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."

Comments

Premium content

[sopssa]

If the content is premium content, something that I know is more valuable or interesting than elsewhere, then I have no problem paying for it. This is the reason people for pay for Wall Street Journal and the likes too - they get more out of it and the writers are specialized in the area.

For everyday news, no. I want opinions and better writing than just simply telling the news.

Re:Premium content

[slashqwerty]

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.

Re:Premium content

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Premium content

[NatasRevol]

If it's truly premium content, then I can see justifying paying for it.

However, the real problem is that most newspapers think that their editorial content is almost as good as the WSJ and the like. But the sad truth is that it's nowhere near that. It's not indepth, it's not researched, it's not thorough, hell, it's not usually spell checked. And every newsroom I've ever been in believes they have great content. In spite of the fact that most stories are PR pieces or written by someone else who emailed it to the features, sports or news desk.

And yet the newspapers think that they'll make more money by putting this crap behind a pay wall. In reality, they'll just get fewer hits on their website, and thus ads, and will end up lowering their revenue way more than what they charge for access to their 'premium' content.

If they wanted to actually increase revenue, there's a simple solution.
1. Create compelling content
2. Charge a premium for ads around that compelling content.

Compelling content = more readership which means more ad impressions which means more ad revenue. Yes, compelling content is hard. But it's the only way for newspapers to make it in the future.

Yet every paper sees it as giving content away for free. And they're all idiots. They provide a real service - information. They just need to figure out how & who to charge to optimize their bottom line. Because advertisers, especially local ones that are impacted by that compelling content, are willing to pay for good quality ad hits.