There has been a great deal of discussion about the future of analog (print) media and many predictions of its imminent demise in the near future. There has been even more discussion of how news and online content sites will make enough money to be self sustainable. After all, the majority of online media is re-purposed analog content. If paying for content can be made as simple and straight forward as using EasyPass, then why not for all online media? Here is a link to a great article from Time that a colleague recently sent me which, if you haven’t already read it, is definitely worth your time; http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html. Past attempts to enable microtransactions and micropayments at Beans, Flooz and DigiCash all failed, but perhaps the dire circumstances of today’s economy and death knell of print might renew efforts to make micropayments a possibility. If print dies, how can quality journalism continue in it's online iteration without meaningful revenue to support compensating journalists?
As they say ‘timing is not a city in China’ … if the ability to sustain and fund quality journalism, meaningful citizen journalist contributions, and the preservation of investigative reporting is at stake, what are the media waiting for? A key component to the success of microtransactions, in my opinion, would be the need for the entire industry to adopt this approach across the board, and as quickly as possible weaning the reading public off the free dole. Give the readers a choice of a monthly subscription like the WSJ Online or on a per-story transactional basis. For micropayments to be accepted, and more importantly adopted by the public, several key conditions would need to be present; it would have to be easy to enroll; it would have to be singularly useable across most applications, for most content sites; and it would have to be cheap (my guess is $.05 to $.10 per article). So my question for today; can microtransations save journalism?
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