Micropayments certainly won't hurt

Last week, I wrote a post called Could micropayments save the news business? [1] I was being a bit provocative of course. I don't believe any one idea is going to save the news business or provide reliable income for online content providers who are looking for a steady (any) income stream, but I don't necessarily agree with Robin Wauters, who wrote in TechCrunch recently:

"Information is now a commodity, so deal with it. And yes, it should be free to end users."

I don't believe it's quite that simple. All information is not created equal. Certainly news has become a commodity of sorts, but even there, if you offer a higher level of quality, and dare I say accuracy, do you have a right to charge a little for the content? How about if you take it a level above the run of the mill offerings out there. If you're reporting what everyone is reporting, sure it should be free, but if you have analysts and reporters who can dig deeper to find underlying stories, would the public pay for that? Would there be a market for "premium content?" I think there could be, even if it's a small one.

In the end, micropayments alone probably won't save journalism or online content in general. There are too many free options, but even if just a small, loyal base of subscribers is willing to pay for that extra stuff, it could be part of a diversified income stream that helps traditional print publications (and other online publishers) make money. As Seth Godin wrote recently in the blog post "Too Much Free, [2]" free content begins to lose its intrinsic value after a while. Could charging a small fee restore that value?

A few years ago, a local college decided to lower its prices to be more affordable. What it found was that fewer students applied because they equated the lower cost with lower quality. Perhaps online content providers could learn a lesson here and find that there is a market out there somewhere for paid content, too. We won't know until we try, and there is certainly nothing lost by experimenting with different models.

For more information:
- see Robin Wauters Tech Crunch post [3] on Micropayments