Slashdot Mirror
Google To Offer Micropayments To News Sites
CWmike writes "Google is promoting a payment system to the newspaper industry that would let Web surfers pay a small amount for individual news stories, an idea that could help publishers struggling with the impact of the Internet. The plans were revealed in a document Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which had solicited ideas for how to monetize content online, a task some publishers have had difficulty with. 'The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants,' Google said in the document. Google said it had no specific products to announce yet."
That's not going to work in a "cut-n-paste email" world.
Much like the moderation system on Slashdot, I will use my "mod points" sparingly.
Specifically to the non-retarded journalists that can use a fucking spell checker, actually look for glaring grammatical mistakes, and just plain, what-are-you-blind-?-fuck-ups.
If I am going to pay for a news article I want it to be written so well the words feel like "wiping my ass with silk".
Ohhh, and I want to be able to take back money from journalists who write anything about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and their respective twats.
P.S - A *very* important feature. I want a checkbox that says, "at no time will your money ever go to Rupert Murdoch".
Maybe I am the only one, but I subscribe to the paper version of the NY Times and read the paper online. What I pay to them for the subscription covers the cost of my online access to their editorial writers. I read different things from the paper and the online version, it's a different experience. Something that occured to me is that the semantic web may be a way to effectively monetize online news. People come to news sites for different reasons. The casual user needs access to the latest news, and that should always be free. The researcher, the people who want more detailed information are the ones who have the most incentive to pay for news content. Presenting them with related content that goes beyond stories, that dives into databases and other forms of content would be an interesting model to work with. It would be great to actually view source material that was annotated in some way, get access to related video, pull up figures and statistics cited in the article, and more. Again, a different experience. I don't care to pay to read an editorial by some jerk I don't agree with, I would pay for in-depth coverage that is free from partisan slant and gives me access to source data so I can make up my own mind. Call it news plus. M
Let me start by paying nothing for this one
and I guess your sentiment will be echoed by a lot of people. All we can really do is let the industry die and THEN see if it is so valuable that it needs resurrecting. The fact that newspaper conglomerates keep harping on about how necessary they are for the proper functioning of democracy means nothing to me without evidence and I'm afraid the only evidence that counts is a failed industry followed by a failed democracy. I don't see the later happening any time soon (well no more than is already the case!).
A lot of what google does is control the data and information produced by others. Google news for example, which I check daily, does not really generate it's own news. It's just a listing of top stories over a bunch of different news sites. If those news sites run into real fiscal issues and are at risk of ceasing operations Google would be harmed. So I see Google's stance here as nothing more than a "If you guys start going bankrupt we've got ideas." In the mean time I don't expect anything to change.
It (should be) smarter than that. The thing that's traditionally stopped this working is the overhead of micropayments. It takes time/money to process each transaction and below a certain value: it's not worth doing.
What I'm presuming Google is proposing is the papers sign up for the service, that the user "pays" via a google account, and that google provide the smarts to say "OK newspaper, we've received a few micro payments for you, and when we've got a critical mass of a few thousand we'll put through a single transaction and reimburse you". Google will take a cut, the paper will get micropayments which traditionally has been too hard a nut for them to crack, and we get either nickel and dimed to death or we get to pay a fair price for our reporting.
Ultimately I assume the market will decide, and poor reporting will result in poor sales, but I'm in an optimistic mood today.
If it were only that simple, I always thought I should support the sites I look at byt not disabling the ads with an ad blocker, but lately it's been pretty much impossible to look at most news sites I go to as all those flash ads causes my browser and computer to crawl. Yes, bit old computer (Athlon - 64 3000+) but I shouldn't have to update my bloody computer just to be able to read some web pages!
So, in the end, I installed Adblock and everythiong jsut works! fantastic! I am still allowing ads on slashdot to show though as it's not enough of them to cause too much harm.
Anyway, if they made flash less intrusive when it comes to CPU hogging I'd appily live with it, but now it's pretty much a joke
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
*cough*
No offense, but my experience with my local indie weekly (which I don't run, but do read) differs.
My local indie weekly (the 11th hour, Macon, Ga) has become known for running better, more in depth investigative journalism and honest reporting than the local "real" paper (the Macon Telegraph, may its cowardly editors burn in hell for the things they haven't had the guts to print).
In fact, the investigation into our human trafficking issues in my town was largely due to a really scathing piece of investigative journalism that the 11th hour did, which basically put egg all over the local police force for failing to do their job and made them get off their asses more out of embarrassment than anything else.