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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).
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...
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...
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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 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.
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"
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.
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.
No, we won't pay for Slashdot.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.