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Micropayments For News — Holy Grail Or Delusion?
newscloud writes "Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab sounds off on micropayments for news content, on the side of the argument that says they are a dangerous delusion: 'What does it mean for journalism? It could mean charging for different platforms, for early alerts, for special members-only access to certain premium or value-added content. But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.' The article provides good context on the debate over micropayments from a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, to recent analysis and opinion by Masnick, Outing, Graham, and Reifman. Google's micropayment plans were recently discussed here."
If they don't accept anonymous payments I won't pay for the content regardless of how good it is. The technology for anonymous electronic cash has been around for more than a decade. If a vendor wants my money they had better respect my privacy.
The fun thing is that this is mainly a US problem. For example in Russia the most used payment method is WebMoney, where you define exactly what information is public about your account and *by default* everything is private. All the information other party sees is the "purse number" of yours, ie. Z435903486439 or similar.
And you can pay for pretty much every service with it, from buying credit to your mobile phone to doing online purchases. You can also get credit card that is linked to your account. And the system is a lot more secure than PayPal too, with possibility to use keyfiles and sms verification for transactions along others. And theres none of such cases where PayPal just decides to lock out the user account. It is actually your account.
Sometimes its funny how much US is lacking behind on some things.
That's the thing, they think we want content. Well, we do, but we've never paid for content. I can read the local paper at McDonald's or any number of other places for free. I won't buy news, but I'll buy a newspaper once in a while, and it will get passed around the office for everyone else to read for free.
I guess that makes me a pirate in the eyes of "content providers".
That's the thing -- we've NEVER paid for content, we pay for its container, whether it be a book, a newspaper, an album, or a DVD. We were always free to tape friends' LPs and we were always free to record TV shows and movies on VHS (well, since the advent of the VCR anyway). We didn't buy music, we bought records. We didn't buy movies, we bought tapes. We didn't buy news, we bought newspapers.
Now that everything's digital they want us to pay two bucks for a song and you don't even get a 45, they want a buck for a newspaper and we don't even get the paper itself?
Listen up, young people -- don't let the greedy moneygrubbers steal your money buy letting them sell you something that has always been free. Bits are like air; they're free and always have been. If you want to sell air you have to wrap a scuba tank or a balloon around it. If you want to sell bits you likewise have to have a container, like a CD or an LP or a sheaf of paper.
These idiots think I'll buy something that's completely free from a myriad of sources. Must be some good shit they're smoking!
Free Martian Whores!
The general public doesnâ€(TM)t put any value on the source of their 'news'. In other words, a twitter post is just as good as something from the AP. This is partially due, IMO, to shitty poor journalism, so little time and effort is spent investigating and digging for original content nowadays. Rather, today 'journalists' slap together a handful of talking points and use other news organization's reports as sources. Journalism today has by and large become a cycle of shit, thanks in large part to the freak show circus of cable 'news'.
So, I don't see myself paying Google for the same quality of 'news' I can get for free from any random jerk's blog.
FAQs are evil.