Like the New York Times....pretty sure they're not all "bullshit media rewriters" there.
Expect a LOT more "Become a member" or "Subscribe to..." websites as adblockers become more popular.
Expect a LOT more "Become a member" or "Subscribe to..." websites as adblockers become more popular.
Micropayments are hard because of the transaction costs, but this seems to slowly change (see e.g. flattr). I wish more sites offered a per-view zero-setup one-click micropayment solution.
What's more interesting is what Google will do if their ads revenue shrinks considerably — I suppose 99% of their income is targeted online context ads.
You'd say "well, NYT is so good you would want to pay for _any_ article published there!" - but then why wouldn't I subscribe if I value them so much?
It could even say "If you liked this article, pay $0.nn and the next article you open on our site will be ads-free for you."
The main problem when charging for content is justifying to the user why the price is "fair" before they've actually seen the content. If you can get around that problem, e.g. by using teasers or word of mouth to instill a need, then you can get away with charging much more than a few cents. And if you can't, very few people will be wililng to pay even one cent, because of the huge perceptual gap between zero and one cent.
This model works best for huge chunks of content like books, movies or video games, where you can create compelling teasers that don't give away the whole experience. It's much harder for stuff like music or NYT articles, where the consumable chunks of content are small and teasers don't make much sense. I don't know any good answer for those.
What I'd like is a PayPal one-click payment sort of system for that, with limitation of e.g. 50¢ per transaction without authentication (with limits per hour and per domain, etc, preventing money-bleeding exploits).
A huge selling point for me would be an ability to come to a previously unvisited site supporting this system and pay with one click.
The thing is that I don't browse media sites from their home pages, I mostly follow links found in social media. This gives the links some level of trust, because I can assess the poster's credibility before clicking the link.
Google would charge 10-15 bucks or whatever the average web user is worth in gooogle adsense.
I guess the hard part is actually effectively detecting ad blocking. I assume you could write an adblocker that downloads and then just never actually displays ads. Without total control over your browser, I'm not sure how ad blocking detection would ever be accurate.
Certainly something that Apple News seems like it could be well placed for.
I do understand smaller bloggers and stuff will have a similar problem but it's people like those that will actually GET subscriptions and who I'd actually be willing to pay for their content if they didn't bombard me with bull crap when I loaded their pages.
And how would Periscope users get paid, exactly?
And how do you expect things like Periscope to stay in business without earning revenue?