Media economist Robert Picard's skepticism is evident in his latest post on micropayments. He understands why they're sought, he's just not sure how they'll be sought, and that leads him to conclude there's more than meets the eye.
Picard believes a fundamental rethinking of the business is necessary to focus properly on charging properly for content. It's a matter of examining the entire value chain of content and determining what the market will bear for certain types of material.
Unbundling content into individual articles will be fraught with transaction expenses, and newspapers need to understand that most online consumers aren't readers yet, anyway --- so charging them for something they haven't been paying for in the past is problematic.
"If they are not willing to pay for news in print, why will they suddenly be willing to pay for that same news online? If papers can't figure that out, no decision to implement micropayments will end happily," he writes.
Picard believes a fundamental rethinking of the business is necessary to focus properly on charging properly for content. It's a matter of examining the entire value chain of content and determining what the market will bear for certain types of material.
Unbundling content into individual articles will be fraught with transaction expenses, and newspapers need to understand that most online consumers aren't readers yet, anyway --- so charging them for something they haven't been paying for in the past is problematic.
"If they are not willing to pay for news in print, why will they suddenly be willing to pay for that same news online? If papers can't figure that out, no decision to implement micropayments will end happily," he writes.
