Why we don’t subscribe to Rupert Murdoch, and why we need a new kind of money
New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.
And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.
(I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)
No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?
Well subscription won’t work because newspapers are not niche, not strictly professional (like N.M.A) and definitely not exclusive. Hell, the competition’s free and these days it’s as good if not better than organised, editorialised, branded journalism. I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth? You can’t buy my loyalty Mr Murdoch, there’s no value in it for me.
There’s a massive failure of imagination here. We’ve said (again and again) that newspapers and magazine publishers have to make the shift from product to service and until they do that they’ll have nothing to charge for. The web isn’t a walled garden either (with a pay booth) and journalism no longer has to be collected into a proprietorial framework. Spot.us is just one interesting example of an alternative and imaginative approach to making a living out of journalism without the need for Rupert Murdoch’s capital or his distribution network. Spot.us works by popular commissioning. It might fill a gap left by dying newspapers using a business model invented for the social media age. Here’s the elevator pitch:
Spot.us is a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us journalists can pitch ideas or the public can commission investigations that they then fund with tax deductible donations. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Spot.us aside, it’s not just a question of imagination. There’s also a failure of money. Everyone’s complaining that they can’t monetise social media and one reason is that incremental value is very small. Money’s magic is wearing thin when it doesn’t work as a medium of exchange in a massively fragmented world. How do I buy little bits of things with very marginal value (even bits of Guardian, bits of Times).
If a credit/debit card is the only option then it’s simple: I don’t. The social web requires something different to ordinary money, it needs a new currency measured in 100ths or 10ths of cents or pennies that allows us to make simple choices with an ambient mechanism, so that people can choose to acquire tidbits with real value at a fair price, with ease and security.
The debit card, just as it starts to replace cash money on the street, isn’t working on the net. Interestingly, there’s one system that’s already geared up to micropayments (except we need nanopayments) and that’s the billing mechanism for mobile phones. We need Mcash on the net please. Rupert needs it too (truck loads, probably).
About the author
William is strategy director and founding partner at Made by Many. This came about after a career in journalism, investment banking and brand strategy revealed method in its madness by plotting a path through the wicked problems of service design. William can also be found at twitter.com/wdowen.
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Comments (12)
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Responses (0)
This is a fascinating idea. What we would need is a standardised approach to making micro-payments through the browser. A technical solution, I mean.
Maybe something like the way that SSL works in Firefox: that green lozenge thing. A button that tells you that you need to pay for this piece of content, and the price of it.
You top up your Intartube Credits using using your credit/debit card with a certified payment bureau of choice, like Thawte or Verigsign for certification.
The browser just needs to implement a UI for this, and ensure that it can’t be gamed or hijacked through script or whatever.
There could also be an extension to HTTP so that the browser sends the evidence that you’ve paid for that content with the request.
All very idealistic, but technically feasible I think.
To help speed adoption, as with all these things, you’ll need the porn industry to get on board early doors and maybe see if Jacqui Smith’s husband fancies doing some beta testing.
James Higgs
May 12, 2009
at 2:53 pm
By far the most elegant solution for this already exists in iTunes for me. I, for one, rarely use iTunes itself…BUT, I did ‘once’ store a credit card in there for buying my first music tracks and now I regularly spend 59p/£1 or more on Apps. And in the new iPhone OS coming out later in the year, developers (or advertisers) will be able to sell social media items, news etc. WITHIN their apps. So perhaps an answer is to leverage a service provider who ALREADY has a billing relationship with the masses?
James Murfin
May 12, 2009
at 3:40 pm
A great idea (and will be even more feasible once you authenticate yourself to your browser rather than to individual sites), but possibly fraught with legal complications, especially across international borders.
In most countries it’s illegal to start a new currency, which is effectively what Intartube Credits would be, and it’s a good bet the FSA and other regulatory bodies would have something to say (they came down hard on Beenz.com way back in the day – anyone remember that?), not to mention issues around money laundering. What if you started earning your wages in Intartube Credits – how would governments collect taxes?
mattw
May 12, 2009
at 3:54 pm
Elin just sent me this: http://www.inamoon.com. Very interesting idea aimed at exactly the problem outlined here, but as they say, “We are currently in our chicken-and-egg phase”, as in a marketplace doesn’t work without both buyers and sellers.
william
May 12, 2009
at 4:20 pm
Also Stephen Dubner in the NYT’s Freakonomics: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/blnk/
mattw
May 12, 2009
at 5:00 pm
inamoon.com looks very interesting. I wonder though what their take-up rate is. Mcash is a great idea – and as James Murfin said, iTunes is a beginning, though I didn’t know you could store money in there and then use it piecemeal. Anyway, charging for journalistic pieces of work is tricky but it could work (when I think about each interested person paying even just 50p per article – it all adds up if a 1000 people buy it) – the key is you can’t charge for EVERYTHING, only articles that demonstrate a high potential to drum up enough interest to warrant charging for it. Which means mostly articles by well-known people, or extremely well-researched stuff. But the potential is there.
