap because there is a "strong incentive" (market forces) to provide it for cheap.
1. It costs me money. The more it costs, the less I enjoy it. Right now the internet as a whole costs me about 40 dollars per month. At this price I am getting good value in exchange for those dollars. Open Source software is saving me license fees, kids are learning a lot, and don't need to go to the library as often. Long distance calls can be made now. One really long call can easily justify the cost per month. Services are ok now, but will get better.
.net is about. Owning communication and identification in such a way as to profit from it --smart bastards.)
2. There will never be anonymous payment systems. Too much potential for abuse. I don't enjoy people knowing what I am looking at. It's the principle really. Going into a bookstore with cash means I get what I want, can read it as many times as I want, and nobody really knows that I have it, unless I tell them. This is the way most things should be online.
3. What can they really sell that I have to get online that I need, and would be willing to sit at my computer to enjoy? Think about it. Online access to information is easy and fast, but the real value so far is in the communication, not so much the content. Hard to sell that given the current structure of the net. (This is what
4. When I actually buy content, I expect to be able to refer to it as needed anywhere I want, any time I wan't until I choose to give up that right. This applies to books, cd's --basically any thing that comes to me on physical media. I have media from 20 years ago that sometimes is interesting. How long will you have access to online content you have paid for?
If the media is more fragile than the value warrants, then I expect to be able to make backups to protect my investment as well.
5. Basically I don't plan on doing pay per play at all and this looks like the model that most corporations want. Some things are worth it. Concerts, movies in the theatre, shows, these all involve some experience that makes them worth doing and paying for. Hard to point to anything online that has this quality now. Nobody likes pay per play. It forces you to keep track of what you are spending. takes the freedom, fun, whatever out of the whole thing.
Why do you think they only do day passes at Disneyland? People don't want to keep track of their cash! Would not be any fun to realise that the Dumbo ride sucks, and costs almost as much as Splash Mountain would it? Would getting a bad ride be more or less of a big deal if you had to pay again to find out? Nasty questions for a place all about fun.
This also is the same reason the casinos like to get you to put some cash into the little cards. You just plug into the machine and just press buttons for a while. Gets the actual act of handling the money out of your immediate attention so you can ENJOY LOSING IT!
Finally, paying for the internet until now implies that you can view most of the content and participate. If that changes, then the actuall connection to the net is worth less. How many of you think that connect charges are actually going to go down if that happens?
Thought so...
Blogging because I can...
You are absolutely right. No one wants to pay because of the competion by 'free' sites. When A charges for its service and B is available for free, people go to B. Simple economics.
To come back at the example in the story: ringtones are available for free on many places. They aren't transmitted to your phone, but you'll have to type it in manually. Many, many, peoply prefer the cumbersome typing over the confort of the payed option.
When you think this doesn't apply to websites: think again. Paying is troublesome. You'll have to do stuff to get what you want. Not paying is easier, so people choose not to pay.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
...indirectly. Fact of the matter is that given a free story from Associated Press, and one from the New York Times (also free, but registration required), I will choose the AP story because it's more convenient. So the paying for a site directly, every time you go, may never get off the ground, because there are site's that don't charge and have the same stuff. The exception is pr0n, where they pretty much all started pay per use at the same time, but gnutella is starting to reverse that.
Cable TV beat this by making cable usage functionally equivalent to flipping normal channels. would you pay for cable if it meant a convoluted process every time you flipped a channel...like a patch bay?
The keenbeans of industry realize this, and know that the one place they can reliably charge for content is in the service bills. I spend more money on DSL than cable, movies, print and whatnot each month.
It's equivalent, only instead of per use payment, it's aggregated payment.
Given this context, it's a lot easier to understand the AOL Time-Warner merger. They want to get paid for access to media, so they merge with the largest provider of access, and live off the service bills.
Sony is the most hypocritical of the people embracing this kind of billing. Their music division is crying foul about mp3, but their electronics division is making money from mp3's. If you download Sony Music's mp3's from napster, and burn them on a Sony CD-R drive, you are indirectly paying Sony for those mp3's, because the money ends up in the same place, eventually, that it would had you paid for the mp3 directly...especially if the reason you bought the CD-R in the first place was to burn their music, and wouldn't have otherwise (which is usually the case for consumers these days).
So yeah, people are going to be reluctant to charge for content which is nearly identicle to the free stuff, because people will stop coming to their site. However, a site investing in the infrastructure needed to get to their site can charge their viewers indirectly, and still seem like a free service to their audience.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
In the '80s, this was the method used to get patches and support for most computer-based products (hardware and software). The free section had generic information and the chat rooms. To access the support sections of companies hosting forums there you were charged per-minute for access. Bills could be extremely high if a large patch was needed and you were limited to 1200 baud modem connections.
Then came the Internet, and slowly companies closed their CompuServe forums and directed customers to access their new (and free) website. The fact that 1) access was now free, and 2) people could access the site through highspeed connections at work, school, and eventualy home made the pay-for-access model obsolete.
To now, nearly a decade later, try to reimplement a pay-for-access model on top of that which has been free all along - is destined to fail. The Internet now is too large and diverse to clamp down upon. That's why so many .com's have gone under. They set up, went public, and based their entire business upon a fallacy that they can charge for content on the Internet. Once they went online, they found that too many free alternatives existed online to make any money. Poof! They exhaust IPO capital and disappear.
Personally, I pay for things with lasting value - a book, a CD, an OS or Application's installation media, etc. I don't view this as paying for the contents of that media - I'm paying for the media itself. That's what adds the "lasting" to the value. Internet content is far too dynamic and temporary for me to get anything "lasting" from it's content. Therefore - I see very little value outside what it costs for me to connect via my ISP.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
From my reading it's only a subscription if you wish to avoid the banner ads. Personally, I don't find banner ads annoying enough to pay to avoid them, since I've developed the fine art of ignoring or scrolling down slightly to block them. But it would be a good thing to have the option.
OTOH, there is good content out there that I would pay for. I'm not sure if user-contributed discussion sites will ever be able to transition to full pay-per-view since the whole worth of the site is the user comments - asking users to pay in order to contribute to an online resource is basically the dumb idea that Napster's currently having.
What we need is not smaller payments (micropayments) but bigger (or "chunkier") content. If I could pay $10-15/month to a central authority and know that I would have free reign to reload /. all day, a metered number of posts at k5, and get my daily online comics as required, I'd jump at the chance to support my favorite sites. But I don't want to follow the recording industry system and subsidize sites that I can't stand with my $10. My contribution has to go to the sites I actually want to support, and the user has to be able to specify that they want to be able to read some sites in an unlimited manner, read others in a limited manner (I only need so many Google searches per week, but I do need them), and specify that others will only be hit once per day, etc.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Paypal has to be able to make money off of their microtransactions and they probably cost money themselves -- they have an infrastructure that needs feeding, and more than likely pay bank costs to implement some of these charges.
I think there's probably some minimum level at which small payments can't work due to the transaction processing costs. It's not just a dozen encrypted packets ensuring the payments, its a whole infrastructure, auditing and so on to make it work.
It just seems unlikely that a third party can process sub-dollar charges and make any money on it. What does make sense is some government entity (federal reserve? post office?) getting involved and creating a centralized clearninghouse for financial transactions. It would still cost money, only be available in US dollars, but it would likely make transactions down to the $.05 practical for payers and payees alike.
I was talking about micropayments with a friend of mine, and he brought up the fact that there's an expression "nickel and dime you to death" for a reason. Lots of little payments are hard to keep track of, and they add up fast; if you view 1,000 bits of web-content that cost you a nickel each (like, say, browsing through archives of a comic strip), all of a sudden that's $50.00. He feels that people aren't going to want to subject themselves to a system where it's so easy to end up owing more than you realize.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Here's another detail: I started getting a PayPal
account, and noticed that my spam rate at least
doubled after I gave them my email address.
If they're not selling your email, someone is
doing something clever to spy on their traffic.
It certainly didn't make me feel inclined to
continue with the process of getting an
account.
Consider the fact that people are willing to pay quite a bit of money for computer books, even if they (or the equivalent information) is available online.
It all comes down to the fact that computers really, really suck, in many ways.
And the ways in which computers *don't* suck have largely to do with providing new ways for people to interact with each other on a personal level. It's got little to do with connecting to big batches of canned content.
(Weird thought: celebrities could probably sell pen-pal rights. A well-known person can't possibly respond to every piece of random email, but maybe they could follow the email from 100 people willing to kick in $1000 each for the right to that consideration...)
It's really not any more complicated than that.
Don't buy a pig in a poke.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Those two little phrases sum up why I tend to be reluctant to pay for content. The times that I have, I have frequently found that what I paid for was worth less than what I could have gotten for free. Sometimes not, but it's quite difficult to tell ahead of time. And as for testimonials... Do you believe the candidates surveys? Do you believe Microsoft sponsored software comparisons?
So there are two problems. Establishing credibility and proving incremental value. Both are quite difficult. A lot of people get bitten a few times before they learn, so there's an early bulge in the demand. Then it quickly drops off, as the ex-customers start going out of their way to avoid repeat business.
OTOH, some vendors I deal with repeatedly. But I'm charry of new ones. And new products, even from established companies. They are so often quite disappointing. Usually I'll only purchase a new item to display support for past favors. If, say, I purchase a subscription to the Black Adder from the Kompany then it's likely to be because I've heard of their donations of software to KDE. If the product is good, then I'm likely to purchase upgrades from them. If it's terrible, I don't feel too ripped off, because it was really a gesture of support to a friend of the community.
This wouldn't be a good business model if things cost much per each to make, but as it is it may work, and in any case, it's one that the on-line vendors need to live with. Or not, but the model isn't going away.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yep, I've had that with Rat Shack. Odd thing, though. When I've got folding green in my hand and I tell them "I don't see why you need to know that. Now, either let me pay for my stuff or tell me you don't want my business and I'll cheerfully go down to Fry's from now on where they'll be happy to take my money no questions asked.", the cash register suddenly becomes quite happy to take the sale without any information. Money talks, loudly.
I can give you my personal reason I'm averse to paying for online content: A percieved lack of value-add, with a concrete chunk of money extracted from my account regularly.
A good example of this is Ars Technica. I wanted to read an article. I noticed a link to download a pdf version of the file. I figured "great, I can print it out and read it in bed!". I click the link and it turns out you not only have to register, you have to pay a monthly membership fee.
So now I've got two options: pony up $50 a year for a membership, for which I may or may not ever want to print an article out again, or just print out the (lousy due to paged html setup) web pages.
In other cases I'm reluctant to sign up for a site because it's one more thing to explain to the wife -- but honey, I really need this!
I would be more willing to 'pay as you go' if I could use some form of digital cash/micropayment system that didn't hassle you to sign up and if the products in question didn't cost too much. Back to my original example, I would happily have paid $0.50 for the privilege of printing a nicely formatted pdf over the crappy browser printout. But I am unwilling to if I have to register, give out tons of personal details, a credit card, etc. etc.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
And how is this different from any other type of publishing? Magazine publishers need to set the appropriate price for their publications. Same with newspapers, book publishers, music labels.... If the price is set too high, they lose sales. Too low, they don't turn a profit. It sounds like the same problem to me. So why is this an issue? What's different?
To my mind, the answer is perception. The Web is perceived as being this huge, egalitarian town square, where everyone has a voice, and everyone has equal access to what's being said. Nice dream, but it's just not true. Being connected costs money, for the content provider and for the content viewer. But these costs are hidden for the most part - I can easily see that the book I hold in my hand required resources and effort to produce. The end results are here, physically in my hands, and I have no problem paying for it.
But I can't hold web content in my hand (unless I print it, using my own toner and paper). The costs of the web server or hosting service are hidden from me. I'm already paying for my ISP, my PC, the software that I'm running to get on the web. Isn't that enough?
I think that is the true problem here. People don't understand the publishing costs on the web, because the costs are intangible. And while that's true, I think it will be very difficult to get people to pay for content on a regular basis.
Oh, for the record, I would have no problem paying a small monthly or annual subscription fee to sites that I find particularly useful (like Slashdot). And the micropayment schemes mentioned a while back in Bob Cringely's columns here and here make a lot of sense to me.
This is a factor I hadn't considered in why people won't pay for content.
I think this relates to the mistrust between people and large content providers now - do we REALLY trust the MPAA, RIAA, etc.? I don't. Once micropayments start, I do expect people to search for even MORE ways to gouge us.
Come to think of it, the trust factor explains a LOT about aversion to paying for content, perhaps the critical factor.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I've thought about this issue myself, and first of all I don't think there's one answer. Any complex question like this isn't going to be answered simply.
However, I believe there are several specific answers:
ACCESS: We've got a lot of free information out there - libraries, personal sites, etc. Or we can pay a small amount for a book then hand it around making it free for the borrowers.. People like this, people are used to this. If you want them to pay, they'd like to see a good reason as to why.
BACKLASH: Let's face it, we're tired of the RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, and all the other collections of letters that have been screwing with us. We don't want to pay because the money always seems to be going to a bunch of pompous, controlling a$$es. If people knew more money was going right to the folks doing the work, there'd be less whining.
INTERPRETATION: Cable in my area is basically information delivery you pay for. People understand that, but payments for content on line have been pitched very poorly, and usually when someone suddenly needed a buck to keep a site going. People need to see that paying for content (in one for or another), isn't unusual in the non-computer world.
SELFISHNESS: People don't want to cough up $$$ sometimes, even if it'll help keep a writer or artist in business.
ENTITLEMENT: People were used to all sorts of free net services before The Crash. They still feel like things should be free.
Well, those are my theories, my 1/50th of a dollar (US please, the exchange rate is pretty good).
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Fortunately for you, the media and telecomm titans are working 80-hour weeks to accomplish the remaining mergers that will make this possible, albeit at a slightly higher price to the consumer. :-)
More seriously, it does get to be an incredible nuisance to juggle even a half-dozen snail mail periodical subscriptions, and I agree that people will only agree to pay for content when it is made one-stop subscriptions for content rather than piecemeal subscriptions or dime-at-a-time micropayments. And I do think there is some hope for that.
Babar
Why pay for what you can get for free? That's the cold, hard truth. I'm not going to pay for something without a reason. And 'well, if nobody pays, we might go out of business' is not a good enough reason.
When everyone goes out of business, and there is only one good discussion site left, then maybe I'll pay to use it, as I have no other choice. Or maybe I'll just go outside and play catch with the neighbor's kids.
I don't pay people to come over and fix my computer because I can do it myself. Am I depriving some kid of his job?
