The Following Article Costs $2 To Read (Actually It Doesn't)
I hate this, I really hate this. The idea of a "pay to view" internet system has been thrown about for almost as long as the interweb has existed, and every time I read about it I feel sick. There are people out there that seem to think that money has to be made out of everything that money can be made out of. In this case they want your money for the sake of viewing their website.
Now, if you think that it is reasonable to pay one or two dollars to read something on the internet, then you can deposit $2 into my PayPal account and continue reading. If you don't think paying $2 is logical then keep reading anyways because you are the person I am on the same level with.
A lot of people in websiteland panicked big time when RSS started getting big. RSS was going to kill off website viewers. Everyone was going to get their news via RSS feeds and this would dramatically cut back on the number of views a website received. And in doing so would cut down on advertising. Which would leave the website owners penniless and living on a North Dakota potato farm. Did that happen? Umm...I don't really think so. In my case I would say I end up on a lot more websites thanks to RSS. But, who knows, maybe there is a poverty stricken tuber farmer out there cursing the name of RSS.
Nonetheless, the panic was enough to get people thinking and talking more about paying for website content. This ranged everywhere from a penny a page, to a nickel a site per day, to the outrageous $1 per article. How they figured a payment scheme, on such a level of payees, was going to work was never really brought up. There are apparently a lot of people who think this is a good idea. Some how I think they are probably the one's who stand to gain from it. Those who will lose? You guessed it - me, you, and everyone we know.
Thankfully none of those ideas have come to pass, yet, and let's hope they never do. But, there is a trend going around now, and it seems to be getting more and more popular, and that is to charge people $1 or $2 to read a particular article, blog entry, newspaper commentary, and in the case of magazines, to be able to read an article from the current issue on the newsstands. These payments are made directly to the site via a credit card. Now, I know this has been around for ages, but I had never seen it often enough to actually believe it was a threat. Till now. Five sites I have been on in the last week feature this sort of thing and that is enough to make me start getting worried.
Why? Because I don't ever want to have to pay to read something on the internet. Especially when the site already has a bunch of annoying Flash advertisements - mostly the ones that "hover" over the site and make you click on them to get rid of them. If you have a magazine and I'm interested in the content I'll buy the magazine, don't try and sell the articles on-line to me. And for goodness sakes I don't care what your blog is about or how interesting it is I'm not going to pay to read it. Even if it is about building your own perpetual motion machine. And if you're a newspaper, I'll buy the newspaper. If I don't live in the area, well, I guess I'd rather go without.
Paying for web content, is to me, the antithesis of all that the internet should stand for. Now, I can't speak to the billions of you out there, but I can reach about a dozen or so of you...most of whom I know...please, please, please, do not support this type of thing. Don't let this be the future of the internet. I beg of you, don't give these people your dollar. Boycott them. Make them realize that if they have content that they think should be on their website then it should be free. If they want to make money let them do it through annoying free subscriptions and pop-up ads. But don't let them take the last refuge of free information, education, enlightenment, opinions, and personal expression away from us.
Viva la free interweb!
K. Panda
