Comments on: Study: 33 Percent of Digitalist Bloggers Would Pay Steven Brill to Just Go Away

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:31:58 +0000

Thanks for the comments. Patrick — the best parallel I can think of is Dick Morris in politics. He masterminded Clinton’s ’96 re-election and got a reputation as a genius, so we’re not allowed to point out that nearly every prediction he’s made since then has been wrong (he wrote a book predicting the 2008 election would be Condi vs. Hillary, for Pete’s sake!) If only there was some sort of market where investors could go short on surefire losers like Morris’ predictions or Brill’s latest ventures.

Drew — the problem with true micropayments is that, at a certain point, you’d just be better off selling advertising against it. Consider that charging $0.01 for an article is the same thing as a $10 CPM, which would be a decent, but not great, advertising rate. However, since any transaction greater than zero will drive people away, your audience would be much smaller, so it’s not at all clear that revenues would be higher. And remember, the reason we’re having this conversation in the first place is that the status quo is unsustainable. You are right that $100K for a single article is ridiculous; that’s why publications need to focus on selling the experience, not the individual articles.

By: Drew

Drew — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:30:26 +0000

I still don’t get these bizarre ideas on pricing. I’ve heard prices as high as 10cents an article. That’s not micropayments. That’s still 100,000$ in total costs for a single article if, say, a million people read it. And there’s just no way any story is actually worth that much: not in a universe where freelancers can do basically the same job while living on Ramen noodles. There are just too many near substitutes.

Price something low enough, and make the purchase system seamless and universal, decoupled from any specific website/paper, and consumers won’t worry too much about a few pennies falling out of their pockets a day as they browse. It’s not the thing media empires are built on, but it’s better than nothing. But none of these giant subscription/payment systems seem built on the idea of slowly weaning web users onto the concept of paying for content: they all seem bent on making the desired transition as annoying and awkward as possible.

By: Patrick Thornton

Patrick Thornton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:25:21 +0000

Unfortunately, because Steve Brill has had past success and is kind of “one of them,” all these old media types will listen to them, instead of people with fresher, more logical ideas.

It doesn’t matter one bit how good of an idea I come up with or you do, because we’re not one of them. And that’s precisely why so many newspapers are failing. Brill obviously doesn’t understand the Internet, and yet media execs are giving him their time. That’s a serious issue.

His idea to charge people for providing free marketing for his clients is absurd. But it shows a lot about his thought process and understanding of the Internet.