That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on.
The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power.
But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars.
Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.
It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.
I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.
> Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.
You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.
Reporting on corruption and injustice is critical to a society, but doesn't have any monetary value. The way I see it, we already have a way we choose to fund that kind of thing: non-profits/NGOs. Some media outlets (Vox, The Guardian) are already turning to just asking for money in this way, and over time journalism might become more formalised as something funded by the public for civic ends, not as a commercial product. To that end it should be unbundled from stuff like sports coverage and celebrity gossip - which might really end up disappearing as a viable career and be done exclusively by amateurs.
I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.
To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions.
I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.
Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
I used to call them malicious SEO sites, but your point makes better sense than my hatred.
Games won't become free until it's easy for commoners to make them. Even with Unity and all the easy plug and chug game dev resources, it's still hard and requires multiple people with different talents.
Software is no different. When Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, the standards were incredibly high. If I violate a GPL license or steal some copywritten Unity code for my game - I'm probably pretty safe. Unless, of course, a bunch of people agree that my software is valuable. I could be in big trouble if that's the case, even if I give it away for free (as in beer) and never make a cent off it.
2) It's pretty unclear to me that Substack actually lets "legions" of writers make a living. https://substack.com/discover lists the top (income making?) writers, and it drops off very quickly. By number 25, it is "hundreds of subscribers" paying $10/month. That's a nice hobby income but isn't really "a living".
Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links?
I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]"
And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it.
Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work.
Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.
> If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question
If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost,
But there're also different continents and countries and different languages
... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and:
> "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy"
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti...
Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.