It's about ease of use. If I get the same results, subjectively, whether I pay or not, I won't pay, because it involves less work, and there is no additional reward.
It has to get to the point where the convenience/reward I percieve is greater than that sense of loss I have when parting with my money (and the effort required to do so).
Well, one of many problems is the unwillingness / inability of content providers to charge realistic rates. Partly, this is due to the very low conversion rate of free->paying customers and to the high overall cost of customer acquisition, but it also seems like many providers have their heads in the sand.
Take, for instance, LinuxGram, which I definitely enjoy. I'd even pay $20 a year for it, which is what I pay for Dr. Dobbs. But their subscription price is $100.00 a year, which I find ludicrous. Or look at the They Might Be Giants Unlimited service on eMusic.com. For access to TMBG songs, plus interviews, they want $10 a month! Isn't that a bit shameless for access to content from a single band?
--JRZ
- Most online content is worthless and the consumers know it. Stuff like
/. may be mildly entertaining, but the SN ratio is nearly 0. Most other online content providers are in the same basket.
- This is a classic example of the cartel quandry: a cartel is only stable so long as absolute control can be exerted over the members of the cartel. As soon as one member of the cartel breaks ranks (in order to increase their income by decreasing prices but increasing quantity) the cartel pricing structure collapses. With most cartels, there is a small matter of minimum investment necesary to enter the market, which restricts the number of possible players and eases the quandry somewhat. With online content, however, the barriers to entry are almost zero (especially with a fluff site like
/.) hence there is no opportunity to install a cartel pricing structure.
Since information, in general, is a fluid comodity, all profit from information properties is based on some form of cartel or monopoly. For copyrightable information, these monopolies are support by legislation and judicial action, but this only works if the information itself is, somehow, unique and valuable.Most online content is either non-unique or of very little value (or both. /. falls into this last category). You simply can't charge money for something that the market doesn't value or can get elsewhere for free.
So, the point is that the vast online readership will probably never pay for most online content. The only way to squeeze any revenue out of online content is to either produce something entirely unique and unreproducable (difficult and costly to do, both because of production costs, and becuase you will probably need to defend ownership and control of the content in court) or you will need to establish a reputation which ensures a consistant readership, and trade access to that readership to third parties (advertisers).
All that said, I'm admittedly writing from a perspective where I've never had to deal with $1000-a-month server bills, or worry about going broke from rampant popularity. And that's a real issue for some people, and I agree that people who create good content deserve to be rewarded and supported in their efforts, in a way that doesn't compromise their creativity.
But I don't see a magic solution to these issues emerging anytime soon - if ever. Because there really are a lot of intertangled issues involved, and it's taken this long (*ages* in internet time) just to get people to start asking the right questions, and thinking about the whole issue in a suitably nuanced manner.
I'll also mention that, from where I sit, the most useful thing people can do is get involved somehow on a personal level -- create your own content, write a substantive fan letter to the creator of your favorite semi-obscure site, talk about the issues with your less-techie friends and family. I completely agree that a good, popular site can't happen without money, but I also think that untangling these dilemmas is at least as much a cultural issue as an economic one.
--Ben
It's even better than that.
I sign up for "Everything" with my cable company. They charge me like 60 bucks a month, and I get every channel they offer (except for PPV), 24/7.
Let's put it this way. I love the Sopranos. It's the best thing on TV these days. But I wouldn't want to have to give you my credit card every time I watch an episode, nor would I pay 2 bucks an episode to watch it. I pay $20 a month extra to be able to watch all the Sopranos I can handle, as well as all the other stuff I can handle on 20 other movie channels (yay Digital Cable).
If you could offer people the same deal on the net, they'd take it. But the net _isn't_ tv. Part of what makes it great is that it isn't tv. I don't want an Internet where every site I visit is controlled by one of 3 major companies.
So, we're screwed. People are used to paying one fee and getting a bunch of stuff with it. They pay their ISP 20 bucks a month (more for cable/dsl) and expect the same sort of deal.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
Like I said -- cable service is a service, not a thing. I pay for cable once, and not again when I watch the show. For those that say I pay again with advertising -- true, for channels that run ads. But when I watch HBO (or any of the other 20 movie channels), I get no ads.
You pay for a newspaper subscription. Yes, you can physically touch the newspaper today, but once the recycling truck drives off, it's gone.
But the point stands -- I get something to hold in my hands. I can read it on the john. I can take it to a friend's house. I don't get 404 errors when I try and follow a link (i.e. turn the page). And I pay _once_, and get a wealth of stuff. I pay my measly 10 bucks a month, and I get all the news I can handle, with rather high quality reporting on world and local events, as well as sports, commentary, and comics (why pay a micropayment for Penny Arcade when I can pay a micropayment [50 cents] and get an entire newspaper, including 20+ comics?).
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
The things you describe, to me, are either services (massage, education), or entertainment (theatre). They don't really fit the web paradigm.
Let's say you're at the massage. You paid $100 for this massage. The guy applies pressure to one spot on your back, and then says, "If you liked that, would you mind paying an extra dime for a little more pressure?"
Ok, obviously I'm stretching an already bad analogy.
As for entertainment, I don't spend money on movies I've never heard of. I already spend 20$ a month to get 20 movie channels. I'm only going to spend 20$ a night to watch a movie if that movie comes highly recommended to me.
And that's not a micropayment anyway. It would be more like I went to the movies, paid my 20$, and then every so often I had to pay more to enjoy some part of the show even more. "Would you like to recline your seat? Insert a dollar. Would you like the guy in front of you to take off his hat? Insert a dollar." Look, I already paid for the movie, stop nickel-and-diming me.
I already paid for my internet, stop nickel-and-diming me.
I know it doesn't work that way. You know it doesn't work that way. But John Q. Public doesn't know that, and as long as companies keep selling the Internet like it's another kind of cable TV, people will expect their flat rate to pay for everything.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
"And you "pay" again by watching advertising during your shows. "
... legality doesn't come into play here, folks. If someone says, "I'll wash your car for 10$" and someone else says, "I'll wash your car for free" you're likely to get it washed for free. This is true even if the guy offerng to wash your car for free seems to be a little shady. And let's say that guy gets put out of business by the feds for washing cars with stolen water. You don't think you'd still be reluctant to pay $10 for something you got for free a month ago?
Sorry, I neglected to address this in my first reply.
Let's say I'm new to the net. Let's say I'm told it's like my cable TV access. With that, I might imagine I need to suffer through commercials to get programming I want.
After being on the net a while, I realize I'm getting a half dozen ads in my mailbox every day. More, likely, if I'm signed up with someplace like emachines for my PC.
So, I think, I pay for my net access a second time in the tons of spam I get.
Nope, you're paying for the privelege of getting all that spam. Whee!
Ok, maybe I pay for my net access a second time in the form of banner ads -- ads which are deliberately made to confuse users (popups with fake "close" buttons, etc) in a way no "real" advertising would get away with. Oh, that doesn't pay for it either?
How many times do I have to pay for this internet, anyway?
Not only that, are you trying to tell me the quality of service on the net is anywhere near the quality of service I get when I pay for my cable TV? How many times has your ISP been down compared to your cable TV in the past year? How many times has slashdot been down compared to CNN in the past year?
Add to that the fact that it's silly to pay for something you can get for free
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
"well sometimes 2 hours cuz I'd get sucked into the next show which always had some sensational expose"
:-)
America Undercover kicks ass.
That's all I have to say about that
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
There's a few big reasons people are reluctant to pay for "content" online.
One is that they don't have anything to hold in their hands in exchange for their money.
If I buy a book, I have a physical artifact which will last much longer than my lifespan.
I still have tapes I bought when I was in middle school.
I still have the original floppies from computer games I bought around the same time.
What do I get to hold on to if I buy a year's subscription to a web news site, for example? Do I get access to archives of that year forever, even if the company that made the site goes under in the next recession? Please.
Another big reason is that if people aren't thinking in terms of buying a "thing" they're thinking in terms of a service. We pay for plenty of things we don't get to hold onto -- electricity, cable television, taxes, etc. But the thing is, you're already paying someone for the "service" part of your net connection -- your ISP.
It's just not in the normal buying pattern of people to pay for content on a medium they're already paying for. You can get people to upgrade to a higher quality service (sure, I'll buy digital cable), but to pay for the very thing you're already paying for?
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
If I buy a book, that book is MINE. I will never need to renew my membership to re-read that book, nor will the book evaporate when the publisher goes out of business. I can read my book in any kind of light, not just light produced by GE Soft White (TM) light bulbs. US Law protects my right to cite portions of my book in my own writing. I can lend my book to a friend, donate it to a library, or even sell it.
Have you ever seen a for-pay scheme for online content that granted all of these benefits? Neither have I. That's why I will gladly pay for books, but never for online content.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Sure, but many people get "pay per view" movies on TV, or special events like boxing matches, etc. They're willing to pay extra for that content on top of the delivery cost. Why won't people pay for (non-porn) content on the Internet?
ConsumerReports.org. Charges something like $2.50 for every month that I use the service, plus an annual fee.
But, most sites try to do it via advertising. And even if I do micropay, I still have to see those damned banner ads. And once I micropay, then they can more easily track me and my habits. If some site like NYTimes would ditch banner ads for paying subscribers, I'd sign up in a flash (even though it's currently free).
Every time a new magazine shows up in the mail, the first thing I do is go through it and rip out all the blow cards and mailin cards. After that, I read the magazine.
The web is in many ways a new media type. It incorporates parts of other media types like the print of newspaper and the broadcast ability of TV. We pay a little for a newspaper or magazine but not anywhere near the cost of creation. The exta cost is paid by ads. On TV, we don't pay directly to _any_ of the programming. We pay our service provider for cable or satellite but broadcast is free to recieve with an antenna. Same with radio. In the broadcast area we are willing to have a certain amout of time dedicated to "paying the bills" and interrupting the broadcast.
The web has tried both of these methods with little success. I think the banner ads on Slashdot are what I like best but they don't seem to generate the revenue companies need. Popups just annoy me. I think the culture is different enough to justify a new approach. People viewing websites expect things to be instant and fast.
So, basically what I'm saying is the new media needs a unique way to advertise that works with the culture of the people that use it.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
But how do you do micropayment?
/. and the content has now changed do you get charged again? I can see lots of people with $1000s of bills for these micropayments. Just like 900 numbers, sure it is only $1.95 for the first 3 minutes but then watch out! And they'll do things to make you stay on the phone longer. So then websites will do things to charge you as well.
Do you pay every time you view the page? How about hitting refresh? When a new AC posts to
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
I think that the PC is the worst platform for PPV or pay per use. It has been pretty successful for television, though. I believe it has a lot to do with the easy of use an convenience. If, for example, you got my TiVo to download 'special content' over the Internet via a broadband connection, that might be worth paying for.
Paying to read a news story? Almost silly.
Ok.. here goes. Just a few stats and other numbers. On an extremely expensive T1 line, assuming that 100% of the bandwidth is utilized, it would cost one cent to transmit 4 megs of data. Electricity costs, equipment costs, etc contribute to the cost of owning and operating a high volume website. We'll consider low volume websites run off of DSL lines are not in need of funding their existance. For a 28.8 modem user that spends 4 solid hours a day downloading data, over a month they will cost content providers a collective total of about $4. Someone with a high bandwidth connection that downloads 300 megs a day will cost a total of a little more than $22. What could be done, is the ISP, or even the user depending on the arrangement, would take a flat rate total based on the average user bandwidth and charge that much extra a month. This money would then be stored with a trusted central repository. When the user connects to a site, that site has the option of drawing from this central repository a fraction of a cent based on the bandwidth consumed by that user. At the end of the month, the site will recieve a check for the bandwidth consumed, averaged out over the total amount of money available. This would be primarily for sites that have no interest in making a profit, but don't want to have to pay through the nose for the privilage of simply existing. ISP's and/or users would not be required to do this, but the sites could always excersize the option of not allowing non-member users access to the page. Sites that rely on banner ads or subscriptions would be ineligible, and any site could opt not to take advantage of the service, as it would likely probably incur additional headaches. However, it is an option that would solve the thorny problem of sites that can't exist due to the bandwidth requirements. -Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
it's just a links-and-discussion forum. If you want to see a web journalism site, visit Wired or better, The Register or The Inquirer.
All Slashdot does is verify submitted links (if they remember) and add a bit of spin to the story.
The real action happens in the discussions later, and I think even the principals would concur....
The problem with most web subscriptions is that they're overpriced. The web was supposed to bring good content at a low price because there was no middleman or shipping. However, many of the subscription sites are "content" sites (Salon, WSJ, Economist) who want to charge almost as much as I'd pay for a paper magazine. And, let's face it, the dead tree version is a whole lot more convenient. If I could get Salon for $10/year, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I'd pay the same for slashdot. However, for $30+ year, I think more carefully about what I'm getting, and I usually decide against a subscription.
--
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
:)
:)
/. is so visited is because everytime you come back... there's a boatload of new stories to poke through.. this site moves at a very fast pace. slow down the traffic, and everything will slow down i bet. Dont forget that slashdot is unique.. and special.. yes even the trolls.. without people to mod down, the +,- equilibrium change would almost throw off the whole balance of what has come to be. It would significantly change... so be careful what you wish for.
:) (and yes our ATM system is light years ahead of the US i'll be the first to troll it.. i've seen both and don't feel bad... we just have a better federal banking system... but I can proudly say i carry less than 10% of cash i spend and the only person who gets a cheque is my landlord)
fewer posts would be nice... i remember when i could actually read everything
who cares about the slashdot effect... if people put something on the web they obviously want it to get some attention... if their server crashes because a gizillion people hit it at once, it's a good lesson. if nothing else, it's funny. Like when victoria secret crashed during the superbowl.. who were the ad wizards that came up with that.. and why wasn't IT informed (or formed
However... the reason that
I wouldn't pay for slashdot but I *would*.
that means if I payed for slashdot like I pay for a newspaper and a coffee everyday I would pay. But I'm a minority in this world who doesnt see the efficiency of paying 10-30% interest on things I buy, when I'm already paying 7% tax. hence, you won't find a credit card in my wallet. (i seriously doubt i would pay the whole thing off every month)
trust me... this seems to be getting harder and harder everyday. We have a very efficient and reliable direct payment system here in Canada (interac) but paying online for anything... sucks.
