Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/

The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. ...ja uskottava rahoituspohja, mutta se on eri stoori.

"Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. "

Clay Shirky tells us why micropayments for news will not work.

"The user must be given the option of whether to pay for a Web site's content (by financially supporting the site), or read it for free. I'm betting this one will be a tough pill to swallow for many industry executives with traditional media mindsets, but it's critical because it fits the culture, indeed the nature, of the Internet. Traditional micropayment schemes for online news content -- "pay up or go elsewhere" -- fight it, and thus are doomed to fail, in my view." Okei, en ehtinyt lukemaan tätä kunnolla enkä oikein ymmärtänyt, että mistä ne rahat tulevat. Mutta luen paremmalla ajalla...

Many people in the newspaper industry are already in full-fledged panic mode, and one of the recent responses has been a wave of calls to resurrect an online publishing business model that has not yet worked: micropayments.

Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content While Time magazine and others claim the answer lies in asking readers to pay in small increments, that model will only hasten newspapers' death spiral. Instead, consider what may prove to be the solution: a California start-up called Kachingle.

While Time magazine and others claim the answer lies in asking readers to pay in small increments, that model will only hasten newspapers' death spiral. Instead, consider what may prove to be the solution: a California start-up called Kachingle.

Steve Brill

For a while I have been thinking about a way to take some of the contrarian thinking that made me try The American Lawyer and Court TV way-back-when and apply it to a new business model to save the New York Times and journalism itself. There are two reasons why, beyond my love for the profession: First, about eight years ago my wife and I endowed The Yale Journalism Initiative. The program is intended to get better people to go into journalism, train them, give them a leg-up credential without establishing a "journalism" major, and then find them careers. It now features seminars, workshops, supported internships, and even a full time career counselor. I also teach one of the seminars. (Plus Floyd Abrams, Adam Liptak and I now also teach at Yale Law.) The implicit and now-traditional part of the deal is that if you do all this and become a Yale Journalism Scholar, I will also get you a job...

Steven Brill's plan to save the NYTimes. interesting, if not Brill-iant.

Brill's secret plan to save the New York Times and journalism itself

Miten lehdistö säilyy elinkelpoisena?

Excellent article on the future of newspapers. Good explanations on why micropayments will not work. Excerpts: To put it another way, the geographical constraints on the distribution of printed news required the fragmentation of production capacity, with large groups of reporters and editors being stationed in myriad local outlets. When the geographical constraints went away, thanks to the Net and the near-zero cost of distributing digital goods anywhere in the world, all that fragmented (and redundant) capacity suddenly merged together into (in effect) a single production pool serving (in effect) a single market...But we'll probably also end up with a supply of good reporting and solid news, and we'll probably pay for it.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roughtype.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F02%2Fmisreading_news.php

Nicholas Carr/Rough Type, Feb. 10, 2009. Why micropayments won't work, but controlling supply online and charging for it might.

The notion of micropayments — a pay-per-click/download web model — is hardly a new one. But as a business model it hasn’t exactly caught fire, or even generated more than an occasional spark. Lately, however, the journalism community has become obsessed with the idea. This is what happens when an existing business model begins to collapse: alternative models are desperately invented, debated, attempted, rejected, etc.

'This is what happens when an existing business model begins to collapse: alternative models are desperately invented, debated, attempted, rejected, etc.'

Pay by entering your phone number instead of credit card number

Micropayments provider - Pay by mobile

Google's new ecommerce / micropayments platform. Must read. keep for ref.

Zach Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab looks at Google's proposal to use its Checkout system to manage micropayments for news content. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.niemanlab.org%2F2009%2F09%2Fgoogle-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free

Application platforms, broadly defined, are here to stay. Facebook's platform, first launched in 2007, now has tens of thousands of applications. MySpace, which ...