Jason Fry suggested in a post here last week that current paywall thinking might be just a temporary stop along the way to adoption of “paytags — bits of code that accompany individual articles or features, and that allow them to be paid for.” But how? As Fry recognizes, “between wallet friction and the penny gap, the mechanics of paytags make paywalls and single-site meters look like comparatively simple problems to solve.”
I suggested a possible framework for a solution during a couple of sessions at the conference “From Blueprint to Building: Making the Market for Digital Information,” which took place at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute June 23-25. Basically, my “what-if” consisted of two questions:
- What if news content owners and creators adopted a variation on the long-established ASCAP-BMI performance rights organization system as a model by which they could collect payment for some of their content when it is distributed outside the boundaries of their own publications and websites?
- And, taking it a step further, what if they used a variant of Google’s simple, clever, and incredibly successful text advertising auction system to establish sales-optimizing pricing for such content?
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