Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Reuters’ Felix Salmon says building a relationship with readers — à la Andrew Sullivan — can provide readers with enough incentive to pay for content. Here, Salmon weighs the pros and cons of donations vs. paywall vs. merchandise:
We’re not talking about micropayments here: those have never taken off, and I doubt they will, at this point. For a long time, people thought that the sheer size of the internet would enable enormous numbers of people to pay negligible sums of money, which would add up to substantial amounts in aggregate. The problem with that was that it’s just too hard to spend money online: the effort involved just isn’t worth it, for sums of a dollar or less.