I'll probably have to get a credit card soon, but if interac figures out a way for websites to take money straight out of my chequing account like McDonalds does, you can put your money on.. nope
well this turned into more of an anti-credit card thing, and I know 95% can't imagine living without theirs but web content isn't the same as tangible content and that's a fact. one more analogy... yea i pay for my digital cable every month but if CNN went pay per view, (think internet costs over and above your ISP subscription) I'd just watch CTV newsnet.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
Don't believe me? Here's my PayPal experience. (PayPal being arguably the most popular micropayment system on the 'net).That's why I'm not using PayPal--I don't need to, and it's not worth the hassle. Most of the other micropayment systems online either require you to install some lame program that doesn't support my OS, charge steep transaction fees, or are just too small to be trustworthy.
What will it take to get people to pay for content?
Good, simple micropayment system. This is critical. Imagine if a brick-and-mortar store owner told you that you had to pay him in 1957 pennies, and nothing else would be accepted. You'd just walk out, unless you absolutely had to have whatever he was selling, and he was the only guy selling it.
Lack of free content. People will only pay for shit if they can't get shit free (easily). Duh. I've always wondered how all the pay porn sites exist when there are so many free porn sites, but I suppose people don't act rationally when they're horny and lonely.
Content worth paying for. Most of the content people look at on the net is for entertainment (I'm counting most news in that category--if you're not the freaking President, it's not your job to know what's going on). To be worth paying for, content has to be significantly better than TV. TV content is free (sure, you pay for cable, but that's like paying for your ISP, and you don't have to think about that, nor does watching an episode of Seinfeld cost you extra), and TV is a much higher-bandwidth medium than most people's internet connections. To be worth paying for, content providers either need to come up with some very good original content, or bandwidth needs to get better.
Reasonable prices. I am not going to pay the RIAA $2.99 for a single track at less-than-CD quality when I could either pay $12 Canadian (yes, that's right--our CDs are way the hell cheaper than yours) for the entire CD, or just download it free from Gnutella. I'll probably just not bother, if I can't get it easily for cheaper than a dollar.
What do you really need on the internet, that you can't get from a million sites? Weather, I can always look out the window. Web comics are nice, but not essential (although I did donate to Penny Arcade). Online technical support and product information should be provided free, and I'd avoid any company that tried to charge for it. Slashdot? I'd expect editors who can spell and fact-check before I'd pay for this (and it would be nice if they didn't ask such ridiculous questions as whether it's OK to burn private property of people who disagree with you). The only thing I'd pay for is Google. Think about it--if you can still remember back to the pre-Google days, remember how bad the other search engines were? Think about how much time Google has saved you. That's worth something. Not much else is.
I would be psyched to pay 2 bucks a episode. I would also be happy to pay 5 bucks per channel.
.. Mwhahhahhhaa"
Either would be way better than my current deal of paying 40 bucks a month to watch "The Daily Show" and "Southpark" or my future deal of 55 bucks a month for "The Daily Show", "Southpark" and "The Sopranos".
When I moved to my new place and got the cable turned on I somehow got all the premium channels without paying for them. I never subscribed to the movie channels before because I really wouldn't get much out of it: I've never found myself wishing that I had, say, Showtime so I could watch whatever they happened to be showing at that time (softcore porn).
Anyway, it was months before I even discovered that I had the extra channels and then I came accross The Sopranos and then I got addicted and watched HBO illegally for one hour a week (well sometimes 2 hours cuz I'd get sucked into the next show which always had some sensational expose). So the season is over, haven't watched HBO since but one day I get a call from an AT&T telemarketer trying to sell me movie channels and I was in a hurry and blew them off. A week later I noticed that the HBO was gone! Now, I'm not complaining, but I am knida bummed cuz now I *HAVE* to get HBO once the 4th season starts and AT&T will probably make it as painful as possible: "Well, I think that for a $40 dollar installation fee we can send someone out sometime on the 18th
- bridgette
If someone new to computers and the Internet buys a computer just to hook up to the web and then pays their monthly fee to AOL, Earthlink, etc., they probably think they are *already* paying for content.
For me, the problem is the computer. I don't think that a computer screen is a good way for consuming most content (computer-games aside). I don't think I'm cheap -- I'll plop down $4 to rent a DVD, or almost twice that to see a movie in a theater. If the same movie were available for streaming over the Internet for free, I doubt I would bother. Who wants to sit at their computer watching a movie on a monitor? Not me.
I happily pay $20+ to buy books to read. Recently, several books I would like to read have been made available for download over the Internet for free. I generally haven't bothered, unless I felt that printing them out on my laser printer was a wise use of my toner. There is no way I am going to sit a read a whole book on my computer.
What about shorter content, like articles? Most are of little value to me. The trouble it takes to find good content often overwhelms the positive value of that content. As long as content is free on the Internet, I'll browse through it to see what is there. As long as car dealerships don't charge for window-shopping, I'll do that too. But when you ask me to go through the trouble of paying (never mind the value of the money itself), it just stops being interesting. I consume content on the Internet because it is free. If it were all charged for, I'd stop using it (except as a medium for exchaning free software with others), and I can't see how my life would be worse off. Maybe I'd miss it, and then be willing to pay.
Just my thoughts.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Consider for a moment all the information I can get without directly paying a cent. (Yes, TANSTAAFL, and all of these get paid for one way or another, but they seem "free" at the moment of choice.)
I can turn on the radio and listen for hours.
I can turn on the ol' boob tube and watch broadcast TV. I can even watch basic satellite/cable for about the same cost as a basic ISP connection, so if you consider that more "service" than "content", it's free content.
I can shuffle down to my local library and find enough content to last a lifetime.
I can rummage though the recycling bin at my coffeehouse of choice and pick up the day's newpaper (the Baltimore Sun is definitely not content worth paying for), or the local advertizing-support "alternative" weekly.
I can get all that for "free" (see above), and you want me to shell out to see you webpage?
We're inundated with content. It attacks us from the Muzak speakers at the supermarket and the gas station, the animated billboards on the streets, the ubiquitous glowing eye of the video monitor. Supply and demand...the supply is so high, and many people are feeling so overwhelmed that demand in some cases is going negative.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Actually, people are already paying for content like on-demand TV programs and Minitel.
People refuse to pay when something has been free for a while. It's mostly an internet-only problem. There have been tons of free resources on internet, so people don't want to pay. In their mind, Internet == free for use. If you change this, they will yell.
It's just like Napster and software piracy. People who got free music and free software will know that it's possible to get free commercial stuff. So they will try to get them for free forever, even if it's illegal and immature. You can have strong laws, add filters and crazy control systems. People won't play the game. They used to get something for free, they don't want to pay any more.
They would pay for something that has never been free. Going to a cinema isn't free. Going to a disco isn't free (well... sometimes it is, but you always drink something) . Having food on the table isn't free. A car isn't free. People accept it. People buy these stuff. It's why the traditionnal commerce works, while e-commerce is a joke.
-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
{{.sig}}
I don't have a credit card, and have no intention of getting one.
Since there is apparently no other way to pay for online content - either directly or indirectly e.g. PayPal, i won't be buying anything off the internet, including 'content'.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
i like to pay the people who make content for their services. but a problem that i have is that there are so many filters between me and the creator, so many people getting a cut (some of them justifiably, for hosting, say) that i get suspicious.
while the issues are somewhat different, i believe that the reticence to pay for content online has a lot in common with people's willingness to illegally download music. i do it, too, and while i'd like the artist to get paid, i simply don't see a very meaningful relationship between my clicking a button to pay someone for something, and the talent getting paid. in addition, all content has the same try-before-you-buy issue, which i'm constantly using to soothe my conscience -- after all, how can i say what content is worth to me unless i've actually consumed it already? it's like those goat-head baby booths at coney island. you're afraid to go in, cause what if it sucks? you feel like an idiot, and besides, i've paid enough to see goat-headed babies in the past that i should get something for free, non? and again, how much of my $2 does little Goaty get, anyway?
so for me, it's a combo of payback, suspicion of corporations, and my love of freaks.
god is just pretend.
There is a certain kind of conent that a lot of people pay a fair amount of money for on the Internet, and it's porn. Porn is probably the most successful business on the Net, and probably will be for a long time.
Evidently, this is just a question of priorities. We won't pay for news, we won't pay for art, but we will pay for pictures of naked girls. If there's one thing that the Internet has taught us, it's that human beings are very, very interested in sex.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
A- I can't preview it to assess it's worth to me before I make the purchase like I can in meatspace, ie. flip through a book or magazine, hear peices of a CD, etc.
B- If I lose my connection midway through downloading the page, do I have to pay again?
C- Do you pay to use a library? Even those who don't pay taxes get to use it...
D- What rights do I get with my purchase? Right of first sale (& right to resell)? Can I shift that content to other media? Can I quote it? Am I liable if I mis-quote it? Is this a read-once purchase? Will every site that sells "content" have a different license? How do you enforce provincial licenses through a globally accessible medium? Eventually we'll have to really decide if click-wrap licenses are enforceable at all...
Sure, the worth of the information may be subjective, but how much time it required of its creator is not. That time is either worth money to you, or it isn't.
In the case of a good reporter, you ought to pay them (if not directly, then through a subscription to that media source) so that they can continue to produce that content for your consumption.
Many forms of content that we enjoy on the web today will not be here in a few years -- then we'll be starving for that great content we had for free, and they'll be able to charge for it -- because we'll see the value of it after its gone.
Lets actually pay for and sponsor those who deserve that money now, instead of later.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It might be more useful to reverse the question: what would I be willing to pay for, and how much might I be willing to pay?
I guess the summary here is that I (and I believe other people) am willing to pay for content of a certain quality. Most of what is available on the Internet doesn't measure up to existing standards for print, audio or video and while people will consume poor quality stuff if it's free, they won't pay for it.
Should Slashdot decide that they want to charge, they need to keep in mind that they're selling "community", not high-quality writing, and figure out how to charge appropriately.
Here's what everyone's forgotten:
What we end up with is a point about half-way between what Scott McCloud is saying (Micropayments are the way to go) and what Jonathan Rosenberg is saying (Micropayments won't work): Micropayments have an inherent societal barrier that it has to overcome to work. And usually, those types of barriers are not overcome, and the technologies fall to the side. And free content is available everywhere. And often free content in the past has been of higher quality.
Ted
Whatever you do... don't read this.
...one in which slashdot remained free, but derived shared revenue from sales of high-margin-but-useful-goods at Thinkgeek. It COULD'VE been so beautiful...
;-p ) Since ThinkGeek is one of the most heavily circulated advertisers remaining on Slashdot, I'm led to assume that it must generate SOME business for them...
Ironically, given the way things have turned out, it seems like one of the best potential models for continuing to grow Slashdot from a revenue/profit standpoint, while NOT requiring a subscription and NOT alienating the audience would be for Slashdot and ThinkGeek to merge and exist independent of VA Linux.
Why?
Slashdot attracts a specific demographic / psychographic. The readership, scattered across the globe, skews heavily towards young male programmers, offering "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
ThinkGeek has amassed a gigantic-and-still-growing product line that targets that population very well- and created a brand that states overtly who they are going for. ThinkGeek offers "stuff for smart masses".
I wouldn't ever pay for a subscription to Slashdot, though I'm a fan, because there really isn't much in the way of proprietary value offered here. Slashdot's 'original' content consists of useful product reviews (for things I, as a Mac user, don't need) and Jon Katz editorials about Columbine. So the primary purpose Slashdot serves for me personally (and probably for many of you folks) is to serve as a news filtering service. Given that I care more than the average CNN.com reader about technology related matters (and sometimes technology humor), I read Slashdot. It is, despite the criticisms of many old school users, still a good source for breaking news (via links to disparate sites). Occasionally, it even leads to interesting discussions (as often as it does to "All Your Base" jokes (still!) and ubernerd debates at technical levels I can't follow closely enough to care about...)
While I wouldn't pay for this service, because the value isn't tangible enough for me to want to exchange currency for it, I would DEFINITELY buy things from ThinkGeek that provided tangible value, and would be especially motivated to do so if I thought the good people at Slashdot would benefit financially from it. A lot of the stuff on ThinkGeek has to have pretty good profit margins (shirts, mugs, posters, etc...), so the opportunity to 'share the wealth' would be there. I don't know about the margins on caffeine, but I suspect they aint TOO bad (especially since ThinkGeek marks up some of their stuff over other online sources!
Now that the bubble has popped, we are left to see things as we should have always seen them. The redefinition of value, from a business perspective, emphasizes those old school concepts of stable revenue growth, high profit margins, low operating costs, etc... VA Linux, for a while, was a poster-child for the repudiation of these business values (hence the $350/share stock runup, despite huge losses, low margins, gigantic operating costs, etc...). I'm making assumptions here since I haven't seen ThinkGeek's financials, but it looks to me like they probably have real value as a business, because they probably keep costs low, have good margins, no need to advertise (outside of this narrow community).
So in the end, a model that probably would've really been built to scale would have been to have Slashdot serve the news needs of their community, and ThinkGeek serve their more material needs, and you'd have a classic case of one-hand-washing-the-other without all this stupid talk about creating subscription fees for Slashdot as the viable way to generate revenue.
The unfortunate reality, kids, is that in the heat of the insane mania of 1998-2000, the destinies of really valuable sites like ThinkGeek and Slashdot ended up being alloyed with the base metals of VA Linux. They (the powers that wanted a hot stock offering) threw gold and platinum in the melting pot with tin and aluminum, and created a compound that diluted the valuable to enrich the base metals. They then sold junk jewelry made of the stuff to greedy speculators who thought the alchemy actually worked. Now, the metallurgists have rendered their analysis, dispelled the myths (that VA Linux was the next Microsoft, etc...) and have told anyone who can hear, "You wasted your money. Your jewelry has traces of gold and platinum in it, but its mostly tin and aluminum. Not worth much, and sadly, a waste of some good jewelry."
And what can VA Linux say in their defense at this point? Having conjoined the destinies of two valuable sites to their own? I think the only thing that they CAN say to the opensource community that they may have alienated with these machination is:
"ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US." .
(you didn't think I was going to miss my chance to put that joke to work, did you?)
I think the issue is INFOGLUT, both in terms of the number of sites and the expense of each one.
There are simply too many friggin sites out there to subscribe to them. Period. People here have alluded to what a pain it is to register and give your life history and to the "camel's nose in the tent" leading to higher and higher charges, but I think those are both symptoms.
The real issue is that I (like a lot of people I imagine) get my news on the Internet from probably 100 or 200 different sites at different times. It is CERTAINLY not worth $5.00 or even $1.00 per site per month to subscribe to all these. My opinion is that until there is some kind of aggregation model for these payments it will never happen.
