mk has discussed the idea of a per click rate that gets paid directly by the consumer to the content producer (e.g. $0.10 to read an NYT story). This is feasible in the age of digital payments platforms. I fear that it would lead to even more click-baitey titles, but at least it's a way to try to generate revenue from consumers instead of businesses, which reincentivizes the news organizations to make readers their priority and not advertisers. I subscribe to exactly three media publications (outside of academic ones), NYT, New Yorker, and Washington Post. New Yorker barely counts, because I only read the print edition. So effectively, all my digital media money goes to two producers. However, thanks to social media, I often read things from the Atlantic, the Week, Politico, etc. All of these producers are giving me a free ride. On the other hand they're getting eyes on their screen, so they're selling me out, too. FB, Twitter, Snapchat, et al., are only conduits--powerful middle men. The producers are the ones who should be getting rewarded for their work (i.e. it's the Post and not FB that keeps breaking stories). I'm all for separating the social from the media, but the media companies need to insist on a better way to make money. Social media companies are leeches who I suspect, despite having some of the highest valuations out there, are a net drag on the economy. I have exactly xero data to back this up.
Brendan Eich is making some headway with the Basic Attention Token: https://basicattentiontoken.org/ IMO he has the chops to pull it off.
It's a great idea so long as it doesn't also become a speculative instrument. Stability is needed before adoption can be expected. Media companies should adopt one of these strategies and then make clear that if you use them, your content will be served ad free (or at least have that as a price option). I pay for NYT and those fuckers still put animated ads into the pages. Fuck animated ads so hard (all the time, but especially when you're trying to focus your attention on a potentially complicated topic).
"Micro-transactions" were all the rage back about 15 years ago. (IIRC) The biggest hurdle at that time is that the credit card providers required vendors to charge each transaction individually. So that $0.05/article would actually cost $0.40, with the $0.35 transaction fee. Internet businesses pushed the CC providers to allow batch processing, but the CC providers said no. They wanted their thirty-five cents per transaction. Nowadays? This is TOTALLY feasible! And I would LOVE this. I don't want a subscription to The Economist again. I want to pay $0.10/article. I'll happily read $10 worth of articles, because they are well-written, insightful, and valuable. But buy a subscription? Never again. (And I am not sure why I am so against getting another subscription. I was a subscriber for 10 or more years.)
Related: Kickstarter recently relauched Drip as a Patreon-style backer platform. I was invited to be one of their first projects at launch, but declined once I saw their payment processing fees. The usual 8% but with 20c per transaction, which they said was Stripe's demand. By the way, I wanted to launch a yearly subscription thing, which I found out wasn't going to be possible in their framework (only monthly and per-post, just like Patreon). For what I wanted to do, which was based on microtransactions, I just couldn't agree to it. Funnily enough, Patreon last week announced a change to their processing fees that was really similar to what Drip was at launch this November. Patreon users balked. Just an hour or two ago, the CEO sent out an email apologizing and announcing they weren't going to roll it out after all. They're sticking with monthly batch processing.
Microtransactions were seen as a way to prevent spam: if you charge .001 cents per email, average users can pay Google a dollar or whatever and never pay another dime for twenty years. The average 10 million email per day spammer, however, would be eating $100k per day. It bloody well better be profitable at that point. What blows my mind is that people could look at that model and go "yeah! cut the spam!" but then look at 50,000 Instagram followers and go "no, no, all that shit is valuable!" or look at 85 Huffington Post articles and go "no no, totally worthwhile journalism!" or look at CPM and go "no, no, we should totally be paying seven cents per click this shit is valuable!" Paul Carr argued, first at NSFWCorp and then at Pando, that a thousand readers at a dollar a month counted more than a hundred thousand clicks at a penny a month. But then, Pando mostly serves up sour grapes and hatorade so we'll never know. There's a reason I let my Mother Jones subscription lapse. Meanwhile, The New York Times is doing fine.
That already exists, and I already use it! It's a Dutch startup. I can browse the latest Dutch newspapers and magazines and pay per article or per issue with as little friction as possible. They've been adding US media, too: I can pay per article for every one you mention as well as Mother Jones, Fast Company, The Economist, Bloomberg, Vanity Fair and Newsweek. What I find fascinating is that they're adding lots of innovations exactly where news media failed to innovate. For example, if the article sucked you can always get your money back. They introduced a subscription service, whereby I pay €10 and get around 15 machine-learning-picked articles per day from all sort of different newspapers and magazines. They intentionally put articles that you might not like in your feed. They add their own clickbait-ish titles (it could be worse) because it really does get more people to read more articles. And they recently added an Instagram-Stories like feature, where it groups articles so that you can easily can catch up on a topic or a newspaper that you like. I kinda love it, even though I wish there would be more high-brow publications in there. I would never take a subscription to 90% of the media I read with Blendle. Now I get to enjoy 450 articles a month that I would otherwise never read, articles can get more exposure and reach more audiences, and media companies get additional revenue they otherwise would miss. Win-win-win.
That's great! I do fear that only blockbuster articles are likely to get read that way, but I suppose that's no different from what social media now offers. Does the machine learning then offer you stuff from, say, the science or business section, and not just front page material? Sure does. Read the Post since Bezos bought it? Their reporting is fantastic, but their titles are now stuff like, "6 takeaways from the Alabama election". Horrible. I'll put up with it so long as the content is good, because I get what they're trying to do.They add their own clickbait-ish titles (it could be worse) because it really does get more people to read more articles.
It starts out by asking you to pick the topics and newspapers/magazines that you already like. This is my selection, for example: It then improves the suggestions based on what you read and the articles that you "heart" (their version of likes). I've taught it to feed me the articles from a magazine that would otherwise cost me €15/mo. It does pick out the best articles, but they're not always the objectively popular one. I told it that I liked my home town's local newspaper, so every once in a while I get an article from them (even though I'm probably one of the five people who use that app to read that newspaper).
I"ve effectively abandoned Facebook for Instagram. And the only thing I really give a crap about on Instagram is watches. Yes, I'll like your picture of your kids being adorable but really - get out of the way of my watches. Facebook already has a "pages feed" but it's deeply buried. Honestly, what kept me using Facebook was that feature. It's not available on mobile and when I grew averse to going to FB on my computer, I ended up not using Facebook. I was reflecting on all the butt-hurt Trump voters I purged from my feed over the past year and realized that fundamentally, it's fucking asinine to know what your high school cheerleader thinks about politics. These are people who dropped out of my life for a reason; if Facebook the only reason I'm aware of the life of a cocktail waitress in Vegas who happened to be in my English class 25 years ago, then Facebook is one reason too many.
I used to love Instagram. It was a great place to discover all kinds of interesting people and content that I had no other way to find. Then Facebook bought it, and installed the Facebook algorithms. Now I see all the same people and content I see on Facebook. My current plan is to dump Instagram, delete the Facebook app, and only use Facebook for replying to Event Invites when I happen to be sitting at my desktop computer. I like the "social" aspect of social media, but the tools have gotten to cumbersome, and so narrowly focused, that most of my friends are back to using targeted email lists for most of our genuine communications. grump, grump, grump...
I think shell profiles are the way to go for Facebook. Only one picture uploaded and no personal information on the profile, used only for Events and Messenger. I was pretty attached to my eight-year-old profile, but it became super cathartic (if time-consuming) to erase all my pictures, posts, and acquaintances.