Google To Offer Micropayments To News Sites 155
CWmike writes "Google is promoting a payment system to the newspaper industry that would let Web surfers pay a small amount for individual news stories, an idea that could help publishers struggling with the impact of the Internet. The plans were revealed in a document Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which had solicited ideas for how to monetize content online, a task some publishers have had difficulty with. 'The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants,' Google said in the document. Google said it had no specific products to announce yet."
Re:Information Wants To Be Free (Score:5, Informative)
Gathering news at its source tends to be expensive. Gathering it from people willing to go into dangerous and/or inconvenient areas doubly so. Getting someone to gather the news then report it without some form of hidden agenda is rare even in the paid media, and in an ad-supported world there's the constant pressure to bias your news in favor of your benefactors - those who buy ads. So if MegaCorp's CEO is found buggering badgers in Soho, and MegaCorp's ad revenue is your bread and butter, there's a serious temptation to bury that story as deeply as possible, preferably somewhere that never hits print at all. If it is covered, it would be spun as hard and creatively as possible to cast badger buggering in the best possible light.
Ads can pay for some of it, but not nearly all. Newspapers that have their own news-gathering resources are finding that their articles are being reprinted on free media, and are forced in large part to put a lot of their content online for free and hope that ad revenues make up for some of that. Meanwhile, a lot of their loyal readers are discovering that a lot of the content they want is available for free, and are canceling their subscriptions for the dead tree editions.
Many local newspapers now survive on their remaining dead tree subscribers, and struggle to remain relevant in an online world where they can't make enough money to continue gathering news effectively. So a lot of them are dying off as a result, and the concept of "local news" in more rural areas is starting to fade slowly.
My home town still has a larger town next door that has a decent local paper. It's still got a small staff of newsgatherers, and has fresh and relevant local articles. But it's a shadow of the paper it used to be, and is under constant threat of closing down. Print subscriptions are continually dwindling, and that's their major source of income.