Yesterday I attended the local National Union of Journalists meeting near Euston to give a talk on using the web to help journalists, and a common topic for discussion, both at the meeting and in the pub afterwards, was how you can monetise your writing whilst at the same time raising your profile.
I’m a huge fan of blogging, and certainly for the profile raising role they play, but they are difficult to monetise. One member told a story of someone being offered $10 for a single blog post. Not really enough to live on.
Obviously paywalls have been used to varying degrees by large publishers in an attempt to move away from relying solely on advertising revenue to support their website, and thus their writers. The problem is, unless you have huge traffic numbers it’s very unlikely you’ll get much from advertising.
Micropayments have long been touted as an alternative source of income for the humble blogger. They’d allow blogs to have a kind of tip jar on their site, and readers could pay a small sum (or indeed a large one) for any content they found useful or interesting.
A drawback to this notion is that there has never really been an easy way to make micropayments, or indeed for bloggers to collect them. Plus of course many will argue that the cat is already out of the bag and that people are now so used to getting content for free that they will never again pay for reading online. It forces/encourages many online writers to blog for the ‘fame’ and then use that fame to gain speaking engagements or book deals or consulting gigs, which is where they make their money.
Alas, Google haven’t given up on the idea of micropayments, and have launched a new system via their Google Wallet service that aims to help writers and bloggers earn money from their work. The system is currently in testing via DK, Peachpit and Oxford University Press and will see people buying articles for between $.25 and $.99 each.
The way it works is that the reader will get a portion of the article for free, with a banner hiding the rest. The banner will display the price for unveiling the remainder of the article and a simple way of paying to see the content. You can see a screenshot of how it will look below.
It’s an interesting development for sure, but I’m still far from convinced that people will pay, even small sums, to read content online. Hopefully the system will be rolled out on a wider scale before too long though and it can be put to the test.
Would you pay a micropayment to read content? How should bloggers and online journalists be paid?
It's a nice idea, but I can't really ever see it taking off. As you say, people have grown so used to getting great content for free now, I think the genie is out of the bottle.
Here’s a rundown of the main features of the program btw:
Buy web pages individually. Your users can buy exactly what they want, with typical prices ranging from 25¢ to 99¢.
Instant Refund if they don’t like the content. Help users feel comfortable buying your web content by offering them an “Instant Refund” within 30 minutes if they aren’t happy with it. There are checks in place to prevent excessive refunding.
Long preview content. Provide free preview content to give users a feel for what the rest of the content will be like. Search engines rank articles based on the free preview content (not the paid content), so you should make the preview reasonably long in order to rank well.
Rich obfuscated content. Let your users know what they can buy, by showing them a rich obfuscated version of the rest of the page.
Single secure payment method. Let users buy web content using the same Google Wallet account they already use to pay for content across all Google properties.
Provide perpetual access. Once your users buy content, they own it forever. Google provides an archive service help you provide perpetual access, even if your web site ceases to exist.
Compatible with ads. By running ads alongside the preview content, you can get an ad impression even if a user doesn’t buy the content.
I'm not sure to be honest. Obviously I think people should be paid for their efforts, but equally I'm so used to getting things for free now. Maybe I can just click on the ads now and then instead?
Andrea, there are micropayment systems like Znak it! http://www.znakit.com that offer users instant access to paid content without charge, in exchange for a click on sponsoring ads. And it works 🙂
Interesting, thanks for sharing. What do the advertisers think of the system? Are they happy with the returns they get?
Very much so, as they pay for real clicks or data by real people and impressions are free. The cost per click is not very high either — after all we are talking micropayments.
It does not work for everyone though. The best results are with mini-surveys: like/don't like; agree/disagree, etc. as users do not want to spend too much time to get to the content they want.
We laugh that Stewart Brand's famous "Information wants to be free; and, it wants to be expensive" conundrum has been solved — you can have both ways 🙂 But only with Znak it!
Reasonable prices + Convenient Payment Method is a money sucker – I know this from Amazon Kindle.
Some kind of micropayment/pay-as-you-go scheme has got to be the way to get us out of the current mess of advertising we're currently in, and reward people for producing quality content
Not sure the prices really work do they? I mean lets work out things for a typical newspaper, or even journal. Paper costs say £1. I might read 25 articles in that paper, so 4p per article.
Not much is it?
The thing for me is whether there is a strong enough adoption of Google Wallet to make this work. It's yet another sneaky ploy by Google to get people into the Google web, because surely publishers will want to use something like this to raise money.
This is done routinely for academic papers. You get the citation and pay for the article. So clearly it depends on the content.
Really interesting post, Adi. I'd agree with lots of the comments made prior to me in that it will boil down to ease of payment, quality of content and pricing. For a really good article, written by a respected author, I would certainly pay $0.25 or $0.99, if it's an easy process. I think iTunes, Amazon and a few others picked up on this already, and it works great.
Yes, we are used to free content, so this makes for a certain psychological barrier. But we are also OK paying when we perceive the added value, which is the real issue. Time will tell, and I will follow what happens with this project. Or keep us posted on your blog 😉
It's certainly an interesting one. Obviously with buying a song from iTunes or somewhere you get multiple usage from it. I can see this maybe working if you get multiple usage from an article, ie its a reference piece or something, but for a 1 time read? Time will tell, but it will underline the importance of good branding I think.
It'll be interesting to see the results once it rolls out.
I think if websites like Mashable starting applying this for premium content and not all, they might make a good go of it.
I suppose if it's something I really want then yes I will pay for it, and I'm sure others will too. It won't hurt to try it out…
I suppose that's the thing. I'm not sure Mashable would do that well because what they publish is often published in lots of other places too. If you can get stuff for free elsewhere, would you pay for it at Mashable? I'm not so sure.
Hmmm great point Adi.
Very interesting Adi.
I am looking for ways to make blogging pay as well.