The only thing I can imagine could save online newspapers is, that they will become better and better in quality, that will attract many visitors, and the website will survive by ads revenue.
IMHO the core problem is, that the World Wide Web was not created with the intention that it should provide business opportunities. It was mainly established for free exchange of information between scholars and scientists.
Later on, some people and companies discovered that Internet has monetization potential and so the .com companies emerged. Some were successful, other weren't. But nobody said every kind of business can survive on the Internet - WWW has it own principles, and if you don't play by it's rules, you might not survive. And, one of that core principles which lies in the very heart of WWW is that information is passed for free. I don't think any company has the power to change that.
Once you get someone to support your site the goal will be to get them to visit your site as many times as possible in a month. I think this will lead to increased sensationalism and gimmicks.
Also, visits are typically delimited by a period of inactivity (say, 30 minutes). I can think of several ways off the top of my head that publishers could manipulate that inactivity window to create additional visits (thus increasing their slice of the pie).
It is an interesting idea, but as always, the devil is in the details.
For one, no matter how large "their slice of the pie" is, the publishers won't make much if the user doesn't feel that the content is valuable. Thus, blogs and what not will still be encouraged to deliver quality content to truly increase earnings.
I agree, however, that basing payout on the number of visits to a "supported" site is flawed. I could see myself supporting a site, forgetting that I did so, and then end up paying much more than I had intended. No thanks.
Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
30% of the price a consumer would have paid in the traditional model. In all probability even accounting for costs this represented a huge increase in profit per unit sold for the band itself.
That seems lower than one might hope for as a content producer but maybe higher than an average consumer might want to pay as per month - about the right number? It makes sense that as the market approaches perfect competition (no barriers to entry, no information inequalities, no transport costs) it gets pretty hard to make abnormal returns - supply just ramps up until there is less per head.
This could be a nice channel for incentivising content that doesn't work well with an advertising model, for example RSS feeds. It'll be interesting to see whether they can market this well enough though.
Ideally, I would get all news/articles relevant to me within 10 minutes and this would probably save me 50 minutes every day. Personally, I would pay if the service if saved me a significant amount of time and had the absence of articles of which I was not interested.
Many of us would pay for Hacker News - is that because of the variety of news sources, the discussion, the community?
The newspapers are just going to do the obvious, they will have free and premium content with a monthly subscription.
The big media companies like Fairfax will bundle all kinds of premium content under one subscription. I guess it will be like a pay tv model.
From the newspaper's standpoint, they become mendicants, or worse... PBS or NPR. I don't think that will sit well with many in the industry, but faced with an inefficient, obsolete business model and eventual bankruptcy, the NPR-ization of all media just might be their only option.
Also, this is an especially hard sell with the economy the way it is.
Given the In re Bilski, anyone have any ideas about the status of this patent? My understanding was that process patents had to transform an article's state or be bound to specific hardware (but I'm not an IP specialist).
Two reasons off the top of my head: Where's the value in signing up for Kachingle? What do consumers get? Assuaging of guilt? If Kachingle negotiated so that every Kachingle publisher had Kach-only (or otherwise paid only) content, it could work as a giant "subscription fee to everything". But Kach would need a lot of traction to get heavyweights like the NYT to make some content only available to Kachingle users.
Second - privacy. I'm not Captain Uber Security online, but I don't want my credit card and favorite reading online linked. I've seen too many companies abuse user data to be excited about telling Kachingle/AMEX/whoever else exactly what I like reading and my interests are. Ultra-targeted demographic based advertisements all over the internet does not appeal to me.
Data. Hard facts. I'd much prefer to pay to access something like AP's newswire, where I can get a lot more salient information without having it regurgitated by someone.
