{"id":5035,"date":"2024-11-01T22:53:09","date_gmt":"2024-11-02T05:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=5035"},"modified":"2024-11-02T22:19:14","modified_gmt":"2024-11-03T05:19:14","slug":"micropayments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2024\/11\/01\/micropayments\/","title":{"rendered":"Micropayments Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of an unrelated article, <\/a><\/em>Steven Levy responds to a question from one of his readers (not actually me despite the name coincidence)<\/p>\n

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Ask Me One Thing<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

Alan asks, \u201cWhy can\u2019t we choose how to pay for online content?\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks for the question, Alan. It\u2019s one that baffles me, too. I do have little tolerance for those who complain when they come across articles that are behind a paywall. At one point, kiddies, everything was in print and you could read\u00a0nothing<\/em> for free unless you stood in the newstand and consumed it, hoping the proprietor wouldn\u2019t snatch it away. Folks, it costs money to produce those gems. Admittedly, the news industry didn\u2019t do itself any favors initially by giving its content away online, but now most, if not all, places have abandoned the idea that digital ads alone can fund excellent writing and reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But you are complaining about the lack of choice in how we pay for it. I\u2019m assuming you are unhappy that our current system is subscription or nothing. There\u2019s generally no way to pay a small fee for a single article or even newsletter. How many times have you found a link to something in a newspaper in a town you never visited that might be of interest\u2014and can\u2019t get at it without giving up a credit card to be charged for complete access to news and archives you couldn\u2019t care less about? Literally for decades I have been assuming that an easy-to-use micropayment system will get constructed and implemented. The technical challenges are minimal. Yet despite multiple attempts,\u00a0none has caught on<\/a>. One company,\u00a0Blendle<\/a>, once promised to \u201csave journalism\u201d with its micropayment system. Last year it announced that it was no longer in the pay-per-article business and was moving to an Apple News\u2013style subscription service that gives access to multiple publications.<\/p>\n

The micropayment solution\u00a0seems dead<\/a>. Still, when I hit a paywall and can\u2019t access something I want to read, I would certainly hit a button that would move a few cents, or in some cases even a dollar or two, into the account of a publication. It seems so logical. But as all of us know too well, making sense is not a sufficient condition for something actually happening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The last link there is to a Wired article from 5years ago<\/a> in which the author expresses exactly the same concern that no micropayment solution has caught on but without any explanation of why that should be the case. The earlier link, though, to a Columbia Journalism Review article from a year later<\/a> gives more analysis of why the idea may truly be dead. And that is what I want to question here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CJR article presents two main arguments for why micropayments are not accepted by publishers. One is the belief by publishers that, of potential readers who are interested in an item, the expected income from those who can be persuaded to buy an expensive subscription (despite preferring a one item payment) is greater than the loss of those who will just turn away. The other has to do with the costs of payment processing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of an unrelated article, Steven Levy responds to a question from one of his readers (not actually me despite the name coincidence) Ask Me One Thing Alan asks, \u201cWhy can\u2019t we choose how to pay for online … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5035"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5042,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions\/5042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}