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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."
Let me start by paying nothing for this one, I'll gladly give Murdoch even less.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
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".
Since they're getting paid already, that means the banner and intrusive flash ads on news sites will stop, right?
(Sure it will)
And besides who RTFA anyway.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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
When I saw "Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA)", my immediate thought was that Slashdot had been hacked by a certain troll organisation. I guess that serves me for browsing at -1.
Why not? As long as the process is quick and painless and the cost low enough (i.e. a few cents), I wouldn't mind that one click to read the full article with images and everything (and without ads).
It's similar to the model of those boxes containing a stack of newspaper to which you get access by inserting a quarter or two. Of course, one could get the whole stack and distribute it for free; but in reality most people will just get one paper (i.e. read the article) and get on with their lives.
The media is very biased and pisses off a lot of center-right potential customers because it is often so one-sided. It also does a terrible, terrible job as a "watchdog" as it often just parrots whatever a defense attorney or prosecutor say. It rarely has people follow local corruption cases and really dig down and write hard-hitting stories.
Now, what'll the media do if the few real journalists become the money-making rock stars of their field? How will it respond if more conservative writers start bringing in big bucks.
My guess is that it won't make a difference at many outlets like the NYT. It'll be a cold day in hell before they get actual conservatives and libertarians writing for them, do serious journalism again, etc.
Considering the price of a paper copy of a newspaper and the number of articles in it, the right price of a single piece of news could be 0.01 cents or less (EUR or USD, it's about the same if we look at the order of magnitude). However if we think that the same piece of news can be replicated infinite times with zero marginal costs of production, the price of a single copy goes down quickly to zero. Surprisingly, the more interesting is the piece of news (and so more read/replicated), the less it should cost. Basically newspapers are facing the problems of the music industry: they found themselves selling a product with suddenly no costs of reproduction and they are resisting the urge of finding a new business model or disinvest and move to another market (I mean the labels/editors, the artists/writers are locked into doing what they can do).
The problem is I don't trust the computer with my money. Even though I might be willing to pay a reasonable small amount for some articles, I do not trust linking my payment information to a mouseclick.
There's been many stories of people running up astronomical phone bills because their phone used costly services in the background with no easy means of knowing what it is doing and what it is costing. I need to be assured that the computer will never run amok with my money - or worse - rack up bills on credit that I then have to pay, whether or not I might have had the money for it.
There is needs to be a built-in stop. In real-life, for example, paying cash, it is very hard to accidentally spend without knowing that you are spending and how much. Even paying by credit card, the bank will call and verify if there's a unusual series of transactions, which serves to limit the financial damage in the event of a "bug". Micropayments needs to solve this problem (for example, by using pre-issued time-time-use cryptographic tokens in lieu of serial-numbered bills) before I am comfortable trusting financial access to a general-purpose web-browsing computer. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way.
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.
This is one of the more interesting aspects of the coming pay vs. free online news content issue. On the web, is it ethical for a newspaper to charge for reposted/reprinted AP and Reuters articles, while those original sources continue to offer their articles for free? Because at that point, are you paying the newspaper for the content, or the hosting of the content?
:)
Another aspect is advertising. Since - despite all appearances to the contrary - newspapers are still in business to make money, are they going to expect paying online subscribers to click-through and suffer with various ads, and justify it by saying that they have ads in their print editions as well, and that it "keeps costs down"?
We keep hearing that the papers can't survive on web ads. Yet they persist, and grow more annoying and absurd in their iterations. Perhaps it's the papers' plan is for us to pay them just to make the ads go away.
Bottom line, though, I think the papers are going to want to have it both ways.
Well, there could be an easy solution for that: Pay-as-you-Go Micropayments. Charge your Google account with $10, spend that, a penny every few clicks, charge it again.
Now the charging part could turn out to be a bit trickier. Ideally, you'd pay cash for a gift card, use that and be totally safe. Unfortunately, making and selling the physical cards isn't free, so this may or may not happen anytime soon. I'm guessing they'll take credit cards to fill you up. There's always Visa/Mastercard gift cards (non-personal, check with your local Mall) as well as Prepaid credit cards (personal, check with your Bank or credit card institution). Pretty safe, too.
In the end, even if you'd be paying directly from a real credit card, you can always cancel charges.
Gathering news at its source tends to be expensive. Gathering it from people willing to go into dangerous and/or inconvenient areas doubly so. Getting someone to gather the news then report it without some form of hidden agenda is rare even in the paid media, and in an ad-supported world there's the constant pressure to bias your news in favor of your benefactors - those who buy ads. So if MegaCorp's CEO is found buggering badgers in Soho, and MegaCorp's ad revenue is your bread and butter, there's a serious temptation to bury that story as deeply as possible, preferably somewhere that never hits print at all. If it is covered, it would be spun as hard and creatively as possible to cast badger buggering in the best possible light.
Ads can pay for some of it, but not nearly all. Newspapers that have their own news-gathering resources are finding that their articles are being reprinted on free media, and are forced in large part to put a lot of their content online for free and hope that ad revenues make up for some of that. Meanwhile, a lot of their loyal readers are discovering that a lot of the content they want is available for free, and are canceling their subscriptions for the dead tree editions.
Many local newspapers now survive on their remaining dead tree subscribers, and struggle to remain relevant in an online world where they can't make enough money to continue gathering news effectively. So a lot of them are dying off as a result, and the concept of "local news" in more rural areas is starting to fade slowly.
My home town still has a larger town next door that has a decent local paper. It's still got a small staff of newsgatherers, and has fresh and relevant local articles. But it's a shadow of the paper it used to be, and is under constant threat of closing down. Print subscriptions are continually dwindling, and that's their major source of income.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."