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Unbiased Game Reviews Through Micropayments
a reader writes:"Fed up of games reviewers giving in to advertiser pressure to go easy on high-budget turkeys?
A group of distinguished British videogames journalists has set up an independent site called Digiworld. It's funded by an interesting micropayment system: you pay 50 pence (about 80 cents US) a week for full access, although new content is available for free on weekdays (details here).
For extra geek appeal, the look of the site imitates the 8-bit Mode 7 graphics of Teletext, a British system that uses spare TV signal bandwidth to transmit pages of textual information (some of the staff previously worked on a Teletext gaming page called Digitiser). Even if you're not a gamer, the bizarre humor and characters make the site worth checking out."
why pay when there are sites like www.snackbar-games.com honest and humorous reviews...enjoy
>The only thing that would help is to have ad-free mags
Digiworld IS ad-free. That's the entire purpose of the micropayment system. If you read the site's FAQ, you'll see that the whole reason it was opened was to provide the first ever truly ad-free professional games journalism in history.
Consumer Reports, which accepts no ads, has been in operation since 1936. The online version is $24 per year. I think it is fair to characterize $2 per month as a micropayment (the Digiworld subscription is roughly 89 cents per week), so this is proof by example that the business model can work.