There is current buzz around the idea of micro-payments for news.
I won’t spend much space here talking about the economics of the current purveyors of news but they are having problems in 2009.
Suppose there were an organization that operated a web proxy and had a financial arrangement with a large number of news consumers and a reasonable number of news providers.
A consumer could go thru such a proxy and get a news article and pay 5 cents.
Here are a few incentives for the user to go thru the proxy:
- There might be fewer or no advertisements.
This in turn provides two possible advantages to the consumer:
- Less time for the information he seeks to appear;
- Less screen space to be managed;
- Less energy to render the page (think cell phone)
- The user provides support for the publisher.
Whatever ads are delivered to the user need not go thru the proxy.
The logic of deleting ads could be done by the publisher or less well by the proxy.
Ad deletion is done only by explicit agreement between the proxy and publisher.
The proxy might cache some material.
I imagine that the publisher sets the price on each page and that the proxy takes some negotiated slice of the revenue.
If the proxy delivers a list of the time of each view to the publisher either in real time or in a batch, the publisher is in a position to detect viewed material unreported by the proxy.