Cable/Satellite TV is a good example. I pay $50 a month for my Dish Network and I get about 180 working channels for that (no premiums of course!). Would I pay $.50 a month to get American Movie Classics by itself? Hell no. But as part of a package, I buy it and sometime I might watch it if something catches my eye. But even though it includes things I don't want, it also includes most everything I do want and it is ONE bill.
Now that I think about it, those economics are probably about right. I pay $50 for 180 channels. Call it $5 to the aggregator, and it's $45 to all the channels, which are each averaging about $.25 a month per viewer then. Would I pay an average of $.25 a month for Slashdot, CNet, CNN, NYTimes, Playboy, Yahoo, ESPN, SciAm, Gamasutra, Google, and 100 others? Yeah I might if they were on one bill.
The problem is that no one is charging $.25 a month and no one will be able to make any money at $.25 a month either, given that they are depending on $10.00 a month to stay alive right now. Until the Internet content industry figures out how to fix this, they are going to be broke and people will not subscribe.
Crash
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
I would happily shell out dough for content, just not at the price points that old school content providers have the gall to expect.
I *will not* pay $4.95, $2.95 or $1.95 US to download a single music track in some obnoxious format. I *will* happily pay $0.25 US each to download hundreds of my favorite songs from years past in MP3 format. I'd happily sign up for a service that allows me to download 75 songs for $20.00 US. I'd probably spend $100/year on such a service just for the convenience, assuming it had a good search interface and reliable downloads.
I will also not pay $1.95 to access a story from a newspaper's archives, nor am I interested in a subscription to that newspaper's archives. I'd pay $0.04 US for an article. Since there's no way to microcharge me that much, just serve me a targeted banner ad instead.
--
I don't think people are as adverse to paying $0.076 as they are to having to deal with paying $0.076.
For myself I like the freedom that comes with surfing the web without having to worry about what my "tab" for a particular online session is. I don't want to have to read a ten page "agreement" at every website I visit to fully understand what I am going to be charged. I don't want to deal with sites that sucker people into paying a lot more than they think they are being charged (ala 1-900 numbers that charge $50/minute). I don't want to have to give a mini-biography to every site I visit so that they can bill me. In the end I don't care about the money, I care about the time and effort that goes into thinking about how much of money is going where.
Because you call it "content." As if someone's (everyone's) artistic creations are simply filler for your computer or TV or car stereo. My presence on slashdot aside, the internet is not the be-all and end-all of personal interaction and fulfillment.
Quite frankly, most of the so-called "content" out there sucks, because of precisely that attitude: new media company comes along with a snazzy new business plan, and needs some stuff to fill it up. So they hire underemployed musicians, writers, and visual artists to "produce some content." There's nothing artistic about the transaction. Business needs filler, content provider obliges, money changes hands. End of story.
You can argue that it's always been this way, that art hasn't degenerated seriously since the onset of the internet. Overall, I suppose you'd be right; there's always been trashy "art." But electronic connectivity has ushered in a new wave of "hurry up and get it out the door" that's at direct opposition to insightful, well-thought art, music, and literature. Before the sound-scan system put in place at record stores across the country, there was bad pop music. But the system's introduction increased the fervor with which everyone tracked the pop charts, and it's been years of straight garbage since. There was bad reporting before CNN, but now it's become the de facto standard and news organizations compare bottom lines with them.
I guess I'm an idealist, because I view this as something of a tragedy for all those art forms and the press. And I don't blame "the internet" as such, but I do believe the fast-forward culture brought with it is at least partly to blame. So, I will and do support artists whose work I respect, both local and worldwide; I buy books I like, from the author directly when possible, and I buy tons and tons of music. There's a few peices of visual art I'm considering buying. But no, I will not pay for "content."
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Tipping might work better if it was initiated by the tipper (ie the web site didn't ask for the money, but just provided an e-mail address, and the visitor decided to send some money after reading the site).
The shareholder is always right.
There is the continual feeling that the next click might yield what we am looking for. But it could be dozens of clicks away. For some reason, probably because of conditioning, we choose to gamble time rather than money.
If you gamble with time, and you click the first five free hits in your favorite search engine, you may have wasted some time, but the less useful sites you clicked to haven't gained much (perhaps an ad view). If you gamble with money by giving 5 cents to a source you've heard of but don't really trust, and you lose, then not only have you wasted 5 cents, but the owner of the unuseful web site just gained 5 of your cents. You feel like you're a victim, you feel like you've been nickeled-and-dimed (even though you were only nickeled), and you feel like you might be supporting a scam purposely set up to take 5 cents from a large number of people.
The shareholder is always right.
Sorry, I've trademarked the words "copyright", "copyrights", "copyrighted", and "copyrighting". I have to enforce the trademark if I want to keep it, so you either have to cease-and-desist or purchase a license. If you don't stop letting people see this publicly-posted comment, I will have to take you to court. (In other words, the only way to avoid paying me money for something you didn't buy is to pull another Scientology and make slashdot remove your comment.)
ANALBILTTS (Am not a lawyer but I like to think so.)
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
The problem with this stems from the fact that not everyone assigns the same value to content. Let's say Joe finds a piece of info on the Internet and he's willing to pay $10 for it, Jack finds that same piece of info but only thinks it is worth $2, and Jill finds the information not useful at all.
My father happily pays $50,000 for a new car of a specific model. My sister would actually only be willing to pay $10,000 for that car, given her situation with the kids and stuff. Personally, having no driver's license, I'd probably take it if someone gave it to me, but I wouldn't pay for it. I'd buy a can of coke instead.
The same thing exists everywhere. To take an example even closer to the web - magazines, books, comic books, movies, music etc. All those things are nothing but "content" or information if you wish. And (if we disregard the existance of piracy for argument's sake) have a basic set cost that everyone will have to pay - and trust me, I sure didn't like Titanic as well as your average 14-year-old girl. But somehow they still seem to make money out of it. Strange, strange....Strange that car manufacturers survive, don't you think?
--
May we live long and die out
I might pay for slashdot. A few bucks a year, but I would have some requirements first:
accessibility: automatic first-page mirrors of linked sites
integrity: confirmation of story facts
legibility: reasonable spelling and grammar
(I can understand an accidental misspelling of remuneration, Cliff, but CmdrTaco would have to go through remedial English classes)
customization: personalized killfiles on author and grep (kill /goatse/)
[
--
Twivel
Unlike a magazine, a newspaper is transient- very few sane people save the paper for more than a few days, or cut out many articles.
What I pay barely covers the cost of the pulp and getting the paper to my door- the rest is subsidized by advertisers- and much of the blow-in material is 'targeted ad' content.
Why do I pay for a paper but will not pay for online content?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I put a lot of time and effort into creating special purpose software, in return my consulting clients give me money. Why should somebody else get for free the product for which my client has paid huge sums?
Information costs money to collect and organize. For example, writing a non-fiction book is a huge effort, and can take years of an author's time and thousands of dollars for research.
Should the output of a non-fiction author be free, should their books be fair game for anybody to download? The publisher invested huge sums for the author to create the book, and both the author and the publisher depend on sales to pay their bills.
Nothing is free... it's just that sometimes the costs are well hidden.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Instead, you use a micropayment system where, when they site wants to charge you for content, you get a popup from your micropayment bank asking
.You then authorize that single specific charge through your micropayment bank- not any larger amount. It's all pretty standard in the design documents for the more thorough micropay systems.
One such example is e-gold, where all transactions go through their servers, and must be authorized by the payer.
The e-gold/e-silver system is interesting for micropayment because transactions between users are free to the payer and 1% surcharge to the payee (max 50 cents). They make most of their money on moving funds between national currencies and gold.
They do seem to be missing one crucial feature- anonymous transactions, where you do not reveal your account information to the vendor at all.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
We already have to suffer thru millions of mindless commercials with cable tv, and there's no difference with online ads... it's the same shit. Of course there are those who want HBO [or whatever] gladly pay for the content and lack of ads, etc. But i've yet to see anything online that even remotely offers something truly unique and exclusive that i cannot find anywhere else [like HBO] that merits paying additional fees just to view it.
If you force people to pay (1) to access and then (2) to view web content, you'll see websites drying up so fast dust will be coming out of your speakers.
<---[singularity sig]
1. Very little of the content is worth anything to me.
2. That which is worth anything provides no payment mechanism.
3. I'm a cheap bastard.
I didn't get rich writing a lot of checks.
--Bill Gates on "The Simpsons"
Personally, I have no problem clicking on a banner add or two if it's made unobtrusive (The frickin X10 pop under is pissing me off!!). The common Joe thinks they are already paying for the internet when they pay Road Runner or AOL. The notion that they'd have to pay a website too to get what they used to get free is well I don't need to tell you what they would think. What they would do is either stick to AOL content, or go to another free web source, or ditch the net all together and a vast amount of the content out there will dry up because there will be noone left to read it...that's paying for it or not paying for it. What I do think that websites should do is keep with the ads, and then sell stuff too. I know Taco would not like it, but just think of all us idiots who would by Slashdot this and Slashdot that. Then some schmoe on the street would see you wearing the hat and you'd explain to him the website and then they go there and click on a banner and so on and so on. The reason banners hand ultimately failed is the web sites have forgotten that it's important to have good content to drive the traffic to it. All of this address is important and all of the superficial stuff is immaterial. If it's not worth reading, noone would pay or click on the ad banners. We already know slashdot has content. Also, when ever anything is posted to slashdot, that drives traffic (as those poor web servers wheeze and pant). I wonder if it's possble to slashdot slashdot??? :) Anyway, noone would pay for something that sucks. Micropayments suck. I would rather see something like Kuro5hin. I would surely PAY to keep ads off of Weather.com and quite a few other websites. (but not Slashdot or Kuro5hin).
Gorkman
Yes, but with possible exception of Think Geek, how much MONEY does Slashdot really get from you buying that T-shirt? I bet not that much. They'd get more if Slashdot actually sold the shirt, or if Think Geek (being owned by VA as well) would give Slashdot x amount of dollars per shirt. I am sure something like that may happen, but we sure don't know about it. Other wise I'd have at least one Slashdot shirt and hat.
Gorkman
Here's the simple answer: If you have content that people are willing to pay for, they'll pay for it. Ask any site that charges money and makes money. I guarantee you there are plenty of porn sites out there making money? Why? Because they have content that people are willing to pay for.
If someone wants to charge for their content, that's fine. If they price it in such a way that I'm willing to pay for it and I think it's worth the price, then I'll pay, otherwise I wont.
Why is this even an issue. It's basic economics. Who here doesn't understand the concept? I thought Slashdot readers tended to be on the more intelligent side.
I think it has more to do with the fact that it's mutable and ephemeral. If you buy a paper book, then you know that it'll pretty much always be there unless you lose it or it decomposes, neither of which can be the fault of the entity that sold it to you. You have no such guarantee with online materials. It might go away with no notice whatsoever. In addition, using a book requires no preparation or additional equipment.
Electricity is much more mutable and ephemeral than any information you can get on the internet, yet people have no problem paying for it. Electricity is just as intangible as data. Same goes for gasoline, food, water, and various other consumables.
For thousands of years, music existed without profit. It wasn't until technology screwed it up by introducing distribution media (radio, records, etc) that people decided they could be rich by playing music. Now technology is allowing us to put it all back.
How has recording technology screwed up music? There will be more recordings made in Japan of Beethoven's Fifth this year than there were worldwide performances of it during Beethoven's lifetime. In the last ten years, there has been, by far, more music produced (and, moreover, more music available) than there ever has been before. Before recordings, only the rich elite could attend music performances. At the advent of recording, only a few performers were able to record, and there was little choice of recordings available music. With the advent of the LP, much more music was recorded, and great performers have been forever immortalized. With the CD the selection has compeletely skyrocketed. All music ever recorded is simultaneously and instanteously available. How is this bad?
I challenge you to name an important music performer before the advent of recording, or an important composer before the advent of writing. Practically every important composer, in fact, came after the advent of the printing press, the first technology which enabled mass reproduction of music.
Yes, the easy transparent micropayment system is what is needed.
Why micro?
Because, as an earlier story on /. indicated, we are deluged with information. It's so plentiful that it has become cheap. We can't provide any of it, no matter its worth, with anywhere near the amount of attention that we used to give to carefully prepared, researched and edited print media. Like many, I have acquired a built-in prejudice to paying a lot of money for anything I see on a computer screen.
The other missing ingredient, of course, is some semblance of privacy and anonymity.
With all the marketing efforts to track individual users so as to create the ultimate profile, I'm suspicious of any commercially developed system (MS Passport, anyone?).
Given the potential profits from owning such as system (and charging tolls, just like for the win32 API), and being tempted from marketers willing to pay for detailed profile information, such a system would probably not provide the degree of anonymity that I would like.
If I want to read alt.goat Premium Add-free, then I'd like to read it in the privacy of my own outhouse without the world knowing every click I make and when I make it.
To that end, it would be ideal to be able to go down to the local convenience store in a trench coat and sunglasses and purchase a little card that contains a special URL and activation code that provides an e-cash account good for purchases on the Internet. Then, my purchases are my own business and no one else's.
Just last week an LWN editorial came out in favor of innovation for the Open Source community. There is an obvious opportunity here to develop a system for secure, anonymous micropayments over the web.
We need true ecash.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
But the library has a revenue stream from taxes. Even a bookstore allows you to read portions of a book before you buy it, but in a bookstore a large number of people are paying for this service by buying products. On the web, people aren't paying for anything.
-no broken link
I think people are unwilling to pay for content for two reasons:
Idol Star Astronomer
Must we go over this again?
/. still runs stories like these. Whether it's the college student running a server in his dorm room, hogging bandwidth from the college OC-3 line to distribute copywrited porn, or the 13 year-old kid who used Back Orifice to get into a computer in AT&T corporate headquarters to delete his long distance bill every month, we all try our hardest to get as much as possible for as little as possible. I mean, we all know that because we have that little thing called the first amendment, it is our right, under the foundation of this country that we can be the "robin hoods" of this land of the internet, robbing from the rich (aka them) and giving to the poor (aka us). Information is free speech, right? So I guess that means that it should be "free."
Why are people so unwilling to pay for online content?
1) Because they can. That's the primary reason. Why are we going to go to Big_Company.com's website to pay for, say, some software that they have when I could search the warez site and download it for free? It's available. There's nothing in the way to stop you. Everyone knows morals/ethics don't stop you. We won't stop for $500 in downloading Micro$$$'s Office Suite from a warez site, and we won't quit even when dealing with the full version of Doom which you could probably buy on eBay now for less than $5, but you instead download from an abandonware site. We all do it because we can.
