If anyone from FeedBurner is reading, let me know what you think of this..
The concept of micropayments has been around for a long time. Simply, a charge is placed upon a page or, say, 1 cent, and the content producer collects a share of what's paid by the people who read the page. Rather than pay for each page individually, everything's handled automatically, and with more visitors comes more cash. If 100,000 people hit a 1 cent page, that's a total of $1000, of which you might end up with half. Simple.
In this world of blogs and RSS, however, I'm beginning to think we should be looking at microsubscriptions. They'd be a bit like subscribing to a magazine, except applied to blogs. Rather than pay $10 or more each month, a feed might make itself available for just 25 cents a month. With a few thousand readers, this would convert into at least a few hundred dollars a month for the content provider, enough to keep many part-time hobbyist blogs afloat.
The great thing about this idea is that it's far easier to construct than a regular page-based micropayment system. A company like FeedBurner, say (they have the audiences already), could offer this feature to both content providers and content users, and manage the money transfers. As a subscriber you could load $10 onto your FeedBurner account, and that lets you subscribe to whichever premium feeds you want. Based on the price of certain feeds, the money is debited from your balance and given to the content providers. Everyone's happy. Subscribers get better, more up to date content, while spending mere pennies, and content providers get an extra revenue stream.
I can think of at least 10 blogs I'd pay 25 cents a month to read, especially if they were to improve because of it. Someone.. implement this!
(Update: An extension to this idea.. have a 'full text' no-ad version run through the microsubscription service, and an excerpt-only, advertising funded version on the other.)
Technorati Tags: feedburner, feeds, micropayments, microsubscriptions, rss
I can't make my mind up on this idea. One side of me says this is a great idea, but then I think why should I pay for content when it's already free?
I can think of a number of blogs that I would consider paying for, but how do I know a blog's content is worth paying for?
What happen's if you only read half the content for that month from a particular blog? I know it only works out at 12.5 cents, but that's 12.5 cents that could have went towards reading another blog.
Great blog btw Peter!
Posted by: Matthew Lang at September 5, 2006 04:05 PMI would certainly pay some money for the Peter Cooper microsubscription. I enjoy reading your blog - you almost always have fresh content!
Posted by: Nick Gray at September 5, 2006 04:56 PMmaybe you should start this as an open source rails project
Posted by: wildster at September 5, 2006 05:09 PMIt wouldn't make much sense, unfortunately, wildster. It's an infrastructure and community problem rather than one of technology. A company like FeedBurner could add this sort of functionality within weeks. It's just a case of turning on the right options and doing the billing.
Posted by: Peter Cooper at September 5, 2006 05:20 PMI would also pay some money to read your blog, and a bunch of others aswell.
It would be a great thing for those bloggers who really have a large amount of readers.
The only problem I can think of, is the fact that there is alot of people who wouldnt pay to read content, that they think should be free. And if they stop reading and contributing maybe the blogs will stop evolving? Dont know if that's a fact but. That was the thing that jumped in to my head at once, when I read this post.
Posted by: Johan Bergström at September 5, 2006 10:55 PMI remember I once had a shareware program for sound editing, which used to count the clicks I made and then the total I “owed” them, each click was a cent or maybe 0.1 cent I don’t remember.
I later uninstalled it, but if I was a heavy user, this would be a model I think could work. How about “charging” someone $0.05 for every article they read (click through to the content) in the rss and letting them have a simple mechanism to pay it when the bill goes to couple of dollars. They don’t have to pay, but those who do pay get into some VIP program with early access to content etc.
Posted by: Oron at September 6, 2006 08:20 AMReturn to the homepage.
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