During the early years of the web it was often predicted that micropayments would form the basis of a new online economy. That failed to happen, for reasons that have been summarised by Clay Shirky in his definitive rebuttal of the micropayments vision. Walled gardens of pay-per-view content cannot compete with the growing bulk of high quality content that is freely available on the web. Interestingly though, the supremacy of free content has created a need for a new compensation strategy for people who want to pay for it.
Paying for free content sounds paradoxical, but it is a surprisingly common occurrence across a wide range of different interest groups. There are many reasons why someone may wish to pay for free content: simple altruism, the desire to reward good work, the feeling of obligation to the author, the sense of participating in a community, or plain old self-interest in ensuring the availability of more content in the future.
Some examples of compensated free content include:
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Many online projects such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg accept donations from grateful readers and contributors.
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Linux distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake are partially supported by purchases that are essentially donations, as the content they provide is freely available.
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Linux Weekly News is an interesting example of a technical publication that is supported by subscribers, but also made freely available to non-subscribers one week after each issue is published.
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Many of the popular weblogs that discuss political news are partially supported by reader donations; some even have occasional pledge drives.
The most common form of compensation for free content on the web today is donations, typically made through PayPal or Amazon wishlists. These are light-weight services that can be trivially deployed simply by adding a link to a webpage; they can even preserve the anonymity of the author if desired.
However, donations are not the best compensation strategy for many types of free content. Donations are like a tip-jar, with the idea that visitors will casually drop in some coins when they see something useful or interesting, then move on. But in practice the web is not like that. People read the same weblogs, play the same games and update the same software for months or years. They may wish to support websites with which they enjoy an ongoing relationship, but having to repeatedly donate is inconvenient and few people will bother.
Subscriptions are an alternative compensation strategy that might be more appropriate for many websites. Rather than exhorting visitors to donate, websites would have a subscribe link with a suggested monthly rate. The link would go to an external subscription service like PayPal, and clicking it would subscribe the user to the website. The subscription rate and duration would have suitably modest default values, for example one dollar a month for six months, and the user could adjust these as desired.
For users, subscriptions would be an easy way to contribute to websites that they value, without the hassle of repeated donations. As with existing donation mechanisms, users would only need to deal with a single service provider, from which they could view and update their subscriptions.
For authors, subscriptions would be a more predictable source of income than ad-hoc donations, providing a pleasant incentive to keep producing free content. Subscriptions would also offer some intriguing new possibilities, such as joint subscriptions, in which multiple websites could collectively pool their subscription income to pay for bandwidth and hosting. Websites could also customise their appearance by recognising subscribers using cookies and replacing the subscribe link with a thank you message or graphic to reward the user for contributing.
Today, few sources of free content on the web offer subscriptions, primarily because they are hard to set up. (Linux Weekly News provides an interesting history of their shift to subscriptions and the difficulties they encountered). A common subscription service would solve this problem. Perhaps PayPal or another service provider could consider introducing subscriptions to the web.
Copyright © 2004 Michael Day, mikeday@yeslogic.com