On that note, you should read this article if you haven’t already: http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/04/13/DIY-Currencies
Anjali Ramachandran
May 13, 2009
at 9:01 am
Nope. Sorry, but I can’t agree with most of your post. The foundation is flawed. Information (read: facts) indeed must be free, but publications must add value to that information. Readers (read: consumers) should pay for that value. If a publication cannot add that value, we will not pay. But if they DO add that value we will pay; it’s a simple time-honoured model. It’s the same as the restaurant model; given essentially the same access to basically the same ingredients, we each are very choosy about where we consume those ingredients based on how the chef adds value to them through method and composition.
This is not about trickle-payments for as-you-go browsing, it’s about consumers being willing to invest in their media outlets, and media outlets providing value that consumers are willing to invest in. Media has long undervalued their content output, because advertisers have been willing to subsidize the consumers. Would you eat at any restaurant where Parmalat or Kraft was subsidizing the meal?
The card on file at iTunes doesn’t mean you’ll want to pay everytime you stream some random song, all it does is provide a convenience for your choice about consumption. But choosing which media we each want to invest in is not about convenience, it’s about investment. You invest in the band you want to hear, the card on file only makes it a 1-click process; don’t confuse the two.
The problem with online media: pay nothing and that’s what you get. Any blog (including all 3 of mine) are worth exactly what you are being asked to pay for them. But I do hold the NY Times, the BBC, The New Yorker and others to a higher standard, and I would be willing to back my statement with cash…if only they would ask!
Cheers!
Tony
May 15, 2009
at 9:21 pm
I will pay for news. I do already: NYT, both paper and Kindle, WSJ, numerous subscriptions, etc. I also have donated/paid money to http://www.spot.us as I think it’s a terrific model.
Newspapers may go away, but the need for reporters won’t. And I’m willing to pay for them – the reporters – just tell me how.
Steve Wax
May 22, 2009
at 4:49 pm
Elin just sent me this: http://www.inamoon.com. Very interesting idea aimed at exactly the problem outlined here, but as they say, “We are currently in our chicken-and-egg phase”, as in a marketplace doesn’t work without both buyers and sellers.
PB
May 27, 2009
at 8:38 am
Social media is already disrupting the stranglehold of traditional proprietary broadcast media on the masses.
Making people pay monetarily for their content isn’t going to improve their situation.
The business model of charging for content is rapidly coming to an end, as people realize that it makes no sense to charge for something that’s free and instantly shareable.
Jonathan
June 16, 2009
at 3:46 am
I’ve been following this thread and thought you might be interested to read the comments of David Wheeldon, director of public affairs at BSkyB, on my fledgling blog at http://www.newtraditionalist.wordpress.com. The post is ‘Man bites dogma’.
Ian Thomas
June 16, 2009
at 5:56 pm
Thanks for all the comments. a few points to make here; firstly, in general:
I do think micropayments are an interesting and potentially valuable idea for small or incidental web transaction for which a credit or debit card is too much hassle. (Did somebody twitter Oyster for the net the other day?). But I also think it’s right that micropayments should be rubbished as nothing more than a great white hope for traditional publishers on the net. No form of subscription, however fragmentary, will solve the problems of companies who imagine they have a monopoly of news, fact or opinion, pushing content they ‘own’ at passive recipients.
@Ian Thomas, thanks for the link. It’s interesting that while media owners think of themselves as the providers of the content, they’re in fact more often the commissioners / aggregators / distributors of the content, hence the rise of the independent production company and fall of channel owners.
@Steve Wax. I agree spot.us is a very cool idea, one that could be made better by crowd sourcing the research. You can donate a news tip rather than money, but I wish there were tools – even a simple private message box – to help individuals assist the reporter online with any information they might have about the story being pitched or in progress. Is one last professional conceit getting in the way?
@james murfin, I agree, whoever provides the solution is more likely to be an existing service provider, that’s what made me think of mobile because it’s one place where that happens already, through your bill. In places like Kenya with unreliable real money supply mobile is already a form of currency. Right now it’s quite hard spending money on the net, even if you want to; iTunes shows how easy payment could be (if what you want’s available in the shop).
@tony, we are learning every day, more and more, that ‘time-honoured’ doesn’t mean invulnerable or good.
william
June 19, 2009
at 12:35 pm