| Virtually all high quality content on the web is written by either a full-time practitioner who is trying to build a reputation or gain some amount of recognition. For example: Entrepreneur and investor bloggers such as Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, Brad Feld, Sam Altman, plus the dozens of founders who post their articles to Hacker News produce the best writing available on founding a business. They do this because if they provide good information, they build their own brand.* The best posts on software engineering come from bloggers and Hacker News commenters who again, are trying to build their own brand. The best posts economics or finance come from those actually working in the field, or from obsessed amateurs who spend hours each week studying the issues on their own. The best posts on criminal justice issues comes from Peter Moskos, who was an actual Baltimore Cop, and is now a professor of criminal justice ( http://www.copinthehood.com/ ). Even if he charged micropayments for his posts, there is no way he is going to make money off of his site. Yet the information he provides is order of magnitude better than any journalist who has no domain knowledge of the subject matter. Most beat reporters producing run-of-the-mill news are entirely dependent on their sources for information. If these beat reporters were simply paid by the sports team or institutions that they covered, and essentially worked as their communications office, it would be a more honest relationship and the quality of coverage would be no worse. Basically, I don't see what the role in the world is for the professional, full-time "content" provider. There is simply no need for anyone to be an intermediary between the practitioner and the audience. If you are a professional practitioner, then the financial benefits in terms of building a brand dwarf any benefits from earning micropayments. Thus I don't think the existence of micropayments would result in any greater amount of high quality content. * Note for the pedantic, this is not to imply that all content produced by people trying to improve their own reputation is good content. 98% of everything is crap. |