Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Carr Hopping and Jay Walking
Our pal and ace media reporter at NYT David Carr comments on the new pay plan here. 'People who remain reflexively bullish on free ignore that fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content." And now, after pausing to actual study the plan, Jay Rosen talks to NPR about it here (text and audio), taking a more critical view. -- Greg Mitchell
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Micropayments
ReplyDeleteSomebody can refresh my recollection on this, but years ago I think there was a company or group investigating whether a micropayment system could be devised to charge pennies and fractions of a penny to Web users when accessing content. Apparently it died, but maybe somebody could bring it back to life in view of the fact that Twitter can handle 100s of millions of tiny 140-character transactions a day.
I mention it for this reason:
Personally, I am extremely unlikely to go along with adding a flat monthly subscription fee to my credit card so that I can see more than 10 (or whatever) New York Times articles a month. I already have too many "small" monthly fees (invariably $9.99, or more, it seems) charged to my credit card and I would like to see fewer of them.
They can get out of control, you know. When the Washington Post and the Commercial Appeal and virtually every other content provider starts charging similar "small" monthly fees, as they are likely to do once NYT sets the precedent, it's game over for me.
Here's my idea: If NYT wanted to charge me pennies per article from the very first article, I think I'd be much more willing to consider that idea. I'd feel that was fair, since it was totally proportional to my use. Hopefully there'd be a way to warn me (mouse-hover message?) before I click the link -- and that's where the W3C would come in, by adding something to the HTML5 standard for the warning.
Just saying.
...Adding: If the NYT wants to go ahead and do something stupid and immediately get booed out of the stadium -- thereby scaring everybody else away from charging and keeping the Web free for ten more years -- I'd be okay with that, too.