
Readability: An Important Announcement - bjonathan
http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/
======
droithomme
Ah, what a mess.

Hopefully no one will create problems for them since it seems their intentions
are good, and 826 Valencia (McSweeney's nationwide network of writing
workshops for young people) is quite awesome.

I don't know what their original contracts with customers said, that contract
is what needs to govern what happens to money collected that was not
distributed. Perhaps the contract never thought to take into account left over
money though. If that's the case, then the leftover amounts, calculated as the
percentage of funds received per person that weren't disbursed based on their
reading habits, should be refunded to the original customers. I think it would
be worth also emailing each person and asking them what they want done - do
they want it donated to 826 Valencia, or would they prefer their money back.
Most will give permission to donate it since they are each small amounts
anyway, but others will have problems getting ahold of them because their
emails will bounce. But it will at least allow getting permission from many as
to what they want done. This is all presuming, to state again, that this case
of undistributable funds was not covered in the original contract.

There is one case I am familiar with where a person collected money for a
certain cause, but wasn't able to use the money for that cause. He didn't keep
track of the people who he collected the money from (some of this was passing
baskets around at churches) and so he just decided to donate all the money
(around $10,000) to a different charity he chose. He ended up charged with
theft and misappropriation of funds. So you have to be careful with this
stuff. (No case citation as I know the person professionally and don't wish to
call attention to him, just making the point that collecting money for one
thing and then spending it on another can lead to problems in some cases even
when your intentions are pure.)

------
SMrF
"Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of
sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers."

And somewhere out there Ted Nelson is saying, "I told you so. We needed
transclusion, transcopyright, and micropayments in our hypertext from the
beginning!"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu> (p.s. not a xanadu zealot, just
fascinated by the history)

~~~
dredmorbius
Micropayments do not scale.

The cost of my deciding whether or not an article is worth whatever the cost
of reading it is, let alone the huge privacy invasion that per-article pricing
implies (tying information content and payment to a single user) is a non-
starter for all but a very few sites.

That leaves us with accompanying advertising, patronage, syndication, content-
as-promotion (propaganda/advertising), and self-publishing.

"Accompanying advertising" is the existing model of display or other ads
accompanying content. This works for some sites, but not particularly well,
and there are concerns in the mobile space.

"Patronage" is essentially sponsorship of work, as fine art patronage was
fairly common in the past.

"Syndication" would require a model of mechanical payments and essentially a
tax-like funding stream (part of your monthly data plan) from which content
providers are paid.

"Content-as-promotion" is where the initiative for creating content is its own
utility in promoting the commercial or ideological goals of the author. Bands
promoting live acts, political or religious organizations.

"Self-publishing" is essentially vanity publishing -- where many blogs are
(possibly a special case of content as promotion).

Of this list, the syndication model is the only one I see as having strong
viable economic potential for general works, though it requires the creation
of a syndicate. Small-scale syndicates, in the form of paywall/paygate
operators could be the start of this -- major periodical publishers (NY Times,
Murdoch/Dow Jones), Apple, Amazon, eBay. But for general content, I'd see a
mix of a mechanical reproduction right, a flat (or very simply tiered) level
of content payments, and what would amount to an all-you-can-eat or bandwidth-
based scheme through a data service provider or independent syndicate
provider. It's a leaky system, but might just work.

~~~
maigret
> Micropayments do not scale.

It's just a matter of time before it does. I'd rather say the current micro
payment offerings are not good enough.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's not a technical problem.

It's a user problem.

Economics and financial transactions work well with fairly evenly paired
buyers and sellers, and largely undifferentiated goods (bulk items, water,
food, etc.). Where market power is unbalanced, you end up with monopolistic or
oligopolistic markets, where goods are highly differentiated (think:
enterprise software sales) you end up with very prolonged negotiation over
quality and deliverables (hence the high cost of such sales).

Information economies violate both precepts.

