What ever happened to micropayments?
Or why are paywalls so high?
Seems like most worthwhile content (and much that is marginal) is behind a paywall these days. If you click a link to an article in the FT, WSJ, NYT or even BI a “subscribe for access” message comes up in your face.
As a writer myself I’m all for supporting the work people do in order to inform or entertain us. But the models seem to have evolved very little over the years despite a broad range of enabling technologies being “on the shelf” for decades.
There are more “leaky” paywalls out there that attempt to provide “casual and free” users a small number of articles before asking them to pay up. There are ways for people to game that system for more articles but it feels wrong to do that if have the means to subscribe.
Today it came up with an article in the FT that some people were discussing. The FT has a hard paywall.
They do offer a cheap trial as most of the large media companies do but why insist on this level of commitment to read a single article? Sure you can do the trial and mark your calendar to cancel it. But some of these companies don’t let you cancel online so you have to call them and fend off multiple requests to continue your subscription. And if you forget? POW! $69 a month. No thanks.
If I was a news junkie I’d be paying over $200 month to read the major papers?!? I guess one could save with annual plans and maybe cut it down to $1000 a year to read the papers. This doesn’t make sense.
Of course we have advertising (ugh) which is one way to monetize without the friction of asking for payment but this apparently is not enough to support quality content online.
The other scheme that has failed repeatedly is the “joint subscription” where people pay one subscription fee for multiple publications and/or authors and at the end of the month the monies are apportioned based on views or reads. The concept has survived on some popular sites like Seeking Alpha but they also rely on subscriptions for their business model to work.
We’ve had micropayment technology in different incarnations since at least 1997 or so. It’s better now thanks to the evolution of the payments infrastructure and ubiquity of companies like Google. There is the Brave browser that was implementing something like the Basic Attention Token (BAT) that could be used as a mechanism for micropayments (both ways actually.)
In some ways Substack and Medium have played around with this. For example I pay for quite a few subscriptions that are only a few dollars a month to support authors that I read regularly. It’s not quite micropayments but it’s getting closer.
It would be easy for some collection of technology companies to do this. For example Square and Google or Visa and Microsoft, take your pick. There is a “chicken egg” problem here so they’d need to get at least a couple of the major media companies on board to launch it.
Think of it as a digital wallet for use in buying content online. You fund it with some amount of money and it sits in the browser. When you go to read an article at the FT an additional pop-up tells you that you can just read it for 15c and it gets debited.
Today we know that subscriptions are necessary for content providers to make a living but we’re still missing a useful tool to make casual consumption more practical.