Archives: January 28, 2009
Micropayments for news
I know. You don’t want to hear about it. Readers will not pay for news online, period. We tried that and it didn’t work. Information wants to be free. Attention, not content, is the new scarcity. Free is a business model. I’ve explained this, myself.
But the “make the reader pay” crowd just keeps sending new combatants with new fodder into the fray. The latest is Jon Austin, one of the perpetrators of The Same Rowdy Crowd, in a very long and well-informed post entitled “Fixing the Newspaper Business or ‘Do I have to Do Everything Around Here?‘” You can read it for its considerable entertainment value (and very thoughtful chain of comments), or save yourself half an hour with Paul Gillin’s summation, or Austin’s own:
Let me wrap up by reviewing the preceding 4,543 words: 1) journalism is not dead, dying or irrelevant; 2) micropayments are the answer to the economic discontinuity afflicting newspapers, and; 3) advances in distribution and display technologies will make digital paper a reality and a viable alternative to paper.
Basically, Austin suggests (a) that news sites adopt a micropayment system in which content is priced in pennies, or perhaps even fractions of pennies, or perhaps even variably priced for different content and for different readers; and (b) that what he calls versions 2.0 and 3.0 of e-paper gizmos will enable newspapers to get to a realistic pay-for-content model. (Version 1.0 being the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, version 2.0 the promised Plastic Logic reader and maybe Kindle 2.0, and version 3.0 a fully flexible, very thin, paperlike, color reader: basically a reusable newspaper).
Morning Links: January 28, 2009
— Mark Briggs asks: What’s your video SEO strategy? (That is, how are making sure Google and other search engines are sending traffic to your videos?) He points to this study by a consulting company on the issue.
Google can’t (yet!) understand all the words spoken in your videos, so even if your subject screams “Chicken McNugget” throughout a video, no one Googling for those tasty white-meat nuggets will come across it without a little search-engine optimization help. This is one reason (among many) we publish transcripts of our videos whenever we produce a new one — Google can read transcripts just fine.
— The New York Times opens up an API for its weekly bestseller book lists. Looks interesting, but it’s a shame they don’t seem to be opening up any of the data underlying the list — that is, the sales-data secret sauce that is used to determine who’s No. 1 and who’s No. 7. That would be a fun data set to play around with.
— Bill Cunningham is the Times’ street-fashion photographer, and here is his audio slideshow from inauguration day. I link not because of the photography, but because of how blogger Jason Kottke linked to it:
Be sure to listen to Cunningham’s wonderful narration; he even gets choked up when describing the moment of Obama’s swearing-in. I wish all journalism were this professionally personal (if that makes any sense).
Emphasis all mine.
