Medienspiegel.ch

Den Anfang machte vor rund einem Monat Medienkolumnist David Carr, der in der «New York Times» ein «iTunes for News» anregte (s. dazu auch Edgar Schulers «Mediensatz»-Kolumne).

Es folgte «New York Times»-Chefredaktor Bill Keller, der verlauten liess, dass auch bei der «Times» eine «lively, deadly serious discussion» über die Wiedereinführung der Kostenpflicht stattfinde und dass dabei auch Micropayments in Erwägung gezogen würden.

Und in der Cover Story («How to Save Your Newspaper») der aktuellen Ausgabe des Nachrichtenmagazins «Time» fordert nun auch Walter Isaacson eine Abkehr von Gratisangeboten und die Einführung von Kleinstbeträgen für Einzelartikel und «Tageskarten»:

«So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
[…]
The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet - a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
[…]
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.»

Klingt alles irgendwie einleuchtend. Beim (Fixnetz-)-Telefonieren denkt man ja schliesslich auch nicht fortwährend daran, dass jede weitere Gesprächsminute mit einigen Rappen zu Buche schlägt.

«MicroPay talk appears whenever a biz is dying», meint jedoch Clay Shirky in einem Twitter-Post. Shirky hat bereits 2003 aufzuzeigen versucht, «Why Micropayment Systems Don't Work»:

«The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting readers.

This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems.»

Ähnlich argumentiert Owen Thomas auf «Valleywag»:

«Micropayments are the future of content! If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one. […] The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about - 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? - aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" - the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those?»

«Newsosaur» Alan Mutter ist zwar der Ansicht, dass Micropayments für «sufficiently compelling» Content funktionieren könnten, gibt jedoch zu bedenken:

«Although a specialized newspaper like the Wall Street Journal has successfully required payment for its articles, the widespread adoption of paid content among general-interest media would require a critical mass of publishers to agree to collaborate more earnestly, more broadly and more smoothly than any group of humans in history.»

Aber selbst wenn es gelingen sollte, diese «critical mass of publishers» zusammenzubringen, ist das Vorhaben zum Scheitern verurteilt, meint zumindest Mike Masnick auf «Techdirt.com»:

«If most newspapers switch to micropayments, someone much smarter when it comes to business than Isaacson will create a new news site that doesn't charge. And they'll make it high quality, and they'll be able to make money through other means. Hell, it will be easier because all the fools who follow Isaacson and others in demanding payment will take all the competition out of the market.»

Update: Clay Shirky schreibt in einem aktuellen Post:

«Because small payment systems are always discussed in conversations by and for publishers, readers are assigned no independent role. In every micropayments fantasy, there is a sentence or section asserting that what the publishers want will be just fine with us, and, critically, that we will be possessed of no desires of our own that would interfere with that fantasy.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We're not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We're not customers and we're certainly not consumers. We're users. We don't consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we're media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it's an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I'm talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

This is superdistribution - content moving from friend to friend through the social network, far from the original source of the story. Superdistribution, despite its unweildy name, matters to users. It matters a lot. It matters so much, in fact, that we will routinely prefer a shareable amateur source to a professional source that requires us to keep the content a secret on pain of lawsuit. (Wikipedia's historical advantage over Britannica in one sentence.)»

Update, 19. Februar 2009:

«Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them»,

meint Marshall W. Van Alstyne, associate professor in the Information Systems department at Boston University and a research scholar at M.I.T. (via «New York Times»-Blog «Freakonomics»).

(Verspäteter) Update, 2. März 2009:

- Michael Kingsley, der als Mitbegründer des Online-Magazins «Slate» auf einige Erfahrung mit (gescheiterten) Bezahlangeboten zurückblicken kann, meint in der «New York Times»: «You Can’t Sell News by the Slice».

- Im «New York Times»-Blog «Room for Debate» äussern sich verschiedene Experten zu «Battle Plans for Newspapers».

- Sehr lesenswert auch Nicholas Carrs «The writing is on the paywall».

- Eine Linksammlung zum Thema gibt's bei «Random mumblings».