2) Because there's no one out there to stop us. Look at it like road rage: whether you're driving in your viechle or at the helm of your computer, you feel independent and in control. It's a power trip. You got something that boosts your power and your ego a hundred-fold. You don't see anyone enforcing anything, so you do something a little bit daring and a little bit illegal. If the cat's away, the mice will play.
3) Because we feel that THEY are cheating US. We all think that, right? You know, how dare THEY to spread commercialism across the web, something created for geeks by geeks for "educational" purposes (feel free do define educational however you wish). I mean, with pop-up ads, cookies, doubleclick, SPAM, banners, web bugs, and all these other anti-privacy invaders stealing our private data and selling it for millions of dollars, it should be our right to fight back at them finally for all these years of stealing our privacy! Besides, considering that we have to shell out a ton of money for broadband service, which is stolen by all the corporate adds and data that hogs our broadband lines, we should have everything handed to us on a silver platter!
I'm sorry, but I'm surprised that
I think most people don't like the idea of paying for content on the internet because they already pay thier ISP. I don't think most people relize that the web site asking for money is any different from the company that they already paid. If you had to pay a monthly fee for cable TV, and then pay to watch each show, how would you feel about it? Immagine if every show on TV was PPV.\ =\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
Buy Slashdot this and Slashdot that? IIRC, Slashdot has already branded things. Right now, I am wearing a /. T-shirt to work. (I think either from ThinkGeek or Copyleft...)
I also would pay some sites to keep from having to see the ads... that is if I didn't have software that removed many of the ads for me.
The value of information can only be determined after it is used... and there's no easy way to ensure that payment is made for the value gained. The thing is backwards, but there's really nothing that can be done about it.
Sure, I'll pay. It's just a few cents. With a big enough reader base, $1 from everybody will be more than enough to handle bandwidth costs, etc. for a year. The problem is with a lot of sites that have a young reader base... they're not ALLOWED to pay. It's not a question of whether or not it will work.
The problem is not why people won't pay for content. Why should they pay for content? They don't pay on radio or TV (PPV, etc. is not the same, you pay extra for 10% or 20% of your overall viewing).
The problem is advertising. It should be able to support websites that generate lots of traffic. But it doesn't. Internet advertising is where TV was in 1950. People reading radio scripts into the camera. As long as people try to re-invent existing ad media on the Internet, it will continue to fail. Banner ads, pop ups, broadband commercials. All crappy retooling of existing media. When the only goal of an ad is to get a click, then you have a really shitty ad.
When people figure out how to do things on the Internet that they can't do on a billboard or TV ad, then Internet advertising will take off. That's when we will start to see some good creative. And guess what? Good advertising needs good creative, not good technology, just like its always been.
The really big ad spenders are brand companies like Coke. When they start to spend 25% or 30% of their ad budget online, then thousands of sites will become self supporting. Then the marketplace will be one of real content and ideas, not hype and gloss.
Why would Coke spend that much online? Because that's where the people are. Why don't they now? Because Internet ads are completely inappropriate for their business model. Click throughs and the like do nothing for them. What are they going to do? Sell you a bottle of Coke online? Get you to sign up for mailing list so they can spam you? When sites can do effective brand advertising, then the Internet will become the most effective ad medium ever invented.
When that happens, paying for content will become irrelevant, except for "premium" content like porn or PPV stuff. Just like TV today.
First off, I applaud slashdot for bringing up what must be a sore subject for them. After all, they have been advocating free/open-source software since inception. I realize you didn't want this to devolve into a intellectual property discussion, but how can you avoid that when you ask the question "why won't users pay?".
Perhaps when there is nothing left on the internet but IRC and a few lame-ass user-brewed sites, slashdotters will finally come to realize that the basic concept of intellectual property and the right to charge for it is fundamental to there being information in the first place.
The article suggests that compensation should be limited to distribution costs, but to believe that is to deny the obvious. The relative value of the information is not the problem at all...in every business there is a balancing act between price and volume and the goal is to optimize the profit. Personally, I would be willing to pay $10 for a Fuddruckers hamburger because they are so good and I could afford it. But I am sure Fudd's realizes that they will make more money selling them for $5 instead. The same is true of information...the content owner (that's right) needs to simply weight the money left on the table versus the volume of business they could do, and they should optimize that curve.
As I see it, there are two possible solutions, one is micropayments, but the problem with that is you often don't know if the information is worth paying for before you see it. The second, and better approach would be to have it setup like cable TV. Websites could join a conglomerate of other websites and charge for a subscription. I suspect things would consolidate fairly quickly and you could get access to thousands of great websites for one monthly subscription fee of say $10. ISP's would then negotiate better-deals and roll the cost into the cost of their service.
It's funny how the entire thing is starting to sound like AOL 5 years ago. What comes around goes around...
The parent post is the first post to mention Anonymity. This is the key. In addition, I have no intention to pay $0.076 an article; they add up! I read gobs of stuff all over the internet; like many /.ers, it's a large chunk of what I do. this would add up; say I read twentyfive articles a day. that's $1.90 a day, say five days a week, times four weeks in a month - that's $38.00 a month; nearly TWICE what most users already pay. Are YOU ready to spend $58+/month for the internet AND be tracked everywhere you go? I'm not! (for less active readers, here's the math at a mere five articles a workday: $7.60/mo) ... the library doesn't charge for each book you read there...
... but not 7.6 cents. The theory of micropayemnts is that they don't add up. If I'm charged by the article, it had better be under a half-penny.
Perhaps if we had free (high-speed) internet access I'd pay a few cents per article (it would cost me about the same)
(just my $0.002)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I don't think we have to ask to know the reason though, they have a product that people want and can't get elsewhere for free (free high quality porn is not terribly easy to find). The rest of the web will move to this model and its not horrible. People just need to get it out of thier mind that the web is to be free (as in beer) because there is no reason it should be.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
That's your right, I suppose. But if you take this attitude, you shouldn't be surprised when your culture comes to be effectively owned by the advertisers and manipulators who do pay money to the people who write essays, record music, film television shows, and host discussion forums.
The way I see it, the money I pay for content makes the content producers a little more responsive and responsible to me, and a little less so to, say, Lexus, or the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I like that. Those who create things with no immediate utilitarian value (artists, writers, and all sorts of "content producers") have always had patrons who paid them to create. Sometimes that has been the church, or a few wealthy individuals. The printing press and movie theater made it possible for the common man to act as a patron. And American television puts patronage in the hands of large corporate and governmental organizations who buy advertising time.
The internet offers the role of patron to the common man in a way that even the printing press could not. We should be eager to take up this role, rather than leaving it to fall into the hands of organizations whose values are ultimately quite different from our own.
The internet is cashless. Therefore, to pay for content, you have to use a credit card or check of some sort. So, to pay for online content, the person providing the content needs your address, home phone, and all other info that comes with your payment method.
- ---------
If I paid for all the content I view on the internet, a) I'd STILL be broke with how much content I view, and b) I'd be in thousands more marketing databases, receiving thousands more SPAM mails from hundreds more companies who ask you to pay for their product and then turn around and supplement their income more by selling your info.
No thanks; I'll just keep my CC info to myself.
----------------------------------------
In particular, it seems whenever I pay for something on line, I have to
Whereas, when I buy a newspaper, magazine, CD, movie, or anything else offline, all I have to do is:
And of course, if the product I buy offline is defective, I can return it and get my money back. How many subscription web sites have a clear refund policy?
Leaving the question of quality aside (since most people's comments, including mine, aren't worth $.02 most of the time), paying for online content is inconvenient, invasive, and doesn't even provide a reasonable gaurantee that I'll get what I'm paying for.
I think that about covers it for me.
As a web developer myself, it is an interesting dilema. I run a subscription site for my employer, which offers a internet version of something to commercial customers which they usually hire an addition worker, to physically drive to places to retrieve (information.) We charge $50 per month, and $2 per search. If you compare that to the cost of hiring an additional employee to retrieve the information, is dirt cheap. But of course people still bitch. They all think the internet is free. All the content just comes out of nowhere. We have over $10k a month in ISDN charges alone to retrieve the information which is searchable on the site. That cost may soon double as our information base grows.
;-).
As a whole, I see content based internet sites going the way kuro just did today, but with a twist. I see sites adding more intrusive ads, and offering subscriptions for ad free based access. For more intrusive ads, think the large square in the middle of the content type some zdnet sites now have. For users who rarely visit a site, it will be a minor nusience. For people who regular a site, like slashdot, there is more bang for the buck to subscribe. I think the costs will be relativly low once the dust settles, like $24 for a year ($2 a month), the same cost as a good magazine. I doubt slashdot makes a two dollars a month showing me banner ads, but I could be wrong. 15000 people paying two dollars a month isn't too bad for a site which still feeds banner to non-subscribers. That's enough to hire five full time employees and site overhead in my neck of the woods.
Make ads obtrusive on a site like slashdot I vistit a few times a day, and I'd gladly pony up $2 a month. Just means I have to work an extra 6 minutes a month
That's where I see the content based web going, but it will take some time for the public (the internet is free!) perception to change.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Why *would* I pay for content when I can get comrpable content elsewhere for free. People would rather not pay than pay, right? That provides a strong incentive for content produces to find a business model whereby content consumers don't have to pay. Advertising is the obvious one, but there are others.
As long as someone's making a go of it offering free content, it's going to be pretty hard for other people in that same market to charge for content without some kind of strong differentiation (like HBO versus CBS).
I don't see why that's so hard to understand.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
A few of my reasons for (rarely) paying for web sites info :
/. are in the business of selling and using packaged information, one way or another. So figuring out a usable financial instrument which supports "Bits4$" transactions, is something we would all potentially benefit from.
1) Time. It takes too long to fill in credit cards #'s etc, for such a small transaction. Time is a rare and precious resource, I sincerely object to wasting it for a marketdroids benefit.
2) Invalid payment model. Most sites use the subscription model, for items and services I view as an ad-hoc and probably one off usage.
3) Cost. IMHO most sites overcharge for the item/service. Often related to (2) above. Information has extremely subjective valuations, and a highly variable, short, shelf life. Many things are like this, the usual solution adopted is called haggling. I want to be able to make an offer if I don't agree with the asking price.
4) Trust. Web sites persist in demanding too much personal information and I have no reason to believe their canned promises not to abuse it. Given that they are usually controlled by marketing people, I have many empirical reasons to believe they will abuse it.
5) Privacy. Many purchases of information are necessarily private, do you want your competitors, significant other, boss, etc, to know what you are reading today? This privacy is at risk if the bills show up on a credit card bill, or in spam to my work email addresses, or in marketing stats.
6) It's hard to find any real value. Most stuff on the web is not truly unique or valuable, mostly I am paying for marginal convenience. Given a choice between spending ten minutes finding raw stuff for myself, or dropping $10 for some pre-digested bits, i'm nearly always gonna do the research... Thats a $60 an hour rate (ignoring tax). Plus the bonus of whatever I learn along the way, often equally valuable....
7) Keeping track. I don't want to have to check an extra 20 or so fiddling little items on my credit card bills. Thats like having to balance an account for the loose change in your pocket each day.
8) Caveat Emptor. I am wary of buying anything I can't see or try in advance. Especially from companys that subject me to problems 1 thru 5 above.
Overall, I don't think we can assume the problem is with our potential customers..., its gotta be our business model. Why "our model", well..., imho, seems to me that many folks on
I suggest we pool some thinking about whats needed and maybe fire up an effort to fix this before the EAOTD (Evil Acronym Of The Day) or whomever start figuring out how to patent/sue/restrain or charge us repeatedly for every web page we hit.
My stab at some specs for micro transactions :
Fast. Easy, quick payment authorization, up to a user configurable limit.
Supports for making bids, can make offers for services and one-off payments.
Zero residual personal information available to vendor.
Fast. Like reaching in my pocket for a quarter fast...
Up front account payment. Zero additional accounting burden.
Umberimas Fides. Utmost good faith. Supports returns, no questions asked.
Did I mention fast?
Item (6) is clearly a tougher issue. However, I think that if a micro payment Bits4$ system was available, it might become a virtuous circle as sites use the funds for research.
I reckon thats about 0.076 worth...
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
What we need is not smaller payments (micropayments) but bigger (or "chunkier") content. If I could pay $10-15/month to a central authority and know that I would have free reign to reload /. all day, a metered number of posts at k5, and get my daily online comics as required, I'd jump at the chance to support my favorite sites. But I don't want to follow the recording industry system and subsidize sites that I can't stand with my $10. My contribution has to go to the sites I actually want to support, and the user has to be able to specify that they want to be able to read some sites in an unlimited manner, read others in a limited manner (I only need so many Google searches per week, but I do need them), and specify that others will only be hit once per day, etc.
Sounds like AOL. About $10-15 a month on top of what you'd pay for a pure dialup (in fact, BYOA is $9.95/month). Central authority. And the money is redistributed to the content providers based on the amount of traffic they get.
Of course, AOL takes the biggest chunk, and is starting to tightly control who provides the content (read Time-Warner), but that's how it was in the good ol' (remember Motley Fool) days.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
As you can see, all of my grieves would be solved by micropayments. If I could simply access a site, find information, look at it, and after a certain amount of time a dialog box would pop up, saying something like:
and any payments I would do were automatic, anonymous, and as simple as pressing the [buy] button (no forms to fill out, no hassle), then I would be more than happy to pay for content as well as anything else over the Internet.
From their main page (today): "You can now subscribe to Kuro5hin, and browse the site ad-free."
I just went to K5 to see for myself, and sure enough, Junkbuster filtered the banner ad quite effectively, just like it does for nearly every other site on the web.
K5 is cool... maybe someday I'll kick the slashdot habbit and read K5 instead, and maybe even send 'em five dollars.
But it won't be due to banner ads. Junkbuster takes a bit of work, and you have to get a good blocklist built ( Stefan Waldherr's site is a good place to start). Maybe Junkbuster is too difficult for most mainsteam users, but I'd guess the average slashdot or K5 reader could set up Junkbuster about as easily as setting up a Paypal account... and it works for almost all websites for free (zero dollars, and GPL freedom to hack).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
And downloading it to your computer and/or printing it out is probably going to cost more than purchasing it at a store. Consider how much it would cost to print out Cryptonomicon (918 pages) vs. buying a copy for $16 retail. These arguments remain fairly valid for media other than books as well. News sites may be an exception, as few people hoard old newspapers and news magazines.
