|
|
|
|
|
|
by eli
4326 days ago
|
|
|
As others have pointed out, this is an old idea that has been attempted several times but never really taken off. I think it could work but it would be really really hard to implment successfully at scale. For example, I'm not sure it would work without strong DRM. People don't like ads and some install AdBlockers, but people REALLY don't like paying for things and I think even more of them would use paywall avoiding plugins. I think publishers would demand it (just as movie studios did with Netflix). That sounds like a huge step backwards for the web. Clay Shirky wrote a somewhat famous takedown of this idea in 2009: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont... |
|
|
One excerpt that struck me is, "The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong." It reminds me of the perennial hubbub over unlimited cellular plans. I have so very many family and friends who only rarely use more data than you'd get from a $15/mo plan, but insist on clinging to much more expensive 'unlimited' plans they're grandfathered into because they hate hate hate the idea that on the odd month they'd have to pay an extra $10 for going over the initial allotment. Similarly for folks who barely text but still pay for unlimited texting because they'd rather pay $5/mo up front than $2.50/mo in ten-cent increments.
I subscribe to the local paper. If you amortize my subscription payment over all the articles I actually read in depth, I wouldn't be surprised to find I pay $1/article, but I think the subscription is well worth it overall. If they were to restructure their paywall such that I had to pay on a up-front, per-article basis, though, I bet even $0.10 would be enough to send me googling for the same information on a blog somewhere.