Chase pinned a great article a few hours ago from the Media Decoder blog over on the New York Times that ruminated on a leak from Google indicating their supposed plans to roll out a “one-click payment system for content called ‘Newspass’” (if you’re unfamiliar with Decoder, you’re missing out on some great content about the future of the news industry. You can follow it here, and I highly recommend that you do).
The system, as real or fictional as it may prove to be, isn’t alone in concept or execution. A number of other entities, including Journalism Online, a venture that recently received additional backing from Rupert Murdoch, are jumping into the news payments game. While it may seen inevitable that subscription models will make their way to the web, the prospect of these products attaining long-term viability is tenuous but not completely out of the question.
While it’s easy to knock the subscription model as a legitimate revenue source – after all, it’s never been the way newspapers stayed afloat – there’s some reason to think that it may fit the online model better than the print model. Chris Anderson, in his controversial but insightful book Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price, makes the contention that bytes (digital content) are fundamentally different than atoms (printed content). Since bytes are produced once and copied, distributed, and replicated at a price that’s always approaching zero, our traditional business models inherently fail.
There’s no cost per unit for producing a story on the internet, as there’s no additional paper, ink, delivery costs, or distribution fees associated with each additional copy. So what we’re essentially receiving when we read a news story is not a product but a service. We may not pay for the news itself, but are we willing to pay for the service of news? If so, the subscription model makes perfect sense. We already pay for the service of television, the service of internet, the service of the health club and, increasingly, the service of mobile data. But we’re not quite ready to pay for the service of news. Why is that?
This is where both a unified payment system and some bright young entrepreneurs come into play. The payment system is an obvious but significant hurdle to paid content. It’s awfully hard to get someone to take out their credit card and type 15 digits into a web form, for reasons that relate to both financial security and user experience (have you ever forgone an online purchase because your wallet was in the other room? You’re not alone…). In order for web content to survive a subscription basis, someone needs to make this as easy as possible, and many, including Google, will try. There’s an obvious model to follow in Apple’s iTunes store, but that company has always possessed the rare superpower of being able to pry thousands of dollars from innocent, unsuspecting victims who then turn around and shower the thieves with praise. To steal a phrase from New York governor David Paterson, on planet Apple, there is no gravity and light bends right around Cupertino…
But assuming someone solves the credit card challenge, and assuming our hypothesis about news as a service is correct, there’s one fundamental problem that remains to be solved. No one has yet to make the news experience pleasurable in all the ways the internet makes possible. We’re stuck in a half-integrated world, where newspapers exist as strange islands drowning in an online sea. To make a long story short – the service isn’t that good. We’ve come to expect more of our online content, and I think we deserve it. Want to publish a print version online and make me visit your poorly designed destination site? Fine with me. Want me to pay for that service? Think again.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, a different scenario. A scenario where content is delivered to you by a hand-picked group of curators who can provide filtration, context, and added value. A scenario where you’re rewarded for providing opinions and adding perspective to content that’s judged on merit alone, regardless of the size of the publication that produced it. A scenario where publishers, advertisers, and readers all work together to create value for each other in a way that’s unobtrusive and beneficial for all. That’s the future of Pinyadda, and we’re building it, together, right now. Come join us.
Read more about Newspass here and here. Who do you think will win the news payment war? Will it be Google, Rupert, or some other upstart? Let us know in the comments.
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