11 ms·

It is either this or a system for micropayments, IMHO, which would probably be less click bait-inviting (as you pay per item, rather than having already paid fo

by lb1lf 8y ago

It is either this or a system for micropayments, IMHO, which would probably be less click bait-inviting (as you pay per item, rather than having already paid for admission to an all-you-can-eat-buffet.) Let's say you have a subscription spanning X sites, and that after you have read the first paragraph or so, you click a button if you wish to read on, being charged, say, $0.02 for the privilege. Prepaid, so you don't get a surprise when the credit card fees are 100x the cost of the reporting you read.

te_chris 8y ago
Surely micropayments work in the exact opposite way to what you describe when it comes to click-bait. Like every other market with abundance (e.g. music in 2018), I imagine it will be winner take all and the distribution of rewards will skew to the most popular, creating incentives which will lead to the marvel/dc-isation of news, reduce production risk taking, and increase the fight for attention. I mean, micropayments will essentially behave something like spotify, and that is mostly what's happened over there - excluding a bit of weirdness around the monetisation of legacy catalogue that doesn't really work the same in publishing.
- lb1lf 8y ago
  I may be naïve, but the idea was that the first paragraph would probably tell you whether reading the rest made any sense; my reasoning was that if you pay a flat fee which the content providers fight over based on what is being viewed, you do not care what you click - but the other side has everything to gain by making you click. With micropayments, you can at least hope that content providers will be wary of leaving customers with the sense of being fooled into paying for a story. The keyword here being 'hope'. Sigh.
  - te_chris 8y ago
    We still have to maintain hope :) Personally, I subscribe to the Guardian (the weekend papers, I live in London) and the London Review of Books. I like this model as I'm not buying the individual content so much as I'm buying into the ethos and output of both organisations. I don't really want to be deciding which of the items they do is best, I want them to maintain a machine that will keep surprising me with stuff I want to read. I think aggregate subscriptions are going to have to become a thing though, likely as a side contribution, without all the benefits of full subscription, but still some access beyond the paywall. Good luck and godspeed to whoever manages to coordianate that.

by lb1lf 8y ago

te_chris 8y ago

Surely micropayments work in the exact opposite way to what you describe when it comes to click-bait. Like every other market with abundance (e.g. music in 2018), I imagine it will be winner take all and the distribution of rewards will skew to the most popular, creating incentives which will lead to the marvel/dc-isation of news, reduce production risk taking, and increase the fight for attention. I mean, micropayments will essentially behave something like spotify, and that is mostly what's happened over there - excluding a bit of weirdness around the monetisation of legacy catalogue that doesn't really work the same in publishing.

lb1lf 8y ago
I may be naïve, but the idea was that the first paragraph would probably tell you whether reading the rest made any sense; my reasoning was that if you pay a flat fee which the content providers fight over based on what is being viewed, you do not care what you click - but the other side has everything to gain by making you click. With micropayments, you can at least hope that content providers will be wary of leaving customers with the sense of being fooled into paying for a story. The keyword here being 'hope'. Sigh.
- te_chris 8y ago
  We still have to maintain hope :) Personally, I subscribe to the Guardian (the weekend papers, I live in London) and the London Review of Books. I like this model as I'm not buying the individual content so much as I'm buying into the ethos and output of both organisations. I don't really want to be deciding which of the items they do is best, I want them to maintain a machine that will keep surprising me with stuff I want to read. I think aggregate subscriptions are going to have to become a thing though, likely as a side contribution, without all the benefits of full subscription, but still some access beyond the paywall. Good luck and godspeed to whoever manages to coordianate that.