I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay for content. The Web breaks apart for-pay models in different ways: people want content from more publishers than they can afford; and, people want to share.
Getting people to pay for content on the web is a tricky issue. Looking at it as a consumer, I don't mind paying, but to whom? "Walled gardens" tend to force you into a subscription model: pay "The Economist" (e.g.) annually and you have access to their content. In modern times, people read content from all over the place without respect for boundaries. Realistically, you will probably want content from more publishers than you can afford to pay in subscriptions.
Should publishers move to a model in which you pay per article? If so, how much? Do they price low ($0.10 USD) with the belief that more people will pay? Do writers get a percentage or flat rate? How is the quality of writing affected by each option?
How do we share content in a for-pay model? Communal reading and discussion is what people do. It's the same way with music. People share articles, music, and pictures with others who might be interested. In turn, sharing entices dialog and dialog entices relationship-building.
I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay. The Web opened up individuals to a much larger set of publishers. Publishers in turn tried to keep a subscriber model while trying to curtail the very human desire to share. Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.
I would never consider paying for the vast majority of web content. Fully 99.9% of what I see and read online is total shit dressed up with JavaScript.
The cold hard truth is that most content on the web isn't worth even 10 cents per read.
I agree that there is a poor signal-to-noise ratio for content on the web. When I wrote the response I had in mind professional journalists and writers; publishers like The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, ACM, etc.
>Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.
I don't see how that fundamentally solves the problem of how you pay content producers. For a business model to survive you need to extract something from the end user eventually. With ads there is this turtle stacking problem - revenue comes from a consumer buying something from a retailer > retailer pays for ads on a website.
So at the end of the day there is an exchange of money, just not between the content producer and the consumer. If the desire is to kill the relationship between content and ads then the content needs to capture the revenue through another means - sales of hardcover books (internal ads), subscription services etc... there really aren't that many models.
Publishers are already very available, and sharing exists. Different channels for paying authors don't.
It's possible that my observations won't solve the problem. But, we agree on the fundamental that content providers either need payment from the consumer or from ads or both.
Right now content publishers are often taking money from ad agencies in lieu of charging the consumer (no blinding revelation there). My assertion is that I'm more than willing to pay for content (as long as there are no ads), but I don't want to enter into subscription relationships with every content publisher I go to. I was also trying to implicitly state that I don't want to pay for a full issue of (for example) The Economist when I'm interested only in one article. Paper-based publications had to be that way; I'm skeptical that digital publications do.
Publishers who do allow per-article payment methods are often pricing individual articles so high that it would be impractical for me to pay for all the content I want to read.
I've been careful to use "publisher" because the publisher is often the proxy for the authors whose content we read. It may be that we need to enter into more direct relationships with authors rather than their proxies. It seems like we need an "App Store" for articles. It may make things worse, I'm not really sure.
Yea I get what you mean. I think that the system you describe would have a lot of friction in it, but if done right could be really useful.
On one side publishers get an easy to grok revenue stream and on the consumer side they get a better user experience.
I think it falls apart when you consider that adblock is becoming the norm and publishers are probably seeing pretty decent revenues from advertising.
Seems like it would have to be something where you pay $10 per month or whatever to see ad-free articles from publishers on the platform through a browser plugin. Seems too cumbersome though. Not sure - there could be a "disruptive" startup in there somewhere but I think it would have some pretty big challenges to overcome.
It's not hard to solve that problem ,theoretically.
Before an ad network serves me an ad, my reader app will see how much was paid for this ad, and will pay the sum for the removal of the ad. Of course there would be some settings menu defining the rules and amounts and behavior of this. And if i'm not willing to pay, i will be showed an ad.
Publishers could charge whatever they're getting net from advertising. I can't imagine that it would be very much. Use some micropayment system. "Google gold" or whatever ;)
Weird, I constantly see communities rush to give money if a site is in danger because of money. I am not talking about '50 social media experts write lists about memes' sites but websites that came and come to be by intrinsic motivation to create and share. Be it a site about bicycles, simulation games or a plant species no one ever heard of.
Solve that and you solve the cruft issue.