(iverson's) currentbuzz: Sensible approach to audience choice.

From Editor and Publisher comes this short, sweet discussion of unbundling media on cable and for online news sites. The author lives in France and so backs up assertions about the cost of choice from actual experience. And what is the point of the story? Micropayments make sense for an industry whose business is information or "content."

I get three papers delivered to my house each day. I spend at least two hours per day looking at news online (FYI-- I don't watch TV and that gives me more time to read in print and online) and it is the story that is of interest to me, not the "paper" or the "site."

If I could ante up an amount each month and put it in an electronic wallet that had parameters I could set, for example, buy a story at any price from .001 to 10 cents without notifying me. For any story that cost $5 or more, notify me-- you get the idea. You would trade off the opportunity cost of quick views and no interruption,with not wanting to be surprised at the end of the month that some article was very costly. I would want warnings when my wallet was getting empty. That is how micropayments would work in a very gross fashion.

John Perry Barlow's "Old Wine in New Bottles" put out the idea of the computer "widget" that you could put into a file, launch it on the web, and have it "call home" like ET. There are programs that will let you have a copy of a file for a set time limit, after which it self-destructs. These are both tools that would go into a micropayments system at some level.

The reason I don't watch TV is that free TV is mainly long advertising interrupted by short commercials, and that cable packages make me take something I don't want to patronize (e.g. Disney) and don't let me easily get the few channels I would want. If we can ever as a body politic free ourselves of the yoke of corporation control and actually move toward open market operations as in the FCC mandating "menu choices" for cable, I will happily buy the channels I will use. As someone who hates waste, I don't like to consider paying for electrons I may never activate.

Then I thought about all the online news I read for free. Because of the freedom of choice I have online, I realized immediately that I would never pay for subscriptions as my wallet is not bottomless and I thrive on Internet news choice.
But if a system was set up that I would pay per article without really thinking about it only to have my combined news reading added to my monthly Internet bill which would then be directed to the pockets of the publications I had read, I figured that wouldn’t pose much of a problem.

It’s only fair to give a little back to the people who provide you with quality information as long as they leave you freedom of choice. Don’t you think?

Source: editorsweblog.org