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Apple could do this. They already have 400 million credit cards linked to iTunes accounts. Instead of subscribing to an individual newspaper/magazine in their

Apple could do this. They already have 400 million credit cards linked to iTunes accounts. Instead of subscribing to an individual newspaper/magazine in their shitty Newsstand app, you could instead subscribe to the news and have access to all of the news. You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. They could have a premium section - kinda like cable companies offer high end channels separately (e.g. HBO) – where you could subscribe to specialized market/business news (e.g. market portions of WSJ and FT and Bloomberg, etc). The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. And also to get basically all the major newspapers and magazines to sign on to the scheme. It would probably be more difficult to achieve than negotiating with the music labels for their catalogs. But the longer they keep bleeding cash, the easier the negotiations will get.

jacques_chester 13y ago
> You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. This is the model Kachingle have tried and Contenture tried. And a few others, actually. Nobody's made it stick yet. Apart from Apple I could see PayPal, Google and Facebook trying to make it work. The problem is that no major media source is going to trust a different major corporaton with their livelihoods in any all-or-nothing scheme. So there's room for a smaller player to grow into the role. Which is what I've been working on. > The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. Actually, no it's not. It's possible to do this reliably without forcing everyone through a paywall. I know, because I developed a technology to do exactly this. It allows publishers to selectively allow users through based on a general aggregate scheme alongside their own paywall schemes. Or they can be open to the web and collect from members only.

jacques_chester 13y ago

> You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. This is the model Kachingle have tried and Contenture tried. And a few others, actually. Nobody's made it stick yet. Apart from Apple I could see PayPal, Google and Facebook trying to make it work. The problem is that no major media source is going to trust a different major corporaton with their livelihoods in any all-or-nothing scheme. So there's room for a smaller player to grow into the role. Which is what I've been working on. > The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. Actually, no it's not. It's possible to do this reliably without forcing everyone through a paywall. I know, because I developed a technology to do exactly this. It allows publishers to selectively allow users through based on a general aggregate scheme alongside their own paywall schemes. Or they can be open to the web and collect from members only.