Recently, this piece from John Oliver has reinvigorated the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ<p>Two major points:<p>- Traditional print media has continued to decline in terms of revenue and hasn't been able to fully evolve into sustainable digital media, clickbait articles are filling the social media feeds. Catchy content with catchy titles from publishers like Buzzfeed etc continues to garner people's attention and hence pulling away from think pieces, op-eds, editorials etc.<p>- People are unwilling to pay for news.<p>Is it possible a pay per article will solve both sides of the problem? i.e. Increase the willingness of individuals to pay for good content in their POV and increase overall revenue streams for news organisations?<p>Here is how the crux of solution might look like:<p>- Articles embed a key unique to them (org, publisher, author)<p>- Users require a browser extension (Desktop) / app (Mobile) with unique key to user.<p>- Based on the amount of active time spent on the article, auto deduct a minimal amount ($0.02) on crossing a threshold (>50%)<p>- Users are incentivised for sharing articles, via unique trackable social media links and are fed back in terms of real currency to their accounts.<p>- Price incentive on a per user basis is dynamic based on current popularity of the content so early adopters have more reasons to be loyal to publisher.<p>What do you think?
To me, the problem is not technical. It's that most of what we call 'news' has no direct economic value to the reader. A story about Aleppo might make me better informed but there isn't really a dollar amount associated.<p>Whatever value it has, little of it arises from time sensitivity, high accuracy, or coming from a particular source: which is to say that reading it today at the <i>New York Times</i> or in a week at the <i>Economist</i> or sometime in between at <i>USA Today</i> is pretty much the same.<p>News sources for ordinary news are largely fungible. The typical story behind a paywall can be replaced by one that isn't. What isn't fungible is the quality of the reporting. That's why individual sites can collect subscriptions.<p>Anyway, a service with many sources and an app is back to selling on the aggregate model with the additional complexity of negotiating with the sources and the risk of users avoiding payment using the open web.<p>Good luck.
This is a hard problem to solve for a long list of reasons. For example, what kind of party should facilitate this system of remuneration? One of the big boys (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) or some start-up in publishing? If we want a system that works for any publisher, that will become a really important player with access to some really interesting information (what kind of thought pieces someone reads; that's a data mining gold mine!) and a lot of influence.<p>Also, wouldn't providing users with incentives to share articles get us back to the clickbait articles we want to avoid?