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."
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
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!"); }