A few days ago I argued that News Corp was ill-advised to put its newspaper websites behind a paywall and beyond the reach of Google. I as reminded today - as the Times announces a date for its paywall to go up - that personally I must concede one exception to this argument. As I have mentioned here before I buy the Times on Saturday to read Giles Coren's "restaurant review" (in which he does now seem to visit and comment on a restaurant every single week, a submission to restaurant reviewing orthodoxy which I regard mostly with scepticism) and for that reason alone. If the Times is willing to sell me those two pages and just those two pages, online or off, for anything less than the pound it currently charges me for the whole Saturday paper I will cheerfully pay up. (Of course, its advertisers may become more wary of paying to reach 600,000 daily readers if everyone is finally forced to admit that some of those readers are only reading two pages of the magazine supplement and not likely, therefore, to pay much attention to the car ads on page seven of the bit they threw away unexamined. Still, that's digital fragmentation for you.)
So when Techdirt points out that the various surveys saying people will (or alternatively won't) pay for content online are a lot less reliable than seeing what happens when someone actually starts charging*, I have to agree. Would I pay for content online? Yes, under one extremely hypothetical commercial model. Do I think that model will ever be made available to me? Almost certainly not. So what's the right answer to the very general question "will I pay for content online?" I guess it's a maybe or a probably not.
*We already know this bit from long experimentation, of course - all the readers go away. Still, the last experiments in this field were carried out several years ago before everyone spent their time online playing on social networks, listening to music and watching streaming video, so it would be easy to argue that the circumstances have changed significantly. Got worse, specifically, from the point of view of charging for content. But getting worse is still a change.
until we have true electronic cash, and the ability that brings to make micropayments at the click of a mouse, I fear that charging for micro-content is not going to work.
are people really going to tudge through that verified-by-visa mullarkey to pay 30p? Not many.
Posted by: botogol | 24 November 2009 at 14:40