I recently started reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ve been really impressed with how well Shirky understands the shifts that are happening in publishing and media and organizations because of the internet.
So you can imagine how far my jaw dropped when I realized that he wrote, essentially, an early draft of his book in mailing list messages in 2002 and 2003.
I really liked this one in particular, which talks about the stupidity of micropayments and, essentially, the stupidity of anyone trying to charge for content on the internet.
Shirky argues that micropayments, or charges of any kind, create a barrier:
Though each piece of written material is unique, the universe of possible choices for any given reader is so vast that uniqueness is not a rare quality. Thus any barrier to a particular piece of content (even, as the usability people will tell you, making it one click further away) will deflect at least some potential readers.
Shirky is 100% right about news and entertainment. This type of content is easily substituted. If the Wall Street Journal is charging me to read about “the company formerly known as” Bear Stearns, I will get my coverage for free from the New York Times.
But information that creates knowledge is still worth money. If I need to learn how to do a particular magic trick, it’s worth $10 for me to buy the instructions instead of hunting around the dregs of the internet, hoping to piece it together.
In other words, the price of education is still high.
This doesn’t really apply to newspapers unless you think of it as a possibility for membership services. For example, a a paying member at the Seattle P-I might be able to sign in for a weekly webinar on pet care, or cooking, or computer assistance, or practically anything that imparts knowledge (since knowledge is different than information).
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry.
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Will people pay for content on the internet? Maybe, eventually. This discussion reminded me of a piece by Nathan Myhrvold (formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft) in Slate from 1996 where he discusses this issue and compares it paying for television:
“To understand the challenge of getting people to pay for Internet content, imagine trying to sell subscriptions to HBO back in the 1950s. People were still fascinated with the sheer miracle of television. They clustered around their primitive sets to watch the damnedest things (Milton Berle for instance). Before people would pay money for premium content, they had to get so bored with TV that they’d say, ‘Damn it, there’s nothing on I want to watch!’ Yet, they’d also have to be so addicted that it wouldn’t occur to them to turn the machine off. This transition didn’t really occur until a large part of the adult audience consisted of people who had grown up with TV. Folks who met the TV as adults would never have as strong a relationship with it–they had other hobbies–they knew, for example, how to read.
“Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There’s no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what’s available. In the very long run, addiction and boredom seem as inevitable as death and taxes, and user fees will then be viable, at least in some cases. Customers who pay for some specialty sites may come sooner, but the mainstream is apt to be slow–exactly how slow is hard to predict. A year? Five years? Must it wait until a generation has grown up with the Web? Maybe not, but there is no reason for the transformation to happen on the same rapid time scale that users join the Web or free sites proliferate. Not everything happens in ‘Internet time’ or is destined to explode at 20 percent a month. The timing isn’t driven by technology and how fast we adopt it–it is about shifts in human behavior.”
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