[...] far the best piece I have uncovered so far is this detailed post by Mathew Ingram for Nieman Labs Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?. It provides a detailed and balance review of the pro’s and con’s facing the newspaper [...]

[...] Santori made a similar point in a comment on one of my paywall-related posts at the Nieman Journalism Lab. As he put it: “overlooked in [...]

The more interesting I found it, the more “valuable” in any sense the item was in my eyes, the more I want to pass it along — and the angrier I will be when the link doesn’t work, or when it doesn’t go to the item proper (Evan Rudowski’s notion that a link back to the originating site alone will do is hopeful malarky), or when sends my correspondents to a bare abstract with a “pay here” link to see more.

This remains the case when the micropayment is zero — remember the NYT registration system? How many times did you see in slashdot or digg a link to a NYT story with an embarrassed “(registration required)” after it? The NYT registration barrier was in fact a micropayment system, one in which the payment was extracted in the form of the reader’s time and keystrokes to log in whenever they got a link to a useful story.

I cannot imagine a micropayment system that would place a LOWER barrier to casual linking than the old NYT registration system did. But it was widely detested and widely flouted. People who wanted to share a NYT story on digg or facebook knew their correspondents hated having to sign in to read something, so they — almost without conscious thought — just dragged over the text, hit copy and then hit paste. Violating copyright, not to mention often expunging the byline, losing the formatting, omitting to mention the source, and not infrequently introducing undocumented errors, omissions or intentional changes.

By dropping their registration system the NYT regained some measure of control over their content. Now most sharing would be via simple links back to the original, at least preserving the author’s byline, the format, the complete text, and the accompanying illustrations. And giving the NYT some slight chance of selling marginal ads.

No content-control system that impedes people from easily sharing content in their tweets, blogs, emails and other networking media, will work. If the content is really compelling, people will share it by copy/paste. If it isn’t, they just won’t bother, and readership will wither.

[...] this week, and the battleground du jour seems to be micropayments. The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram doesn’t like them because newspapers don’t have a monopoly on their industry anymore. Pat Thornton agrees and [...]

[...] disposti a pagare preferirebbero farlo con un abbonamento annuale  piuttosto che con il  controverso sistema dei micropagamenti oppure del pagamento giorno per giorno, e che per rale abbonamento annuale  il 72% degli [...]

[...] disposti a pagare preferirebbero farlo con un abbonamento annuale  piuttosto che con il  controverso sistema dei micropagamenti oppure del pagamento giorno per giorno, e che per rale abbonamento annuale  il 72% degli [...]

This is Clay Shirky’s text about iTunes:

“Fans of the iTunes model are right to point out that people use it because they find it more convenient, but they overlook the legal and regulatory hurdles put in place precisely to make other models less convenient (especially for law-abiding citizens.) (…) Newspapers, even if every single one of them acted in collusion, cannot establish a monopoly on news.”

I think it is indeed important to analyze why iTunes is more convenient than downloading music through file-sharing software, but it’s not at all for the reason Shirky points out. Basically Shirky is saying that users are buying from iTunes because they are forced to, they have no other option. This is simply not true. Monopoly by one definition is the market condition that exists when there is only one seller. I can hardly see how a company can be called a monopolist if you can get the same or almost the same product for free from your home computer. In addition, I have talked to dozens of friends who regularly buy from iTunes and not a single one told me they use the service because they think they would not be law-abiding citizens if they downloaded it for free.

If the overwhelming majority of Internet users don’t think it is wrong downloading music for free how is iTunes selling content hand over fist? The answer is that users already have iPods and iPhones. iPods connect directly with iTunes music player. iTunes music player is also itself the browser for iTunes Music Store, and for the App Store that sells iPhone applications. iPhone only lets users upload applications from App Store, and so on. The result is that once you are inside Apple’s virtual perimeter, it’s not at all the same to get music from some other music store.

Shirky is right when he says that people find iTunes more convenient because there are hurdles put in place precisely to make other models less convenient, but the hurdle is not legal or regulatory. The hurdle is that Apple has created a significant mental transaction cost (a psychological factor) for you to acquire music *outside* of Apple’s music store, once you have an iPod.

@Steve Outing:
I have an original thought for you: how content providers (including news websites) can replicate what Apple has done with iTunes: http://www.icents.net/en/website/TheNewCaseForMicropayments2009.html

@Phillip Hallam-Baker:
About the risk that the payment system itself becomes a monopoly: users should be able to pay with the payment systems they already use. In other words, a micropayment platform should simply aggregate regular payment systems, like PayPal, Google Checkout, Zong, Amazon Payments etc, and “change them” so they work for micropayments. This is what iCents.net does.

@Mathew: sorry for the long comment!

I think another deficiency in the current debate is that all everyone is talking about is how to get people to pay for an old format — a news article — in a new medium, online.

In reality the new medium offers new formats, and that is what people will pay for. I may not pay for a news article on herbs, for example, but I may pay to be part of a knowledgeable community of herbalists who share information, ideas and encouragement (one of our very successful SubHub sites, herbmentor.com).

Most of the noisy current debate is by old media companies trying to figure out how to get people to pay for old content formats. Why should they? The old media companies are not spending nearly as much time thinking of how to create something new as they are thinking of how to charge people for the old stuff.

The people who are using the capabilities of the new medium to create something new are the ones who will find they are successful, at charging for content and at attracting advertisers.

Kind regards,
Evan

Now if we have a small well defined context one can provide useful new information by organizing data for a reader. Specially if I need that information “now” to do something.

If we have a large shared context build upon the environment/culture we live in. Providing something “new” is rather difficult. I can scan for example a headline and know what the article will be about without reading it, since I already have a context with many overlapping areas. And will make up what’s missing with a good enough ratio.

The question becomes what it is worth to me, in the first place something. If somebody organizes data for me to make it easier to grasp the relations that’s worth something. IFF it fits my model of context.
In the later case, well not so much since the information value is really,really small.
But most articles fall in the second category for most people. Then again we work from our context, if “you” provide some real information in a small context, people might be willing to pay for it.

If somebody would provide a better craigslist for example. Organize data from local providers, maps, prices, reviews (local, I don’t care for flatland car reviews, I live in the Colorado mountains and need a car which can handle snow, right now) to a given search. My guess is, that would be worth something at least to the local advertisers and most likely to customers too.
Intent on those searches is really high, see above.

Or in other words shallow articles without much information since they are based on a wide shared context just won’t cut it. Or one can twitter about shallow stuff, most people will get it, but hardly about scientific research, most people will go huh?
Btw, to make things worse. We are working on a system to automate all of this.

[...] Nieman Journalism Lab’s Matthew Ingram asks whether the micropayments to which the newspaper industry has pinned its hopes are “The [...]