Micropayments and Journalism, A Freakonomics Quorum
Interested in micropayments and journalism’s future? You might want to read: What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum
Here is the set up:
We asked a group of people who have given a lot of thought to micropayments — William Baker, Alan Mutter, Clay Shirky, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne — the following:
1. How would micropayments best work?
2. How possible is it that micropayments could be applied to the majority of online content, and how would this affect both online and print journalism?
These are smart people, it is worth a read.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Micro-payments are a red herring. The only industry that has ever done much with them is telephony, and then only in service to themselves.
What we need is micro-accounting, so consumers of journalism (and other media goods that are given away but are also worth more than $zero) can know in detail what they value, and pay whatever they like. In other words, to do what, for example, The Wall Street Journal has been insisting for the duration: to Let The Market Decide. The market is more than competing sellers. It’s also willing buyers. A free market should be more than Your Choice of Captor (which is what sellers, including journals and other media, implement through approximately 100% of their CRM sysems), We’re working on equipping the demand side with midro-accounting and maximized choice through Media Logging and PayChoice,
at ProjectVRM. It’s early, and what you’re seeing at those last two links are works in progress; but we have a growing base of open source developers and allied volunteers getting it done.
We can’t expect any one Big Company (or Big Nonprofit) to fix traditional journalism’s business models. We need the demand side to drive the supply side here, and to provide the business model that will soak up the MLOTT (money left on the table) by current business models (advertising, traditional subscriptoin systems, underwiring).
There’s more, but that’s a start. Thanks for raising all the right questions, and providing some pretty damn good answers, too.
Doc
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:13 am
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