So the intangibility isn't even solely a psychological one. There are very real reasons, as well.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
With www it would be possible to offer practically unlimited granularity for ordering things; from single articles (web pages, songs, whatever) to full-featured channel set subscriptsion (a la cable / satellite tv). Pricing scheme would most likely be somehow logarithmic, ie. ten times more content for twice the price (and vice versa); bundling seems to be a good way of marketing stuff. It's not a coincidence that you can't order just 2 channels you like from your cable provider.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
The problem with paying for content is not that "different people assign a different amount of value to the same content."
The problem is that we can't pay for content. There's no system available that would allow me to pay five cents everytime I reloaded slashdot, or three cents to make this post, or half a cent for every comment I read. There's no system that exists that makes it possible.
But everyone reading this already knew that. This has been a slashdot story a few times just this month. This brings up the biggest problem with paying for web content -- most of it is pretty shitty. I'd be pretty damned pissed if I had to pay for every story I read, and the website was notorious for rerunning stories with only minor content changes.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
People have been getting information off the net for free for so long that people don't want it to change. Change always faces confrontations, especially when the change means paying for something that people have been getting for free. Advertising will not pay for everything. Do you have to pay for newspapers? Magazines? Yes, even though they have advertising. Why is a website different? It costs money to run a website. The admin has to eat and pay for bandwidth. I say, for all you people who think all these websites should be free, I'd like to see you run a website and charge nothing. Then compare yourself to a website with a web team that gets paid to work 40 hours a week on just that one site. We'll see who has the better content in the end.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
renumeration? Isn't that what we used to do to our BASIC programs? Is this a subtle reference to Bill Gates's flame that asked, "Why won't you pay for BASIC?".
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
- Distrust over company's security to ensure my personal info remains private.
- Purchase price is inflated.
- Usability issues with web site prevent me from completing the transaction.
- Exact nature or scope of the information to be purchased is vague. Samples please!
- Unreasonable subscription restrictions.
Read my experience with the Consumer Reports web site when I tried to subscribe to their product reviews.In a situation in which several different competitors can provide the same good, it's very difficult to remove rights from the consumer (ie move the consumer to a worse situation). Simply put, any provider that removes rights from the consumer will loose costumers to the other providers that did not change their conditions.
Unfortunatly this only works in a pure competition situation, hence the RIAA and MPAA situations (plus the latest changes from Microsoft to their pricing schemes).
In terms of the Internet, people are used to free content, so it's going to be very difficult for any one site to make them pay for what they can get free somewhere else.
A sugestion:
The way most people connect to the Internet nowadays (except via modem in Europe) is basicaly a flat-fee. I would think (and this is purely my personal opinion) that the payment of a flat-fee to have free access to a pool of content (for example: all the music you want to hear for $10/month) would match the current model of payment for Internet access and thus be much more easy to accept.
Since Cable Companies have gotten into the "internet thing" their model of business might be one to look at.
Sign up for basic cable and get 2-13 (sorry to those of you out of the States) and that's it. Sign up for Basic Cable Plus and get MTV, ESPN, some crappy Movie Channel. And so on and so on up the ladder until you have full blown every channel ever TV.
Why not do something similar with internet access? Sign up for basic NET and get access to e mail and any sites that deem themselves free. This would include private pages, free parts of pay pages and such. Sign up for Basic NET plus and you get more, Wall Street Journal, Discovery, TV Guide, etcetera. Then you could even sign up for Basic NET Porn and get all the porn channels.
The Internet has/is becoming what we all feared it would become. TV. Might as well price it as such.
Oh what about FTP, Telnet, News, etc. Yearly subscriptions.
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This
Ripped from the front page without permission:
Although only a few days have passed since we broke new ground with our Ars Premier Membership subscription, I thought I'd post an update for y'all. It's going great! We expected it to be slow at first, but in all actuality, the numbers are growing steadily, and beyond our expectations for this early period.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
You have a good point, but consider this: What you describe sounds an awful lot like how the RIAA works, especially with regards to radio. As we all know, the guys that do the actual work see little of the money -- most of it goes to middlemen. It wouldn't necessarily have to happen this way, but it's always a danger when you introduce a middleman. Is this really what you want?
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Tip jar.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
As for me, I am not against paying for online content. Right now, like most of us, I take for granted much of what is there. The problem for me is not an unwillingness to pay, but rather an unwillingness to put up with the inconvenience of doing so. If there were a safe and reliable way for sites to access my "digital wallet" or something, I would not be opposed.
That said, I am currently thinking that for a heavy info junkie such as myself, the bill at the end of the month should be in the US$15-30 range.
To recap, the big problems as I see them are:
1) lack of a unified SAFE way to charge users
2) lack of an agreed upon method to determine your usage (if I view the same page three times does it count? if I am hitting a transparent caching proxy, how will they even know??? etc.)
3) determining what the market price would be
That's just my 2 cents, and it didn't cost you a penny...
No, we won't pay for Slashdot.
People will pay for content. Just not enough people to sustain a site. The problem is that a lot of site operators come to think of their readers, the whole lot of them, as devoted loyalists, enchanted with the content of the site, when actually most of them are just reading it because it's free and they're bored.
Let's put it this way. Go to a grocery store and hand out samples of Tux Puffs, the freely redistributable dessert. If it's a busy store, you're going to be mobbed by people grabbing the sample Tux Puffs as soon as they hit the wax paper. Your Tux Puffs will disappear as fast as you can hand them out.
Now put some boxes of Tux Puffs on the shelves. Yes, some will sell, but they won't be flying off the shelves. If you don't have a national advertising campaign for Tux Puffs (and maybe even if you do), you're not going to make a profit.
So why aren't the people who sampled them willing to pay for cookies? They are, but not yours. Are these people heartless freeloaders who want everything in life to be without cost? Radical socialists? No, they're people who, like most of us, are much pickier when they're shelling out gil than when they're given a chance to get something free.
What people forget is that the Web pages which are dying off like mayflies in a comet strike are in competition with things like cable (which I would assume more American Internet users are paying for already) and magazines. Yes, the Web is better in many ways, but worse in others. I read a PS2 Web page, but I also buy a magazine because it has demos, it's easier to flip through, and you can take it into the bathroom. If I had to pay for each I'd probably choose just one, and I love me some demo discs...
Making things even moreso is the fact that most Web content is still free, meaning that your choice is between something interesting on the Web that you pay for or something interesting on the Web that you don't. Sure, content sites aren't fungible, but when you start forcing the splitting of loyalty you're also going to be splitting the income. There are a few sites I'd be willing to shell out some ducats for if it would keep them going, but they're not the same ones that many other people would shell out for. And then of course there are the people who aren't going to pay for a wacky Flash animation site when they're already getting a monthly cable bill.
In summary, we're still falling into the great fallacy of the information age: that old problems have new causes now. You don't need to make up any explanations about how technology changes spending patterns as long as you know the following things:
1. People like stuff what is free.
2. When stuff what is free becomes not-free, people quickly decide they don't like it as much as all that.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
"We've been spoiled. For example, Napster made music free"
What do you mean? The general consensus on Slashdot during the napster debate was that napster was boosting album sales and the people were only downloading music that they bought!
Do you mean people were stealing?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The Slashdot mantra has always been "information wants to be free" or "FUCK RIAA".
Now that their shit company is going down the tubes, Slashdots 'moral crusade' takes a second fiddle to cash.
Bunch of hypocrites.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I am already paying for Content. I pay my ISP.
Just ike I pay my cable Co. for the content they provide access to.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
A ringtone is just a specially formatted short message. These short messages would use much less than a second of airtime, IF they were using communication slots at all. The same applies to music: How often have you heard that people don't understand CD prices? A compact disc can be made for under 2$, including booklets. How comes they are sold for so much more?
So, that's not the product, you say. The information is the product. But that's not how people see it. That ringtone is just a bunch of keypresses if you do it yourself, and it needs to be programmed just once, even if you transmit it to thousands of cellphones. Can't be the effort of programming or making it available which justifies the prices. Intellectual property implies stuff like "someone thinks of something in a lucky moment and gets paid for it for the rest of his life while I have to go to work over and over again to keep getting paid", so that's easily put aside. I'd say it's simply the feeling of getting ripped off that keeps people away from paying for content.
I think there's an even longer term problem than the big ones that people have pointed out. Most people have mentioned the obvious ones:
1) I pay my ISP. But I pay DirecTV for the monthly service and then extra for PPV
2) No easy mechanism exists. Surely one could be created
3) I'm cheap. If only pay content existed many would get over this.
The problem that seems likely to persist is the way many people use the Internet. It's a process of looking at a lot of things, and then finding small bits of information that are useful. You'll read an article on a site that you check every day, that suggests a subject you care about, you search the web and Usenet on the subject, you find a user group, you search their archive, you find an article that covers the FAQs of that subject, you bookmark or copy the article, you move on to the next subject....
How would you pay the sites you come across. Maybe you'd be happy to subscribe to the few sites you check every day, but would you pay the hundreds of sites you come across in a week? If you search on Google how do you know who to pay? If you can't read the article you won't pay b/c you don't know if it's any good. If you read the article you already have what you need. Why pay then, other than a sense of fairness.
In a bookstore you can flip through a book, but it's tough to read the entire thing. The full value is off limits until you pay. On the net the information comes in much smaller chunks. You won't be willing to pay until you've already received the full value. At that point few will pay.
Particularly for the uses the net is the most valuable for (e.g. not the stuff covered by mass media) it's tough to find a way around this. The small percentage of big sites will get subscriptions, but the individual site on how to add antennas to various 802.11 base stations won't.
However, this is not the worst part. The worst part is getting banks onto it. They are used to largish transactions, and a much must model is charging quite a bit for every transaction. It's going to be hard to tell them this won't work. I have been sending my bank e-mail about it.
What we need are truly open, global standards. Around here, several banks are working on their own models. It seems that it will result in they telling web developers to put buttons on their pages, something like "if you have an account in Bank A, click here, if you have an account in Bank B, click here" (my own bank has allready implemented such a solution). This insular behaviour won't do us any good.
Unfortunately, I just saw the W3C has closed their micropayments group. This is very unfortunate, I think. They had a draft that didn't look too bad in Final Call, and several implementations. I don't know why they closed it, I thought it was about to advance to Candidate Recommendation. I guess it might be that the guy who lead that working group was tied up in a lot of other things.
If the Free Software community can develop something, and make it a public domain standard, I think that would be good. I would prefer W3C to do it, but it seems they failed.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
Off the top of my head...
Our economy is still by and large shaped for buying and selling things, not information. There's a certain amount of space for purchasing information, mostly for entertainment, but also for research and news. But that niche is already pretty-well filled by traditional print and broadcast media.
Internet media has to wedge its way in to this segment of the economy. It can do so in numerous ways -- unfortunately the quickest and easiest "in" -- offering free content -- is only the quickest and easiest way to generate an audience, not the quickest and easiest way to generating revenue.
Of course, advertising would have been just fine as a method for generating revenue had it not been for the idiotic notion that an advertisement should directly generate sales. If it weren't for this idea, web sites that produced content wouldn't have had the carpet yanked from beneath their feet. Maybe the e-commerce sites would still have crashed and burned, but advertising revenue from non-web-only companies should have still been sufficient to fund sites that were geared for providing informational content, not serving as high-tech mail-order catalogs.
I think it is interesting to speculate as to whether the Internet revolution couldn't have been done better (at least economically) by being more elitist and charging for content from the beginning. True, I know this approach was tried, and it was quickly undercut by services that offered free content by charged for connectivity. But much of the price resistance encountered today is due to the fact that from day one things had been free. All I know is I miss the old pre-web days, when extremely narrow bandwidth ruled, there was hardly anyone online, just about everything out there was a labor of love, and the signal-to-noise ratios were by and large excellent. Even though we have streaming audio and video, java, flash, and everything else, I don't really know how "better" the web is today.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It sucks that the $40/month can't go to the content providers. I do wish that the people who allocate significant resources to producing online content that I use can be compensated for their work. But from a customer's point of view I have already payed for ability to view that content.
--
Garett
Too true. I do pay for certain content - old articles at NY Times and LA Times, for example. This is because I know they're good and I need them for some purpose. Normally, though, no dice.
Note also the other threads about the infrastructure of paying for shit. I don't want to give out ANY FUCKING INFORMATION! Bring back the old First Virtual Holdings, which offered anonymous payments but was sadly way ahead of its time (nobody charged for anything back then).
sulli
RTFJ.
Subscribe to something and you can set it and forget it. Use micropayments and you are constantly having to think about whether to pay for something or not. Why would anyone willingly participate in such a scheme?! It just doesn't make sense.
I think the problem is with the term "micropayments." People think this means: I'll pay for every pageview, crap or not. And of course this is distasteful. Perhaps we should come up with a new term: "Simple Payments" (or some such) - a system where it's trivially easy to send someone cash, without wasting time filling in forms, waiting for the server, etc. Then this can be used to pay for non-crap content in a way that doesn't waste time.
Alternatively, a system of all-you-can-eat subscriptions, available to a wide range of content sites (compensated by share of pageviews), might be the answer. I think the pr0n biz has something like this in Adult Check Gold... has anyone on this thread tried it?
sulli
RTFJ.
Let's be logical here, people don't want to pay for information, period, but people who gather information WANT to get paid. So we have a catch 22. In my opinion, a micropayment system would work well, if done right. Let's say you pay .01 to each site you visit per day. For example, you give slash dot one cent for each day you visit it. But you don't pay for reloading or each commenent etc.
I hear people saying 1 of two things,
1)Slashdot can't live off of a penny a day.
I read on that MSNBC article that Slashdot had over 1 million hits a day, now we have some simple math, 1 000 000 x .01 =10 000 x 365 = 3 650 000 a year. And since /. is mostly people post information they find elsewhere...
2) I don't want to pay 100 a month in micropayments.
I don't know about most people, but I don't visit 10 000 a month, I vist about umm.... 10 a day. SO that is .10 a day x 30 day a month = 3.00 a month extra. (and even if the micro payments double, that is only 6 extra dollars, or triple to *ghasp* 9 dollars)
And let's face it, I would be willing to (and have) paid for my Linux Distro of choice (30$ at wal-mart). I like getting it for free, but I don't mind paying for quality. THus I will spend 30-60 for Linux but not 100+ for windows.
Just my .01, .02, or .03, depends on what people would like to pay.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Thank you.
For attribution's sake, did you come up with it yourself or read it somewhere?
It is something I came up with. It evolved out of the thinking I did for a short paper about information overload for a University course. There, my analogy also used water: We are floating on a raft in the middle of an ocean of information, dying of thirst.
Of course, I must credit the person who first used the analogy of drinking from a fire hose.
