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Would You Pay A Penny Per Page?
nebby writes "How Stuff Works is running an article regarding the "penny per page" model for web site compensation. It sounds like a very viable solution, being simple to understand, transparent to use, and fair to the webmasters and users involved. The only downside to it is that it would require a massive effort on the part of web sites, standards bodies, and/or ISPs to switch over. I know that methods of online payment have been brought up before, but in searching on Google I found no information about any groups or companies looking seriously into moving to this model. I was wondering if any such groups or initiatives have been put together, and if not, why not? :) It doesn't take much to imagine the possibilities of what the web could become if this were put in place ..." Penny-per-page actually sounds like one of the better micropayment ideas I've heard, but is just as vaporous as any of the others so far.
Have to pay a penny everytime we get into one of those damned porn sponsored click-fests of opening windows?!
Aggghhh... my credit card bill's high enough already!
;^)
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
With dynamic server-side page generation, how do you determine exactly what a "page" is?
I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.
Calling this scheme "penny-per-page" makes it sound simple, but the basic problem of defining what it is that the user pays for doesn't go away that easily. What about simple page reloads because of browser hiccups? What about sites like Slashdot, where new content slowly encroaches upon old? What about archives? What about Akamai?
Those aren't new questions, they're the same basic things you encounter as soon as pay-per-anything is considered. I think that complexity makes the subscription model (Salon) more appealing from a management and marketing standpoint, because it's easy to describe and appreciate the value proposition.
I'm not down with web servers and ISP's but I would think it would be good for an ISP to cache common url's that people goto (i.e. msn.com for people that don't know how to change their default start page). So if my ISP is caching msn.com and I go to msn.com but never use msn's web servers then who gets the money? My ISP or msn? MSN made the page but my ISP is "hosting" the page.
Hell no on that idea!
Call me a pessimist, but my belief is that businesses are incapable of handling this kind of thing responsibly. The moment we go to penny-per-page, we'll start to see things artificially segmented across a dozen pages, and all kind of fluff and noise between the front page and any useful pages.
Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested.
It would be too costly for Google and friends to index a site which demanded a penny for each page read.
It's also not going to add up to very much per month. People who log on to check stock prices, look up the weather, read the top news stories and so on might look at 25 or 50 pages a day. They would pay something between $5 and $15 per month for Web content. But let's also take the worst case scenario. Let's say that you sat in front of your computer 8 hours a day and looked at a new page every two minutes without interruption 20 days per month. That would cost $48 for the month. That is the worst case scenario, and it is unlikely anyone is going to do that. The cost will be minimal for just about everyone
I just popped through 6 pages in about a minute and a half reading/skimming this article. One page every two minutes? Do people actually read that slowly?
If I'm looking for something, I tend to have two or three browsers open... usually one on Deja that does near constant Usenet searches. Their estimation is about 240 page views per day. Heck, I can almost kill that just on Slashdot within the course of a day.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
In the internet medium, what happens if the routing decides to go south while that page was being delivered, requiring me to reload? What happens if I click a link on that page that took me to some place off site to read more about something, then when going back, the browser was forced to re-request the site again? What if I want to use that page as a reference, bookmarking, but being charged a penny ever time I accessed it?
(Yes, there's ways to bookkeep around all these problems, but I doubt that most sites would figure out all the right nuances).
There's just too many technical problems that can happen that a pay-per-page scheme can work. Instead, if those sites that cannot continue to fund themselves on banner ads should either look into 1) getting a better targetted banner ad provider, just as how /. has done, which will have a much better click-thru rate for your site, or 2) adopt a pay-per-term such as Salon has done for premium content. In the latter case, if your content is that good, you'll thrive (as I understand it, Salon's Premium is doing well, given their good content to start with), but otherwise, you'll flounder (and maybe for good reason).
And in the end, while I don't do it know, a web site with content and delivery like Salon would be worth about the same price as a magazine subscription for a year (eg $30-$40/yr) as long as it's unlimited access to the site.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Take me for example. All thse numbers are being extremely conservative for me.
I'll say I surf an average of 2 hours per day. Thats 120 minutes per day, or 7200 minutes. Now, assume I spend around 30 seconds ona web page before clicking a link to view another (This is a VERY high estimate for me). Thats around 240 page views per day, or $2.40 by this "penny per page" scheme. Thats 72 dollars per month, in addition to my 45 dollars per month for my DSL connection.
And this is being conervative! I can easily name days where I spent upwards of 8 hours online, roughly half of which was viewing web pages. This is much too expensive, I'd never go for it. Maybe 0.25 cents per page is more reasonable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the great things about the web the way that information can get all around the globe quickly? Paying a penny a page would be irritating for most of us in the western world, but it could effectively close off huge sections of the web to citizens of developing countries. Say you "normally" view 5 pages a day on each of 4 or 5 sites - if you're living on $5 a day, are you really going to pay 5% of your income to view US news sites, UK informations sites, etc?
Trev - used to be interesting. Honest.
