As a disgruntled journo who’s doing mostly very different things to live, I believe the fundamental issue is that we keep treating journalism as a business.
It is not sustainable as such anymore for a long time, and keeping it structured as a business creates all sorts of wrong incentives.
Good journalism today comes mostly from no profits, and that is the only model that makes sense in my view. Make it so that foundations and governments can legally fund newspapers from a non political organ and have a charity-style funding process.
That’s true for newspapers but not really for tv, so this is not a panacea.
In general I find it fascinating how we try to analyze all sorts of business cases for newspapers except this one (aka they’re not a business anymore).
Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
281–290 of 408 posts
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#282Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#283Advertising in an SEO game. Get ranked in Google and take a few pennies from millions of drive-by users. Subscriptions is a loyalty game. Convince users of your value and get them to commit to becoming a supporter for an extended period. Get them to install an app, accept breaking news alerts and lean on you as a trusted source. Micropayments is neither. There's no obvious path to generate consistent micropayment rev…
Put out good content that people want to read and people will read it and pay you for it. Youtubers do fine with inconsistent revenue for each video. There is usually less risk writing an article than producing a video.
They do a version of the SEO/ads game. They also are mostly just people talking. Journalism requires orders of magnitude more effort and resources.
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#284I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that doe…
what's the patent?
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime. The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters? If you put a financial cost on li…
> Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters? Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value ca…
> rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would love to hear about some of those reality checks. Note: I'm not currently in favor of micropayments, but am willing to listen.
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator…
Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT. Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious…
Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology. This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
Yeah, I wouldn't touch ANYTHING from current fintech with a 100 foot pole.
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#288Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…
That would incentivize locking important things behind paywalls.
Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology. This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
Yeah, I wouldn't touch ANYTHING from current fintech with a 100 foot pole.
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Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
#290Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation…
> "reading this might be interesting" I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here? I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't lik…
With books, movies, tv shows, music almost everyone is discovering based on recommendations or curation. Very few people are consuming much of that type of content with no outside input on its quality or interest. News is almost always a blind link with just a headline to work from.