
Micropayments, Reimagined - toffer
http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-5713.cfm
======
harpastum
I'm sure that the NYT would love this setup. On the other hand, they're having
a hard enough sell getting people to sign up for _free_.

I simply don't believe that people mentally give the average article any value
significantly above zero. Sure, I would pay .04 for a great op-ed article or
for a quality book review that I'm interested in, but I really don't think the
average story at the NYT is that much better than I can read on a dozen blogs
for free.

~~~
jbarciauskas
To the average reader, the average story on the NYT is not nearly as valuable
as the synopses written by those whose point of view the reader values.
However, to the writers of those synposes and editorials, who drive the New
York Times articles to the top of TechMeme and Hacker News, the articles are
quite valuable, as they provide a launching point for their own writing.
Perhaps there's a business model there.

~~~
ricree
Maybe, in the end that's still the same advertising based revenue that NYT is
having problems with, except that the problem of making money off of ads is
farmed off to the smaller blogs instead the paper itself. It may be that the
smaller, more flexible blogs are able to hit on a balance that is able to fund
both themselves and their news sources, but my suspicion is that if the ads
aren't enough to support NYT on their own, they still won't be able to support
it when they're spread out among a bunch of smaller blogs. If might work as an
extra bit of revenue, but I don't see it becoming a main business.

------
zby
It does not address the problem number one with micropayments - that there is
a mental cost for any money transaction and if you are really talking about
micro payments then this mental cost can easily dominate the cost of the whole
transaction.

~~~
dpatru
Rather than micropayments, I think there's a need for micro-tipping. I may not
want to make the mental effort to decide whether to pay 4 cents for an article
before I read it, but I often feel grateful to the author of a piece after I
read it. The problem is that there is no convenient way to act on that impulse
-- no way to make a quick micro tip. An upvote on Hacker News and Reddit
serves this purpose, but there is no money involved and the upvote link lives
on the aggregator's site instead of the content provider's site.

~~~
tdavis
<http://tipjoy.com/> perhaps?

