The Winnipeg Free Press is about a year into their pay-per-article model and they are selling about 892,000 articles per month. That's significant. Add two other outcomes, lead generation—look at all those new readers who are paying for content—and knowing what topics most interest your readers, and it's a worthwhile initiative.
Micropayments have been on the table for a while now. Walter Isaacson, the much-acclaimed author, wrote this not too long ago: "An easy micropayment system for digital content could help save journalism... In my book, The Innovators, I report on how the creators of the web envisioned protocols that would allow digital payments, and I argue that this would benefit individual artists, writers, bloggers, game-makers, musicians, and entrepreneurs."
Knight Kiplinger spoke about them at the 2010 SIPA Annual conference. "Young people do pay per drink," Kiplinger's editor-in-chief said. "If they pay $1 for a song, they ...
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"An easy micropayment system for digital content could help save journalism... In my book, The Innovators, I report on how the creators of the web envisioned protocols that would allow digital payments, and I argue that this would benefit individual artists, writers, bloggers, game-makers, musicians, and entrepreneurs."
—Walter Isaacson, best-selling author
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