All entries tagged: Jon Austin
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).