We've _never_ had a market for unbundled information goods purchases. A
newspaper or magazine is a bundle of articles, a book is a bundle of chapters,
cable TV is a bundle of channels. Most entertainment parks sell a bundle of
rides rather than tickets to spend on any given ride. Even music and video
sales are a very different experience when you can sample and preview what
you're getting.

If I had to make a purchase decision for every single thing I read, I'd go
stark raving mad (OK, this may explain something).

Commercializing _every_ single transaction is _not_ feasible.

------
Uchikoma
"If you haven’t already registered your domain with Readability, you have
until July 15, 2012 to do so."

They love to give money away, but a.) do not link to the page where to
register or tell how to register b.) The signup page only caters to readers
c.) The publisher page does not show how to register.

If you search the page, you will find a link buried beside others called
"Register"

IMHO that is not the way to have millions of sites to register.

UPDATE: Registered for <http://codemonkeyism.com> Now I get $0.18 - Wohooo!
Didn't know before that they wanted to give me money. The model seems nice,
easier than Flattr but when reading about Readability (and I'm a InstaPaper
payer) I thought the model was only for big publishers, not small blogs like
mine.

~~~
freerobby
Ha. You actually don't get $0.18 though, because the minimum payout is $50.

~~~
Uchikoma
"If you registered as a publisher with Readability, we’ll be sending you any
remaining money your site has earned by July 31, 2012, regardless of amount."

Ha ;-)

~~~
Uchikoma
The text is part of the blog post. Guess they've change the policy for the
cleanup.

------
JCB_K
This is just goodwill-in-disguise. They've collected money on behalf of
publishers, _without consent_ , and now they realise that was a bad idea. They
understand they obviously can't get away with keeping the money, but they
don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain
owners.

~~~
jerf
"but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the
domain owners."

That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am
sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less
than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want
to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way
to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.)

No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those
who gave it, but that may have its own problems.

~~~
darushimo
"That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking."

Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort.
What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers
who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation
would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20
or more.

Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion
of the way they've ended this operation.

Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for
amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could
put in work to contact those publishers.

------
kbob
$150,000. "millions of domains". That works out to an average of a few pennies
per domain. Given that the top 100 sites take a big chunk of the total, the
median is probably much less.

We're still looking for that sustainable business model.

~~~
zevyoura
Right, that's why they stopped doing it.

~~~
gcb
But that blog post claim the opposite. "we got money, but there's no content
site"

------
3pt14159
Why not make the minimum cheque $1k and award them randomly via weighted
ballot method? That way everyone along the tail gets a piece (eventually) but
you only have to collect 150 contact details?

------
ethank
Reminds me of SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and Sesac and other PRO's. "Not our
fault if you don't claim the money we collected on your behalf!"

~~~
dredmorbius
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the musical licensing and payments system is 1)
supported by copyright law (17 USC 115(a)
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115>), and 2) sanctioned by either
regulation or industry as to the establishment .

You left out the Harry Fox Agency, which is actually responsible for the bulk
of mechanicals in the US.

~~~
ethank
Yes, it is backed up by law. Still, same type of issues, just legal breakage.

[http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-
aftra-...](http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-tell-
artists-claim-your-digital-royalties/)

------
endlessvoid94
As a content owner, I had no idea readability was doing this. Like Peter Thiel
says, the distribution is sometimes the hardest problem.

The idea isn't a bad one, and just because the domain owners never registered
doesn't mean the idea can't work. It just means most domain owners probably
don't even know about this.

~~~
droithomme
Yeah, I am familiar with Readability but didn't know they had this program.

I think for the guys signing up and getting a 15 cent check, their form should
also have the option of the site owner saying it's OK to just give the amount
less than $1 or whatever to the charity since the cost of handling the check
isn't really worth it on either end.

