I have been observing a lot of recent discussions on whether or not micro-payments can help save the ailing online news industry from nemesis.
There been some very interesting blog posts that have detailed discussions on the pros and cons of the same ( interestingly the one by Scott dates back to 2003!!!).
Here are some of the hand picked conversations on will it work/ how things wont work :)
How to Save Your Newspaper - Time.com
Will Micropayments Save Newspapers -- Or, Should They be Saved? - Huffington Post
Can Micropayments Save Newspapers? - NY Times
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers - Shirky.com
Misunderstanding Micro-payments - Scot ( published in late 2003 !!!)
Micropayments Won’t Save Newspapers
Do you think you paying 5 cents to read the article your friends just shared would help save the online newspapers industry ( more importantly would you like that as a end user behaviour) ?
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3 comments:
Will people be willing to spend that 5 cents is the big question!!! Will that be a honor system OR pay before you read? Neither of them could result in substantial revenues and have their own challenges ... even prestigious News Paper sites like NewYork Times, Wall Street Journal couldn't garner enough critical mass on subscriptions and gave them away for advertising opportunity .
I think that the whole paradigm of top-down news is going to change, rather it has already started changing. Blogs are now a major source of news, and soon instead of a few websites publishing first news, we will have bloggers publishing news first and news websites aggregating bottom-up.
Also, this is bound to improve the quality of journalism.
@Delip : I think the most important question for publishers today would be to spend their time on building this micro-payments thing which is not going to have substantial revenues anyways to revive their company or utilize their energies into bring out some more fundamental changes in their path to profitability.
@arindam : I guess so. Some of the recent events like the airplane landing on the Hudson river etc have shown that there are going to be some shakeups in the future as to how people consume news based on event types and from which sources. But also quality is one thing and surviving is another :)
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