Would You Pay To Read This?

February 15, 2009

There's a lot of talk within the journalism profession these days about how to get people to pay for content on the internet when almost all of it can be accessed for free.

Newspaper companies across the nation are quickly going broke as they sink financial resources into quality journalism and photography for their websites praying that they can sell enough advertising banners on their websites to pay for it all.

The problem is that they can't.

And with the economy dragging everyone down like a spider-web weighted with a rock, marketers have cut their marketing budgets, making the newspapers' bottom line look even more in the red than it was before.

Add to the newspapers' problem a little thing called Google.

Google likes to make everything accessible to everyone and doesn't play favorites when it comes to how it organizes its search engine results for something newsy like say, "Buffalo plane crash."

You type those words into Google search and the first result was a link to the China News, then the London Free Press, then several from Yahoo's news aggregator and THEN, at fifth place in line, the Los Angeles Times.

Google is the internet's great democratizer. Just because the New York Times may be the Old Gray Lady of journalism doesn't mean she's going to get in the front row.

So, when you think about it, Google plays fair. But that's not what the traditional newspapers have been used to for over a hundred years.

Not only are they taking a blow to their bottom line on the web, but now, the web, which is essentially "Google", let's face it, is deflating their egos at the same time (and making a crap load of money at it.)

And they're starting to get pissed.

Now they have an idea to start charging website visitors iTunes-like micropayments to view news articles (thus, the focus of a recent TIME Magazine cover story, seen above.)

Up until recently, there's been a number of venture capital-backed companies that have tried to get this idea off the ground but to no avail.

But now, internet financial processing software has come far enough where it could possibly work and make the pay-for-read experience for us consumers relatively easy to experience.

The idea would be to have you sign up on the newspaper or magazine's website with your credit/debit card information and as you moved around the web site and saw something you wanted to read, you would click on a "Purchase" button and the 99cent payment (called micropayments) would automatically be deducted from your account, just as it is on ITunes, Amazon or Snocap.

It sounds like it would work, right?

The problem, as with music, is that the majority of the public are used to getting this content for free so how are we going to train them to start paying for it (again?)

In all honesty, I'm really not too sure.

One theory is that if you just go and lock up all of your web content behind such a payment system, you may lose 50% of your regular website traffic, but the other 50% that would begin to pay for your content, piece-by-piece, would more than make up in revenue what you lost in advertising dollars because your web traffic declined.

It could work but it's risky and a lot of major companies don't like taking risks.

Like the American auto industry.

What's the rule in business?

If you don't risk, you die.

But, let's say that they could get us to start paying for articles and photographs and charts and such, what would it mean then for financially-successful, news-linking sites like the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and tons of blogs all over the internet?

They could get crushed.

Because they couldn't just link to a free article anymore. Nor, could they just copy and paste articles onto their own websites.

Or could they?

If newspapers and magazines try and lock up their content behind micropayments, wouldn't it just encourage people to "steal" the content and post if on their websites for free?

Would there have to be an RIAA for journalism organized to go after these pirate sites?

To sue them and take them to court for copyright-infringement?

Well, we know how well that has worked…

I dunno, you tell me what you think.

Is journalism worth paying for?

Or are old, romantic ideas of the career of a journalist gone forever?