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...
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.