------
knowaveragejoe
I stopped using readability when it changed from a simple bookmarklet that
would work on any page, to a browser plugin/service combination. It's a shame,
really, it was brilliantly useful then, and I haven't found anything that
properly replaces it.

~~~
Flow
Have you tried Safari Reader? It's quite similar.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
I have, and from what I've found it has limitations of its own(namely,
paginated articles will not work). I've also tried greasemonkey/stylebot
scripts, which work great with the caveat that they're on a case-by-case
basis. Really all I want is a damn simple way to invert the colors of any
website, so white-on-black sites don't burn the eyes when reading at night.
I'm not at all bothered by choice of font(unless it's really obnoxious and
actually hinders reading of course), and changing the size of text is already
easily addressed in modern browsers. Unfortunately Readability had extremely
limited options for color(only -one- color scheme had light text on dark
background) and font size.

Personally I see this as being in the realm of browser vendors - hopefully we
will start to see them include such a feature, and flesh it out in such a way
that it's customizable and really works for any site.

~~~
unfletch
I use Safari Reader all the time and it loads paginated articles very well as
far as I can tell. When you scroll down a bit you should see an actual
separated second page, labeled "Page 2 of N."

Maybe there are certain sites whose pagination Reader can't figure out, but
try this for example: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-
return...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return-
brings-rapid-chill-to-us-russia-ties.html?_r=1&hp)

------
jacques_chester
Um, actually, they might not be able to do that.

What they may be sitting on here is a trust, for which the publishing websites
are the beneficiaries. If they then repurpose the money for something else
without the beneficiaries' permission, they'd be in breach of trust. Which is
quite serious ju-ju.

Before doing this stuff they need to consult a lawyer.

I should point here that I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.

Disclaimer: I am working on a startup that would have been seen as a close
competitor.

------
nicholassmith
It's great when people try new things, and honestly rewarding creators for the
work they've created is a great thing. Here's the problem, outside of the
sphere of influence people don't know about the service, and that's always
going to be a problem.

Also a problem? People not caring enough to sign up, if your minimum is $50
and the average site makes is $3.50, why's anyone going to take the time to
get that money?

Also a problem? A lot of readers like writers who don't like in the U.S., and
a lot of the time that $3.50 then gets currency exchanged down to even less.

I'm glad they've held their hands and said 'we made a mistake', but it was
essentially not the greatest idea in the world to start with. You have to run
through all the weird edge cases before you even get started.

------
zem
this comment, analysing the four combinations of opt-{in,out}-to-be-scraped x
opt-{in,out}-to-get-paid is well worth reading:

[http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-34...](http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-3419)

------
blhack
Here is the link ton add additional domains:

<http://www.readability.com/publisher/domains/add>

I couldn't find this anywhere on their site... :(

------
PaulHoule
Wow.

The temptation to take the money and run in a situation like this is high.

I hope they get widely recognized for acting with the highest level of
integrity.

------
kirillzubovsky
I am curious to know whether no one wanted to claim the money, or no one had a
clue the money were available. Your "this didn't work" post is the first time
that I've heard of this initiative. How many more users like me are out there?
I'd bet, the majority.

------
jeromeparadis
Do they have a domain lookup form that we can check without registering?

------
mike-cardwell
I wonder if they'll mail out a cheque for the $1.45 they owe me.

~~~
veyron
minimum is 50 bucks, so i doubt you are getting anything

~~~
spullara
In the blog entry they say they will send out any amount.

~~~
josscrowcroft
I'm really looking forward to taking my cheque for $0.21 to my bank here in
England!

------
influx
Why wouldn't they just refund the money back to the customers?

------
danso
Whew, I thought they were going to kill their API.

------
Tloewald
Well, I claimed my $0.50

~~~
underwater
I have 52 cents that are rightfully mine. Where did you go in the publisher
backend to claim the money?

~~~
_delirium
You just fill in your address information in your publisher profile, and
they'll mail you a check by the end of July.

------
moron
Glad they've finally changed courses, but that was a bad idea. Collecting
money "on behalf" of publishers they have no affiliation with... ick.

~~~
lukifer
I think it was a good idea that could/should have been implemented in a way
that felt less sketchy. For instance: show uncollected revenues to each user
on a per-site basis; allow users to withdraw unpaid money at any time, or re-
allocate their funds to other authors who _are_ collecting; have interest from
all unpaid authors go towards uncontroversial charities.