The good and bad thing about the Internet is that anyone can post information freely. Under the old system, to publish, you generally had to convince a publisher that your information was worth the investment. Walking into a library and picking up a book almost guaranteed you that what was inside had passed some standard.
Really, though we have found new ways to filter information on the net. Slashdot moderation is a perfect example of this. But is the quality better? Posts whose writer obviously did not even read or understand the article often get modded to 5.
The news media has similar problems. People can be critical of governments for filtering news, but isn't the U.S. news also filtered based on money-making potential? Worse still, there is the tendency to exaggerate or distort news, for the sake of making the front page. Take the recent Wall Street Journal article about Windows XP not allowing Kodak's photo software to automatically run. Buried deep, near the bottom of the article, the reporter acknowledged that in the latest XP builds, plugging in a camera actually popped up a box giving the user the option of which photo software to use.
Each time news ratings drop, networks respond by trying to make the news sound more urgent, more critical to our well-being. Why don't they try better quality?
Just thought I'd add my two quarts.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
There is the continual feeling that the next click might yield what we am looking for. But it could be dozens of clicks away. For some reason, probably because of conditioning, we choose to gamble time rather than money.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Basically, I like quality. A friend of mine told me about MegaTokyo. I didn't look at their web site, despite glowing reviews. Then another friend recommended it. Then another. I decided, "Hm, I think I'll look at this." Hey! Guess what? It's one of the best web comics I've ever read, right up there with electric sheep and Scott McCloud's stuff.
Speaking of McCloud- I've paid for his content. I bought it off line, but if it were online, I'd pay for it there too. Whoah! Wait! I have paid for it online! There you go.
The Internet is a total success for content. Just a bunch of people are saying, "There went my revenue", and proclaiming it as a disaster.
Whatever. I'm going to go back to the MegaTokyo forums now...
Micropayments are not very likely to take off in any significant way. This article explains why.
-- Shamus
O Brave New World, with such People in it!
I think there's an interesting idea here. Maybe the money that's going to isps should be used to subsidize popular content, under the theory that content will drive new business to the isp's. For instance, napster drove broadband demand like no other app ever has. If ISP's find that a particular site or network is driving demand for their service, it makes sense for them to invest in it.
I don't know, it's got problems, but in some cases it might make sense. I know most users here wouldn't get rid of their isp if certain pages went offline, but I'm sure there's some somewhere.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Someone still has to pay for the content you receive to be hosted and connected to the Internet for you to then access.
There are two causes of failure in the current model. 1) Split costs, which people actually like since they dont want their ISPs (AOL, etc) controlling all the content. 2) Advertising isnt working to support content providers. If either of these causes is fixed then the whole arguement goes away, you just have to pick your poison.
I am so sick of whiners complaining about not wanting to pay for content cause it should all be free. ACCESS TO INFORMATION IS NEVER FREE. There is always some cost to gaining access to information, even your local library costs you money in the form of taxes.
Now if you havent already run off to flame me for this, consider the following. The Internet began life as an entity where information was provided without direct costs, this was possible because various parts of the government paid the bill for providing access to the information (through the military and schools). Now it has grown into a hybrid entity where commerical organizations are also footing the bill for information access (usually so they can sell you something or advertise something to you). However, the costs of providing access to the information are still having to be paid by someone. What needs to be found is a painless way to support content providers that wont be intrusive or a bottomless pit for the users.
Thought that just popped into my mind is a content budget for each user, similar to the flat fee for ISP access. Only the budget gets assigned to various content sites at the end of each month based on how frequently the user used the site, and how they rated it. And maybe you can flat out reject payments to sites as well, but then they dont have to let you back in. Hey, I dont want to get charged for every page I look at (I can just imagine how fast that would add up), nor do I want to pay some idiot for a site that sucks (I'm sure people think the same about my sites). Maybe some system along these lines would address most people's problems. Users have a limited cost exposure and control to keep from paying lamer sites while content providers can still get the support they need.
Hey, it's just a thought.
Ridiculopathy Premium Launched (6.19.01)
Ridiculopathy Premium Goes Bankrupt (6.20.01)
Remember an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
The truth shall set you free!
When people can't get content without paying for it, they'll pay. (But it has to be competitive with non-web sources.)
Sean.
The problem with that is /. and K5 ads are the only ones I intentionally don't block, because the OSDN ads are well targeted for geeks like me. I like seeing them. And now with Mozilla .92's working image blocking, I'll never have to punch the monkey or click on the 33 ever again, because the sites those ad images come from are now blocked permanently.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I believe this is what you're referring to?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Payment methods are definitely another major obstacle. Electronic payment is convenient at times, but as I went over my bank statement the other day, I realized what a tangled mess it actually makes. Of course its my own fault, but there's just too much recurring electronic activity on my card at this point. I tend to like paying with physical money and receiving physical goods in exchange.
Payment has to be reliable and easy. If the payment system is intrusive, I won't put up with it. Part of the problem with charging for web content is your constantly reminded that youre paying for it. Login boxes impede normal web surfing habits.
Although this is somewhat intangible and I havent seen mention of it, the web is flakey by nature. HTTP is stateless and connectionless. HTML, javascript and other client-side languages are interpreted differently by each browser. You really don't know what to expect from one site to the next. One site may have a great payment and access system, easy to use and well designed, but the next site might not. Most sites have terrible layouts and aren't designed optimally. Since you don't know what you'll get up front, most people aren't willing to give it a try.
As a sort of example, surely Slashdot could benefit from interface improvements itself. No offense, but this site's design is outdated and cumbersome (reminds me of the oversized, boxy look of X with its obscure icons). To be honest, its probably my least favorite of the sites I visit. I'm not so certain I would trust this site to implement a seamless payment/access system in a way I would be willing to put up with. That being said, its still my favorite site and I still visit every day. Hmm...
And then, there are so many sites! Even if you only want to subscripe to half a dozen, imagine what a pain it would be. More logins and passwords to remember! And you probably would not get printed statements, so you'd have to track spending on your own somehow.
Then you have to wonder, how will pay-sites solicit new traffic. Pay for advertising? Offer crippled free content? Rely on word of mouth? None of these seem practical for most sites. The web is open by nature, and when you post a guard at gates of your site, youre differentiating yourself from the rest of the web. I dont know of anyone who's found a really solid way to charge for content and still grow their userbase.
And of course, simply making your site a "pay site" doesnt mean youre out of the woods financially. Can you really make enough money off the people willing to pay? Maybe not. On top of what you WERE doing, you also have some new areas you'll need to spend significant amounts of money. You have to police accounts, you have to find ways to get more paying users, you have to worry about security, you have to keep content at a level of quality people will continue paying for, your service must be reliable and fast (now that people are paying for it), etc...
I'm very curious to see if people will establish a reliable standard business plan that monetizes the web, but obviously right now such a thing doesnt exist. Eventually some entity will probably emerge as a standard way people use to pay for content (similar to paypal's dominance in its own field). Hopefully when that happens, payment really is made painless. At any rate, I think I'll wait another few years before going to work for a company with a .com at the end.
Think about this for a second, for every pay service on the internet there is someone some where who wants to ensure you have the right to get that service for free. If the Assocaited Press charged money and all the news organizations charged money, someone some where would just set up a web site that reworded the news off the AP wires so that it was "original" and give it away. This is the same for all sorts of servers and clients (Icecast, Apache, SQL, Perl, Free Unixes).
If ICQ began charing money, some kid would write a ICQ like IM client that would run off his Dorm room computer and give it away. He would in time make money off it by advertising through the client and ICQ would be forced to give their software away again, but by then its too late....
THe quality software/web services/content of Open Source, Freeware, shareware, and other like minded people has ruined the idea of paying for "content".
If Slashdot charged, someone would set up a Slash server and give away the same "content"....
Burn Hollywood Burn
Can you imagine having to subscribe and pay individually for each service you use on the Internet? I can't, because then I would have dozens of bits of money flying off in donzens of directions; I would not feel in control. That would mean dozens of user agreements that affect my *wallet* to keep track of.
While I would gladly pay $100 to a single service to fufill all my needs, and maybe $50 to 2 services and even $25 to 4 services, I will not consider paying $1 to 100 different services. Unfortunately, no such single service exists on the Internet.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Quite frankly, I like the idea. Not just because I'm cheap, but because I want to know without a doubt that Steven Spielberg was trying to challenge himself with Jurassic Park 2, not that he just wanted another pile of money. Breaking down those walls will bring real art back to the world.
In an ideal world, that's great, I agree. There's some people I know that are in death metal bands, and one of them said, specifically "We wouldn't be playing death metal if we were in it for the money."
However, money is a necessity. Recording an album means renting a studio (if you want any decent quality) or owning your own. Making a movie like Jurrasic Park is no small ordeal. It requires a good deal of money and I doubt Steven Spielberg, or anybody else, for that matter would be willing to put forth that much money without having anything coming back.
You can bring up the argument of free software programmers, but most free software projects are done in their free time as a hobby, not as a full-time job (except in the cases of research institutions, but even there, the institution funds the project)
For ANY meaningful project to successfully be completed, it requires money, and people don't just give out money; that's why it has to be commercial.
Of course, make it too commercial, and you begin losing the artistic aspect of it (ie: mainstream radio).
It's a double-sided coin, no commercialization will make an inability to fund projects, and hence less projects.
Too much commercialization will lead to a lessened desire for new (read: unpopular) ideas.
1) We've been spoiled. For example, Napster made music free (to the masses); now people go around saying that all music should be free. Music should not be free, musicians spend long hours trying to perfect their sound, and it's a job for them. Yet, people can't accept that because they've become accustomed to getting free music. (Same goes with software, except it's a little different when the author intentionally releases it freely)
2) It's hard to pay for information, solely because it's intangible. Few people will readily pay for an online book. I know I won't. I don't have a problem with buying a book; I buy many books, but i want it in physical form (same goes with cds).
I'd have to say that's the biggest reason, that we've become used to things being free, it additionally serves as "fighting the corporate power" even though the majority of people "fighting the power" are doing it to save money.
Most geeks know what the internet was like before it hit the mainstrea; EVERYTHING was free (warez, porn, etc) similar to how Usenet is. Most geeks don't want to pay for information because we're used to not paying (in addition to wanting it free). The rest of society is jumping on the bandwagon, well, because they want a free ride.
And how, exactly, does that differ from selling anything ? Almost everything has or can have different values to different people, yet that does NOT present an insurmountable problem to selling. No, dear Slashdot editor, the problem lies in that 1) there are plenty of free alternatives available on the web - start (explicitly) charging for Slashdot and see how fast your readership goes elsewhere, and 2) people expect to get things for free on the web.
Say, if my local newspaper offered a full online version for the same subscription fee as the daily paper, I'd pay it as long as they stopped doing what they do now to their online version: Strip all pictures and only show a selection of stories.
.edu, full access to you. Our gift. Oh, you're a road runner or AOL customer trying to access an AOL Time Warner site, full access for you too! Anyone else, here is our subscription rate.
But you have to address the archived issues. Those should always be free and searchable, and damnit, don't go changing the URL's every 3-6 months.
Now if you want bonus points, also provide a version that I can load onto my Palm, e-book reader, or other hand held device.
The bottom line is, if I'm going to pay for it, it has to be worth it. Think, value added services.
Now, if a site like CNN made you say, give them your cable company account number to access their full content, that wouldn't be a bad idea either. They could raise their rates to the cable company. (I'm on Time Warner, so this wouldn't be reflected in my bills all that much...)
Do some IP checking, oh, you're an
Yes, it's not the most solid or feasable business model, advanced users can forward and reroute traffic, and I'm not claming it's a good idea, but it's something.
Anyway, I'm done talking outta my ass for now.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
While not necessarily "a bad thing" this mentality can be unfair to content producers out there that are trying to recover what amounts to a fraction of their costs/time.
Scott McClouds article on this is still the most insightfull I have read in a while (perhaps because he operates with the same media as I do). Usually it takes me around 3 hours for each toon I create. Over a 5 day week this amounts to around 2 work days of tooning. Or if we put a value my time of, say, $30/hr that is $450/week in "spent time". Now I do my thing for the love of it.. I have a "regular" day job and am not dependant on cartoon payments but some people may be. As was pointed out what we need is a truely international and "reputable" (since we're dealing with money) Micropayment infrastructure.
Just my 2c worth...
--
Jon - TheSpork
The main problem IMHO is the missing (micro) payment standard. I wouldn't be willing to give out my credit card numbers just for a dollar or even a few cents. Besides, I don't have a credit card and I don't like to have one (they just make trouble because you USE them ;-)
If there would be a payment system where I could transfer money onto an online deposit and then transfer money from the deposit to someone on the net, things would be completely different !
The often-discussed micro-payment for online comics for instance, I'd sure pay 10cents or whatever for an episode of a good online comic.
Do a websearch. Even with a good tool like Google, most of the time (in my experience) one wades through a lot of "crap" (either real crap, or good stuff which isn't doesn't address the question you're really trying to answer). Eventually, you find what you're looking for.
Now suppose that pay-for-content was the usual model on the internet. If you had to pay a couple of cents for every useless web page you looked at during your web search, while you were trying to find that gem of the page that made the whole thing worth it, you'd be paying for a lot of stuff that you didn't want to be paying for.
What would happen? People would stop doing web searches. People who go with "known and trusted" sources for content-- i.e. the AOL/Time/Warner web pages, or other Megacorp-blessed web pages. If you have to pay for all your content, you will be a whole lot less willing to wade through pages looking for the unknown gem than you will be if you're paying a flat fee for all content (which is effectively the case now, where you just pay for access). This will squelch the greatest thing about the internet, which is that anybody who wants to can put something up there for other people to see. If nothing ever gets seen but the Megacorp-blessed pages, then the Internet is just a slightly faster way to get the same thing you get from Network TV. That would be sad.
Now, perhaps this isn't the real question. Perhaps we're only talking about paying for content for a few things-- coyprighted music, specific news feeds, etc. Well, fine. That might work. But a general "pay for content" model will only have limited success as long as free content is out there. Why should I pay for a subscription to "How To Get Your Hardware To Work Dot Com" when there are lots of people out there putting up web pages with hints and suggestions for getting your hardware to work? On the other hand, I did say "limited success". While I think that any system that tried to make all content on the internet something you pay for would fail, there are some things worth paying for. Indeed, I subscribe to a couple of webzines myself. It's not much-- to the tune of $15 a year or so-- but it is paying for content. But it's very very far from a model where all or even a significant amount of the online content must be explicitly paid for.