As I've said before, charging the spammers a penny per message is a far more viable idea. This ties in with mandatory spam licensing with a federal register of spammers, where people can bill the spammers for traffic.
This kills several birds with one stone.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.
Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:
This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.
Sturgeons law is utterly inadequate to describe the web. Way, way, way more than 95% of it is crap.
What's more, I do a lot of my surfing right now because it's free. I can live without it, and if I have to do any sort of pay-per-view, I will. There are a small number of web services I wouldn't want to live without; those I would much prefer to "subscribe" to. (Pay $15 a year or some such for unlimited use.) Indeed, I already do pay for a couple of them. So I'm not being a "cheap Slashdot freeloader" here. I'm just saying that it's not worth it to me to have to watch the balance rise as I surf the web, and there are a lot of pages out there that aren't even worth $0.01 to me.
I'm presuming that not all pages will go pay. I certainly don't intend to charge for people to view my fluffy pages (and I will be pissed if my service providers decide to do so under some future version of this scheme), and I'm hoping that a lot of the stuff out there (especially educational and academic things) will remain free. I hope that all of the rest is clearly marked so that I know to avoid it unless it's worth paying for me.
-Rob
Ever since Scott McCloud (of Zot! and Understanding Comics fame) started touting the idea of web-based micropayments, I've been seeing these schemes crop up more and more often. The one thing I've noticed is that they all seem to be performing the most horrible contortions to twist the web into something its not...all for a buck.
And, I can't help wondering: what if the WWW just isn't a good medium for most methods of making money? What if, after all this, its just able to do what it was originally designed to do (i.e.: serve up information-based sites, mostly educational and techinical)?
Pr0n notwithstanding, I don't know why nobody seems ready to consider that the web may be just good for a few commercial storefronts (in select markets), distributing some basic corporate information (acting as an informational "web presence" to companies who care to do so), and leaving the majority of traffic for personal and educational/technical sites.
I'm not a Luddite who longs for the "good old days" of the web (although I have been known to go back to using lynx in pinch), but it just seems that most models of revenue-generation on the web DON'T WORK. Hundreds of companies have gone out of business ignoring this. Sure, maybe there's a way to circumvent the web's limitations, but why doesn't any industry consider that the web WILL NOT make most of them money? It seems to me that the web is not the tool that they're looking for, and they're trying to force it to do things it wasn't meant to do...like trying to use a screwdriver to pound nails -- sure, you can do it, but it would make more sense to look for something like a hammer.
A hypothetical article from the future on the downfall of the web:
In the beginning it was a penny per page, theoretically to just recover the cost of serving the page. Then a few sites decided their content is worth more, so they charged a few more pennies. Soon pages costed a dollar or more.
Meanwhile thousands of people had already been copying the content to their local disk to view again in the future, or perhaps share with a friend.
Since web sites were finally making a little money, large contect companies began buying them all up. In the end only a handful of companies owned a majority of the contant on the net. Prices rose and rose.. The actual authors were of course being paid only small fractions of a penny.
All of a sudden the price/page hits a certain sweet-spot where the cost is higher than the value, and people start file-swapping pages. The WWWAA (World Wide Web Association of America) was formed to 'protect web page author's rights'. Lobbyists were deployed, campains were launched, laws were passed, and copyright protection mechanisms were put in place and made illegal to circumvent.
F that.
_______
2B1ASK1
I live in Eastern Europe. My income is about $400 per month which is above average in this country. I have a university degree and am not stupid or lazy. I just live in a poor part of world. I cannot afford to buy any western books or subscribe to any magazines. Web is the only source of information that I have. Web completely changed my world because giving me information freely. I am extremely afraid that someday such scheme will be adopted.
The entire premise of this is absurd. Imagine the annoyance of going to google and searching for the phrase "to be or not to be" and receiving the following reply for your penny:
The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be.
For my penny, I would have a list of "about 236,000,000" web sites that include the word "not." (Doubt me? Try it yourself.)
This is why this idea will fail. When a search goes bad, a web page turns out to be mirroring something seen elsewhere, or a the information is outdated or incorrect, we just move on. But when every one of these extracts a penny from us, we will get rightly angered by it.
Should I pay a penny for each X10 video camera ad that pops up? That would make the owner of that site richer than Bill Gates.
Nobody said that the web had to be profitable -- and no one is forcing site owners to leave unprofitable sites running. I know that I won't pay a penny a page for what is, more often than not, useless material and I think others will share my opinion. Make a site with valuable content and people will subscribe, but don't expect random visitors to just open their coin purse to you on blind faith that you will provide useful content.
This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.
A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:
Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?
Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?
Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.
Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?
Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?
Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?
Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?
I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.
Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:
"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."
On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?
And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.
I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.
Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.
Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.
Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).
It actually might be a disincentive to index their content properly, because they get paid for false hits just like they do for real ones. So unscrupulous webmasters would go looking for popular search terms and then try to get their pages to show up on those terms even if they have nothing to do with them. And you thought search engines were bad now!
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."