As a follow up to Dan’s post, reading all of the suggestions to save newspapers has given me a strong sense of déjà vu.
Near the end of the dot-com bubble, there was a moment when lots of ad-supported startups, upon realizing that the VC spigot was going dry and under pressure from investors to come up with an alternate revenue stream, seized upon e-commerce as their holy grail (others, meanwhile, tried to reposition themselves as B2B companies). My employer, an ad-supported gaming site, launched a “store” where users could buy .. well, I was never sure what, exactly, or why they would buy it from us. One of my coworkers posed the question directly to the CEO: Was there any evidence at all that our users wanted this store, or were we doing it for our own reasons? He got his answer a few months later when management shut down the store and laid off most of the people who had been working on it. There may have been a start-up somewhere that successfully grafted an e-commerce option onto an existing ad-supported business, but I’m not aware of it.
Lately, I’ve been getting the exact same vibe from the people proposing micropayments or cartel-enforced paywalls. It’s an idea born of desperation, focused on the needs of the business rather than of consumers.
Shirky nails it:
Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions. The conversation about small payments is also not a normal part of the conversation among publishers. Instead, the word “micropayment” is a trope for desperation, entering the vernacular of a given media market only after threats to older models become visibly dire …
The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition. News that this has been tried many times in the past and has not worked is unwelcome precisely because if small payment systems won’t save existing publishers in their current form, there might not be a way to save existing publishers in their current form (an outcome generally regarded as unthinkable by existing publishers.)
Not only does it not offer consumers anything they want, it cripples a key functionality of the Internet: the ability to share, link to or blog about news stories. Read the rest of this entry »
