On one hand it’s useful to know exactly when the page expires and I can’t purchase tickets anymore, and on the other hand it raises my blood pressure.

I wonder whether Rupert Murdoch should add such a countdown to his web estate. The Sunday Times could give you 5 minutes free per article, and charge you 10-20p if you wanted to read more. That way, people could still link to and visit articles via Facebook, but would eventually have to pay for what they really want to read.

Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh.

Full article: If the future’s worth having, it won’t be free

This is very much in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell’s book review in the New Yorker (where the illustration is from) of Chris Anderson’s book, Free.

Both Purves and Gladwell maintain that the advertising industry simply isn’t big enough to support expensive content such as investigative journalism. Anderson on the other hand maintains that in the future, most things will be free for the consumer and funded by advertising.

On both sides of the argument, the debate seems to be based more on dogma than data. Where is the emperical data that shows whether the ad industry can or cannot support a future of free? It would be refreshing if the debate would become more rigorous and scientific rather than being based on gut instict.

1. Subscribe to the column online for a year for £50,
2. subscribe for a month for £10 or,
3. 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.

Peter Day has been spending some time in Iceland and has produced two excellent episodes of his In Business radio show from “the island that went bust” as he puts it. The first episode was Iceland feels the chill and the second one was Iceland: Women.

Strangely, both episodes somehow sound optimistic. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the first episode Halldór Eyjólfsson, former fisherman and CEO of 66 Degrees North, says that his company’s ads, shown above, explain the Icelandic character: “Some people say they are sad, but they’re not sad. They are fighting. They are survivors. They are living on the edge of where it’s feasible to live and they are surviving.” In fact, I know that facial expression very well. It’s how you look when the wind chill is -20° celcius.

The second episode is about the investment fund Auður Capital. It was founded by two female heavy-weights from the Icelandic investment community, Halla Tómasdóttir and Kristín Jónsdóttir, and it has feminine oriented approach to investing. “We’re prepared to use our logical intelligence as well as our emotional intelligence when it comes to investing,” they say. Their main point is that any business that is either too male or female dominated loses out on the benifits of diversity.

The situation may be bleak at the moment, but there is optimism in the entrepreneurial circles. Various Icelandic start-ups are using the sudden availability of a vast talent pool to do some very interesting things. The country will without a doubt rise from the ashes stronger than it was before, with a more diverse source of income than previously when it relied so heavily on one sector, be it aluminum, banking or cod.

On his motives he writes:

if you think I’m only writing this because I’m part of the cosy, metropolitan, liberal, intellectual elite, well, of course I am. What else would I be? Who else do you think works in the media? What do you want? Your papers and TV made by provincial, draconian, philistine nonentities?

If you haven’t heard of the Ross/Brand scandal; never mind and consider yourself lucky.