The Death of Newspapers
Let’s say you saw the headline for a New York Times Online story and it grabbed your interest. And, let’s say there was a system in place where you could automatically pay five cents to read that story by clicking on the headline. Perhaps you could even make that payment anonymously. Wouldn’t that be a good deal? You get quality content easily and the New York Times can add up a bunch of digital nickels into a profit on that article.
The fantasy of instituting micropayments as a possible business model for online publishers is, at best, a prayer. Part of the problem that was identified is obviously that physical newspapers are a poor method of distribution. Unfortunately, the bigger problem with many newspapers is the lack of, well, a business model. Print media has been asleep at the wheel for the past 10 years on the interwebs. As a result, the precedence set forth by publishing content for free on the web, kills off any sort of idea that a “micropayment” system can actually be realistic or profitable. I don’t think that a micropayment model for online news is very analogous to an iTunes-like model because the end to end distribution platform wouldn’t be present.
When most people have been reading news for free for so long through various sources, if a paywall goes up, people migrate elsewhere. General news is such a commodity today, with a multitude of choices, there usually isn’t a compelling reason to pay for a single source. Also, with the advent of copy+paste, it’s even harder to find a reason to pay when the most important snippets of an article will show up on blogs.
I don’t think killing off print right away is smart. While the margins are probably small and have decreased immensely the past couple years, there is still a lot of revenue generated from the advertising in print. Unfortunately, the byproduct has been a large number of layoffs in order to keep certain margin numbers. Going completely online for a print media company isn’t necessarily a savior. So when the Rocky Mountain went down, even if they went completely online, it won’t miraculously save them. The fundamental business model for the future of news just isn’t there.
There still hasn’t been a compelling way to make money online for content providers, but I do believe there are ways beyond ineffective display ads to generate some revenue.
