back to article Google Wallet: Rub our button, cough 15p for quick read

A new scheme launched by Google is allowing internet users to pay to access content on individual pages on websites. The internet giant has partnered with a select number of publishers – including Oxford University Press and Peachpit – to enable users of its 'Google Wallet' mobile payment system to buy content from individual …

COMMENTS

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  1. arkhangelsk

    Could work

    Reasonable prices + Convenient Payment Method is a money sucker - I know this from Amazon Kindle.

    I just hope they don't put pages they used to put out for free into this scheme...

    1. Tim 11
      Thumb Up

      Re: Could work

      some kind of micropayment/pay-as-you-go scheme has got to be the way to get us out of the current mess of advertising we're currently in, and reward people for producing quality content

      1. Anonymous Coward
        FAIL

        Re: Could work - but not at the prices indicated

        Lets take a benchmark of the FT, not because you lot are interested in it, but because it makes money (cf The Graun). £2.50 per paper copy, of which it is reasonable (based on a bit of googling) to assume that the printing and circulation element would be around 50% or more. So let's say their corporate, editorial and other non-physical costs are 75p per issue.

        Out of the hundreds of articles per issue, lets say I read just 25. My non-physical cost per article is 3p per article, with a free option to read the other say 250. That would translate to any other news publication you like, and probably to all commercial magazine type publications. Yes, buyers do pay the cover price, and so that's 6p per article on the same volume basis, but bear with me for a minute, because I'm positing that the cost for them to produce on line content like for like would be around the 3p, including the present margins (not to mention the value in the other 250+ articles I could read if I wanted to.

        Now let's see what Google's proposal looks like the other way round: I reckon I read perhaps ten new articles on the Reg each day, most working days. At 15p per article that's £7.50 a week, or £300+ per year (assuming its not read in holidays and the odd workday). I reckon El Reg would like a piece of that.

        In principle I support the idea of micro-payments for content, but there's a greater than one order of magnitude disconnect between me and the publishers+Google as to what "micro" means. Like all industries facing change the publishers have got their heads stuck in the sand (or elsewhere) making muffled squealing noises that it isn't fair. Until the publishing industry gets real about pay per view pricing, PPV will never happen, and looking at the article, it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

  2. Christian Berger

    Won't work

    It doesn't fit into the web. You cannot simply link to articles. It's much more realistic to do that via the voluntary route. Just look at Flattr. https://flattr.com/

  3. frank ly

    Chrome on lap/desk-top

    You can sign in to Google within the Chrome browser, and sign out again; so they could use this on the desktop, perhaps with the default option as password entry required for each purchase.

  4. ratfox

    Well, it worked for songs on iTunes

    I wonder if the adoption rate of Google Wallet is high enough for this to work, though…

    1. Pete 2 Silver badge

      Re: Well, it worked for songs on iTunes

      The big difference is that you listen to songs more than once.

      There may, just, be a few websites that hosted material which was relevant enough and refreshed frequently enough that I'd be willing to pay 15p once as a subscription to access that content for a long time, across a whole raft of devices. But so far as stumping that much to access a single article on only one occasion? It would have to be a dam' good article: interesting, relevant, insightful - all the things that most web pages (El Reg excepted, 'natch!) couldn't even dream of being.

  5. LinkOfHyrule
    Paris Hilton

    You should put it on this website if the advertising business ever goes titsup - the amount of times I have clicked on to a story with a kinky sounding headline only to find it was boring technology and not hardcore supersex after all, you'd be giving me a lot of refunds!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Talking of kinky sounding things, when I first read this article I thought for a moment it said "Peach-Pit" instead of "Peachpit"...

      (If you don't know who Peach-Pit are, be careful with your Googling lest you happen upon NSFW content)

  6. eSeM

    No Google Wallet for smartphones in the UK ..... so no fecking use.

    1. TonyHoyle

      It's not talking about NFC just google wallet, which works (more or less) everywhere and everyone with a google account has one (if you've ever paid for an app you'll have an active wallet account).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Worth pursuing

    I sometimes do searches that hit pages that sound like they'd be of interest but want a fee for membership that it out of proportion to the single page I want to read.

    I think there is potentially mileage in the idea.

  8. ElNumbre
    Go

    Specific Content

    For me, I can't see this being a big success for 'knowledge' sites - i.e. text resources. Everytime I hit a paywall, I just click the back button and go to the next site listed in Google, which is generally free and has the knowledge I am looking to gleen.

    However, for 'media' services, I can see this being a big boon. Particularly for stock photo/video retailers and musicians, provided the prices to the consumer are pitched correctly and the reward net of fees is fair to the retailer.

    It will be interesting to see if people adopt a paid-for "quality" internet vs the existing free-for-all (except advertising) model.

  9. Tom 38
    Go

    …publishers that sell "premium digital content that's superior to the free alternatives"

    Porn.

  10. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    They said:

    It's an "experiment to see if users will be prepared to pay for individual web pages if the buying process is sufficiently easy"

    You wanna find out what I think? 15p please.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds like a good idea provided the search listings don't eventually get skewed so they show all the stuff behind paywalls first.

  12. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

    15p is still too expensive for most tat. But at least they're hammering the price down.

  13. Joe Harrison

    tiresome

    Surely this will just encourage people who think they produce high-value content but actually don't? Or to put it another way instead of eleventy billion pages of free crap on the www there will be the same number but you have to go through the 15p refund cycle each time you click the wrong one. It sounds very inconvenient trying to find things.

    1. Steen
      Devil

      Re: tiresome

      Those were my thought too. Also I wonder whether its a get rich quick scheme, whereby content is spread over more pages than it need to be. I cannot imagine that refunds won't have a cap, can you? I guess I will stop traveling the inter-webs if there's a toll everywhere I go. Not made of money me and starting to feel very discriminated against on the grounds of financial barriers to accessing information.

  14. Scott Wheeler
    Thumb Down

    Nope.

    The idea is not bad, but there's no way I'd give my credit card number to Google. I'm not worried about false charges (well actually I would be worried, given their lack of customer care services, and that you'd probably have to give then "continuous payment authority" which is a devil to cancel). No, the problem is that they will immediately do the same thing as in the web space: use that number to track a unique and identified purchaser and build a profile. They would probably offer some service analagous to Google Analytics as well whereby third parties would send information about credit card transactions to them for analysis. No thanks, I have no wish to live in a goldfish bowl.

  15. RonWheeler
    Go

    15p is a good price point

    In theory I like it. As long as convenient and I'm not getting tied into some crappy ongoing subscription system. Certainly there are times when I'd pay for a couple of pages of a motorbike manual or the likes.

    Trouble is will media companies buy into it? Everyone seems to want to get you over the barrel onto a monthly subscription you can't escape without threatening to get the lawyers involved situation. I'd like to join Lovefilm for example but know too many cases of customers becoming hostages.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Article confuses Google Wallet for Android with Google Wallet on the web which is a simple payment service like Paypal.

    Same name, different context and things.

  17. cs94njw
    Thumb Up

    Yeah, I could live with this. I'd need a way of setting a budget though.

    Plonking £15 into my account, and then trickle using it. I guess like XBox points.

  18. Ilsa Loving
    Megaphone

    Hell no

    We already put up with advertisements because the advertising money pays for the content. If a site wants to go the micropayment route, that's fine.

    But micropayments AND ads? Absolutely not. People already pay way too much money for television subscriptions, for what? The privilege of watching ads? And now they want to do the same to the web?

    Thanks but no thanks.

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