I don’t like platforms, but this seems like the only way
In the world of “paying for content,” we’re used to buying single, discreet, one-off products.
The newsstand isn’t what it used to be, but people still buy single issues of magazines and newspapers. We still buy a single movie ticket, rather than a subscription. And even when we have a subscription – like Amazon Prime – we’ll sometimes buy access to a single movie. People buy albums, and individual songs.
Why doesn’t this transfer over to articles on a webpage?
I think there are three reasons. The first is the idea of buying lots of things for $0.25, or a buck. That seems silly, and I don’t want a credit card bill with 25 microcharges on it. There are lots of creative ways around that problem, but it ties in directly with the second problem.
I don’t want to subscribe to The Economist, but from time to time they have an article I’d like to read.
What I don’t want to do is sign up. I don’t want an Economist account. I don’t want to have to create an account on 30 different websites just because I wanted to buy one article.
Some micropayment systems solve both those problems, which leads us to the third reason why micropayments haven’t caught on.
How do I know which micropayment aggregator to go with? If the top ten or twenty newspapers adopted one micropayment system, everybody else would fall in line, and that would be that. It’s like MS-DOS vs. CMP. Once the federal government went with MS-DOS, that was the end of the discussion.
Unfortunately, publishers are famous for not cooperating – or doing anything that smacks of long-term, strategic thinking.
Which is why Amazon needs to step in.
This is very out of character for me. I don’t like the platforms, and my general advice to publishers is to keep as far away from them as possible. They’re an invasive species that wants to gobble your entire ecosystem.
Having said that, we need one, central payment platform that everybody’s already using, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on an Android or an Apple device. Amazon seems like the right solution.
As long as I’m making recommendations to Amazon, I have one other thing they can do. Fight back against scammers.
This morning I got a phishing email about my krehbielgroup.com hosting account. I suspected it was fake, but it was decently well done, and I could have accidentally handed over the credentials for my hosting account.
We need a well-funded group of white hat hackers to fight back against these cretins. Find them and destroy them. Plant viruses on their servers. Do denial of service attacks. Hunt them down and make their lives miserable.
That really ought to be a function of the government. One of those big white marble buildings in D.C. should be leading this charge. But they’re too interested in stupid things nobody cares about.
That’s why we need Dark Bezos. He could fund a white hat anti-spammer group with the change that falls on the counting room floor. Except that Amazon is too good at logistics to allow change to fall on the floor, but you get my point.
Somebody needs to go after these goons. They’re disrupting online commerce. They’re the new train robbers, and we need some badasses to go after them.
