Way back in January 2006 I blogged about the crazy model the Independent was using to charge for online content. At the time, for someone who wanted to follow, for example, Simon Carr’s columns online, there were three options:
- Subscribe to the column online for a year for £50,
- subscribe for a month for £10 or,
- buy a single column for £1.
At the time you could buy the whole paper for 60p, 40% cheaper than a single online column. Unsurprisingly, the columns didn’t exactly fly off the digital shelves and eventually they started giving them away for free.
In all likelihood, this is not a good long-term solution. An annual survey run by Pew Research Center showed that in 2008, the Internet had become more popular than newspapers as the primary news source for US consumers. So, it hardly makes sense to use digital content as a loss leader to increase sales of the print edition. Soon enough, there will be no print edition. It also seems that banners, as effective as they actually are, aren’t enough to support proper journalism.
Enter: Google. It seems that they might start helping news outlets charge for their content by adding micropayments to Checkout, their payment platform. Surely, this is the way forward.
If Simon Carr’s column takes 2% of the real estate of one Independent issue, charge 3% of the newsstand price for it. Or give the columns away for free and charge for the investigative journalism.
Micropayments might actually end up saving journalism. And Google will take a cut. They seem to be taking a cut from a lot of business models these days.