I *do* have something against micropayments. Micropayments mean always having to watch what you're doing. Each web page you download you ask yourself, is this worth $0.02 to me? I've been on a micropayment system, back in the 80's and early 90's on QuantumLink and GEnie. I hated it. By and large, I only used the "flat rate" sections of the services, and simply avoided the "pay for time" sections of the services. There was stuff I was interested in there, but I didn't want to have the watch the clock the whole time I was using it. It ruined it for me -- having to watch the clock made it simply not worth it. Micropayments are the same way. Let me pay a flat fee and browse all I want without worry, rather than having to keep making the decision over and over again whether to buy or not to buy.
-Rob
"What!" The editors say, "only $10/year for Slashdot! But we provide new content every day! Think of our operating expenses. Think of the CHILDREN!"
Well print magazines have made money on that amount for quite a while; that and advertizing. Remember I said I'd let you keep your stupid banner ads.
Besides, Slashdot doesn't provide any real content. They rehash news other organizations produce. They don't even do most of the leg work. The readership provides most of the heavy lifting by submitting articles for a few useless K points.
Now the editorial staff does a pretty good job (most of the time) of seperating the wheat from the chaff so they should get a shilling or two. However the majority of content is provided by the Slashdot responders who write trite or flip messages in response to the articles (like this one)
So I guess Slashdot only deserves to make enough cash to keep the servers warm and serving and keep the editors fed (with Ramin noodles.) And I'd put that price at around $10-20/year.
People won't pay for content because we're already trading eyetime for it. Advertising has always run the (non-book) publishing world. Do you think fifty cents a day covers the cost of a home-delivered New York Times? Three bucks for your newsstand copy of Playboy? Not even close.
All those ads for cars, cigarettes, beer and allergy medications... those are the things paying for your paper subscriptions.
Now bravo to the "online community" for filtering spam and coming up with banner-blocking proxys, but these is the same small percentage of people who tell telemarketers they wish to be added to the "no call" list and file to stop junk mail.
Just like in the print world, most consumers just live with the inconvenience of banners and spam, ignoring and discarding most of what they see. That's why nobody wants to pay for online content.
As for electronic books, I won't pay for them because I want my novels in print. Once the interface gets good, I might... then again, if MasterCard puts its logo at the beginning of each chapter, I'd be just as happy to let them pay.
This opnion has been paid for by an unintentional donation by my company, which shall remain nameless so that I may keep my job. Don't pay for it.
>Napster is nothing more than >a pay-music service which >tricks its users into supplying >the bandwidth and content.
/. would be tricking users into supplying the content (articles) and the community (comment posts). Since it never mirrors people it links to, it would also putting the bandwidth off as well.
;-)
I find it ironic with all the comparisons of Napster going to the charge-for-content system. It would be funny if Slashdot would do the same.
In this case,
Nah, no similarities.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Meanwhile, I can get a very nice stereo 20" TV at $200, a Playstation 2 for $350, A Satellite TV unit and a year of premium access, plenty of sports, specialty channels and movies easily for $800. I still have enough left over to buy a dozen or so DVDs and games. I don't care how many neat flash animations and classic arcade hacks I can get with my enhanced content internet access - it doesn't stack up to the value of established technologies.
When I sit down in front of the TV I want to flip channels and find something to watch, or play a video game. I don't want to decide whether to pay a nickel to view a five page comic online. Online content is completely disorganized and the vast majority of it simply isn't worth a premium. Like most people I surf the net at work because I'm not ready to invest a significant chunk of money in the set-up to do it at home. But at work I couldn't take advantage of premium content because I have to be restrictive about time and content.
So stop blaming the surfers, and stop blaming payment systems. People pay premiums on enhanced content all the time - from small premiums for lousy porn access to large premiums for access to high-powered searchable databases like Lexis/Nexis. I have yet to come across a single thing on the internet I'd pay a premium for before I'd do without. If a whole bucnh of content providers got together and formed a network and offered an annual subscription deal along with a nicely turned out interface so I could easily find lots of content, well, it might be a different story. Welcome to the world of commerce, artists: It's not my job to come to you with credit card in hand. It's your job to come to me with a deal I can't refuse.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Case in point: My roommate and I both read WorldNetDaily.com almost religiously. It's a free daily news site, that also publishes a small offline magazine. My roommate thought it was worth his money to get a subscription, I did not (and not simply because we live together, these decisions were made before we were actually roommates). The problem with online sites charging for content is not on whether they can get people to pay, because many probably will. The problem is how many people can they retain when they go from free, to fee? If they lose too much of their readership, they still won't make up for lost banner ad revenue or corporate sponsorship revenue. This is the hard truth that the dot-coms are learning suddenly. If I need info badly enough to pay for it, I will. Otherwise, I, Joe Consumer, am going to find the cheapest alternative, and on the net, that's pretty easy to find. So I say, feel free to charge people for access to the content you provide. Just don't expect everyone to stick around when you do.
never said they were pay-only site. But they do charge for removing banners and are thinking about giving extra priviledges to those who pay (like the ability to edit comments already posted etc.). You my friend should check your facts before flaming!
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Last time I saw anything even quasi techincal on K5 was a loong time ago. It's now filled with commie, hippie, greenpeace tree huggers who get engaged in riots at WTO conferences for fun. It truly and greatly sucks my friend.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
as kuro5hin became a pay site as of today. check it at www.kuro5hin.org
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
rknop said way back while I was in the restaurant:
And almost everything in the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale is is total crap - which bit isn't depends on what question you have in mind right now.
Haven't you noticed: very few of the trusted sources show up on Google. Some CNN, no BBC, among first-rank national newspapers only the Hindustan Times that I can think of... and that, translated to India's politics, is a bit Washington-Times-ish.
Why not? because they're planning for subscription access. (If you want to develop the argument about why this blocks spiders, obviously you can do it yourself. And figure why tightly-targeted advertizing using all those damn questions about your inside leg measurement is pretty much the same thing.)
Why subscriptions? Because, I strongly suspect, they're worried that if they go for micropayments the argument for sharing revenue with actual authors - writers and photographers and artists and musicians - will get a lot stronger. And they hate that, because they're wedded to a Steel Age model of what they own. See the Tasini -v- Times case and (same URL) the Times' dog-in-the-manger response.
But if they did opt for micropayment, all that selected and reviewed content would be available to all researchers without the hassle of remembering whether it's cypherpunx2 or cypherpunks666 that still works as a login on the Times.
With micropayment, information would be a lot more free, in the "speech" sense. Everything would be indexed. Everything would provide source info and a couple of paragraphs (thumbnail photo, musical intro) for free. You like the sample, you click, you pay your $0.02, the aggregator gets $0.01, I get my $0.01.
Yes, I declare an interest. I make my living writing stuff. I give a lot away. But not the best stuff, not the thoroughly-researched stuff. Obviously, not the stuff that I invested days rather than minutes in.
If you want free stuff, there'll always be plenty of free stuff. You'll just have to invest the time to weed it out from among the crap for yourself. Another way of saying what I do for a living is: I develop an understanding of the story and cut the crap for you. You want to do it yourself, fine: but how much an hour do you charge yourself for sieving shit?
I don't think anyone has any doubts that we can afford to pay for content of various kinds, well at least the dwindling minority here that aren't 15 year old kids anyway. The problem has never been whether we're able to pay for stuff it's whether we want to pay for it.
Modern day Western socioeconomic culture has been deeply influenced by the "ideals" of capitalism, in which we expect things to come as cheaply as possible, and in which consumption is the lubricant that greases our lives. We exist solely to consume, and anything else is pretty much a wasteful side effect. And unfortunately, because of this drive to consume, we end up feeling that we're owed something, and that by getting stuff cheaper or for free we're ahead of the game.
Most of us here wouldn't notice a cent or two coming out of our bank accounts for being able to access decent, high-quality content online, but if we can get away without paying, then we'll whine until the cows come home! Couple this with an almost-Luddite fear of giving out account details online thanks to sloppy computer security and media fear-mongering, and you can see how micropayments are not ready for the primetime yet.
I think it's just a sign of the times. Just as people here would rather use Napster to get songs than find a way to ensure the artist gets paid fairly, people will always go for the free option, even when it leads to the end of the product they were after. Such is today's culture - firmly short-sighted and selfish.
We already DO pay by allowing advertisers to waste our time. This is the broadcast TV model; millions of people every day are willing to trade 22 minutes of their life (time spent watching ads) for 38 minutes of entertainment on the idiot box. On the internet, the same revenue model predominates. Granted, it's much easier to ignore internet ads than a tv spot, and this model may not hold over long term, but next time one of those annoying X-10 ads pops up in your face, remember that you're NOT getting the content behind it for free.
The frustrating thing is that I get several emails every day telling me how useful my site is to people, but tips don't accompany the emails. About 90% of the time a request for help accompanies the compliment. I'm glad that I help these people, and I really do develop the site as an act of love, not profit-seeking, but I have to admit it's getting old being told that my site is more helpful than the stack of books they bought ... but of course they probably spent well over $100 for a stack of books but don't send me $5 for the help I provided.
I started the tip jar as a "what-the-hell" thing. Now I'm considering taking it down because I'm worried that it's building more resentment in me than when I just didn't have it at all.
<IRONY> On the other hand, O'Reilly paid me $16,000 to write a book for them (including the final payment approving the final draft), then decided to cancel the book. So I'm not getting paid for content I do publish and I did get paid for content that wasn't published. </IRONY>
Miko O'Sullivan
Miko O'Sullivan
Now suppose this "information" is a series of nude photographs of Jill, Jack is her boyfriend, and Joe is the nerdy kid who lives next door. What does this tell us about Jill? About Jack? What about Joe? The content provider?
What conclusions can you draw?
--
It's crap.   99.9999999999% of all 'content' on the Internet is worth exactly what we are currently paying for it.   Slashdot, Fuckedcompany and others are often entertaining, but would you subscribe to a newspaper that contains nothing but 'Letters to the Editor' and publishes everything it receives, regardless of content or relevance?   I don't think so.
I am already 'paying for content' -- 2 daily newspapers, 4 monthly magazines and cable TV.   Why would I go on the Internet and pay for 'content' that's inferior to what I'm already paying for?
With 'content' there's a lot of flexibility in personal preferences and choices -- it's not as simple and cut and dried as "I like that so I'll pay for it".   X might not be exactly the same (or as good) as Y, but it's close enough -- especially since I've already paid for X.   I might find your online comic strip funny, but I'm unlikely to pay you because I'm already paying for a daily newspaper that gives me 20 comics every day.
For instance, my introduction to anime was through going to anime meetings at the local university where they would show fansubs and copyrighted anime in an auditorium for free. That was my only anime exposure for a long time until I decided to branch out into other shows. When I saw that the DVD's where $20+, I was livid. How dare they charge for something that I watch for free! So, I did (and stil do) something that would have been unthinkable for me if I had began with anime I paid for myself - I trade in it. The ethics of it are debateable, but it's the psychology of the matter; to pay for something that used to be free is hard, even impossible to take, even if DVD quality is better than some of the DivX I get off the net.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
Any programmer should be cautious about making "micro payments". 5 cents times an infinite loop = lots of money.
Me: "Uhhhhhh. Hi customer service... I don't remember how many times I accessed Persian Kitty last month, but I don't think it was over a thousand."
PK: Our records say you did, pervert. Pay the bill in full, or a collection agency will be chasing you...
Non-flat micropayment implies a lot of micro-decisions by the user. Even if it was a penny, you would have to decide every time you see the content, and it is before you see it. People don't want to do this hundred times a day, naturally.
I think a true test of this model will happen at kuro5hin where Rusty (the kuro5hin (k5) dude) is attempting a model where a user pays $5 a month and, in return, the user will not have to see ads. k5's test is one to be truly watched --- k5 has a significant number of users, k5 is similar, in some ways, to slashdot and a subscription model was only be utilized/tried at small/insignificant sites.
The adoption of this model at k5 has sparked a debate on the site with its initial announcement posted by Rusty.
Will this model succeed or fail? I don't think anyone can answer this question. This model has not be truly tested. But, watching k5, we will see.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Cable content supported by advertisers = internet content supported by advertisers
Compelling "premium" channels (like HBO) supported by my wallet = ?
I'll start paying for content on the internet when it becomes justifiably compelling, such as getting a bunch of movies every month (yeah, I know, the movie industry created this dilemma. But it's still cheaper than going to the theater).
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
We never had to pay for it. The content hasn't gotten much better, and now we have to pay? The real issue with this is a behavioral one. It is like spoiling a child. It is much harder to discipline them after they have had freedom, than to give them freedom after they have had none.
"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale . .
It's called AOL. AOL is the future of pay sites. I don't like AOL...but I know it is true. Soon you will pay a provider for general access and/or premium services. General Access to the semi-free sites (those who generate revenue through ads...ie...slashdot) and free sites (personal sites, retail-catalog sites...ie...Sears.., libraries and other state agencies, advocacy sites...and so on.) Then the premium sites (News Sites, Music Sites, Movie Sites...basically what you see in your current cable programming.) It will all be bundled into one nice payment package that you pay to your service provider. 'Yes I would like the sports package please...does that include the live Real Audio Feed of MLB? Cool...can I watch that at work? What..why not...oh...it has to be on my computer at home that I subscribed through...ok...oh well...yeah I guess go ahead and still sign me up....do I have to pay anything to Real? No...it's all bundled into the sports package...ok cool. Thanks.' brian
What is lacking is a reliable transaction platform which permits billing for the use of these items on a disaggregated basis across multiple websites.
Napster could work with a mechanism exists for a consumer to click on an MP3 music file at any participating website, and pay for that one song, collecting a set of songs onto a hard-drive and then burning a CD -- the contents of which may consist of songs with royalties owed to 13 or 15 different composers or record labels. Or a consolidating website -- an "infomediary" may wish to bundle a digital product which consists of content resources culled from a dozen other websites.
All that is required is a mechanism for that infomediary website to reliably apportion out the bundled cost of such a product to the underlying producers.
Clickshare's transaction platform for privacy-protected digital-content purchasing envisions this solution. A consumer can have one account at a most-trusted infomediary and purchase content from multiple related websites, paying just one aggregated bill and without having to register over, and over again.
"Micropayments" are a misnomer. Some consumers may want to pay per song. Others may want a subscription or to purchase a collection. The point is to enable all such behaviors, while acknowledging that in the background, there must be a logging mechanism which will sort out the discrete royalty payments to all the constuent content providers.
Now don't get me wrong, I think there are places on the web where a charge is totaly reasonable, in those places where you would normally pay a fee for service rendered: Amazon, Ebay, Credit Reports, etc. But asking $0.075 to browse someone's lack of information is silly.
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