The Washington Post (hardly a disinterested spectator) looks at the phenomenon, focusing on Andrew Sullivan.
It’s not clear that Sullivan’s relatively slow start as his own boss says much about the prospects for others who want to do the same, says Rick Edmonds, the media-business analyst for the Poynter Institute, a journalism education organization. Greenwald, Silver, Mossberg and the others, he notes, have deep-pocketed backers who can afford to sustain years of losses and experimentation.
I have thought about the issue of “Information wants to be free but people need to get paid” for close to 20 years now. Here are my views, as articulated in 2001.
One alternative that cannot be exhausted soon enough is banner advertising. I have been eager to see this concept die since it first was introduced in 1995. Another alternative that I believe should be euthanized is the subscription model for individual periodicals. The marginal cost of distributing the publications online is zero, so subscription models are very difficult to sustain. Finally, there is the alternative of micropayments, meaning small payments for access to particular slices of information. I am now persuaded by Clay Shirky’s argument that the mental transaction costs involved in micropayments are too high to make micropayments workable.
Ultimately, I think that a new form of content aggregator might get away with charging for subscriptions. The Washington Post is a content aggregator, but it is based mostly on its legacy model. On the Internet, you could become a very different aggregator. You could negotiate with individuals and publications around the world to obtain the ability to bundle their content into a subscription service. As a consumer, I might pay $10 a month to a service that offers me everything I like to read. But I am unlikely to pay even $2 a month to read just on blogger or to get behind one newspaper’s paywall. As I put it in 2001,
For an economic model, I continue to recommend the idea of “clubs.” A club would provide content aggregation, recommendation, and annotation services. Journalists would be paid by clubs, rather than by individual publications. For a consumer, joining a club will provide access to value-added services relative to online content. Most of the articles that you are able to read when you join a club may be freely available without joining the club. What your membership fee would give you is better access to individual authors, as well as to indexing tools and cross-reference tools. Some of these tools would be provided by community members, as in the Amazon book lists. The raw content is not what you are paying for. The haystack is free. But if you want help finding the needle, you have to join the club.
Over the years, I have become a bit less optimistic about the “club” model and more inclined to predict an outcome in which journalists require patronage for support. In some sense, Andrew Sullivan is using a patronage model. However, I think that patronage is most likely to come in the form of support from a few wealthy donors than from a broad base of subscriber-donors.
Clue:
Useful vs. needed.
Separating diversion, entertainment from information (carefully).
Steve Sailer (isteve.blogspot.com) bangs his tin cup from time to time and seems to be keeping body and soul together. His product is simple – one man’s blog. And yet it appears that enough readers consider that blog worth supporting and fork over the dough, no strings attached.
Ken
What you are suggesting is basically what pay-TV providers are doing. Nobody would be willing to pay 2 dollars a month for Discovery Channel but lots of people are willing to pay 30 dollars or so a month for a couple of hundred different channels.
Historical models are useful. A century ago copyright was unenforceable and works were freely translated, copied, reprinted under other names, serialized, etc. Printers and sellers were all the time on the seek of free material to steal. Yet authors kept writing.
Don Qixote was written on the patronage model, The manuscript was submitted to rich patrons allowing them to publish their names in poems and forewords (ghostwritten by Cervantes for them). The authors were required to bring alive the patron’s literary salons. In music, Liszt and his colleges lived in rich patron’s households providing entertainment services. Casanova ended as librarian and professional conversationalist (entertainer) of his patron,
The most viable model is to try to become the hidden propagandist of a billionaire with a cause (like Soros and his open society) or an institution, Steve SAiler, I presume, earns more from TAKI and White Something – than alms. He is too open to be mercenary. But a good writer with a public could insert tendentious publicity items for money, say in favour or against immigration, or Taiwan or Dr Assad or whatever.
The subject needs to be explored more.