Paid Content Online: Can it Succeed?

WastingtonDC: Existing media sales models are insulting, as are the ad supported media sources. The simple fix is all American, business like, and long overdue
The demise of liberal media sales outlets, unable to sell the acres of barely used tenets of journalism parked outside their biased editor’s doors has resulted in 14K jobs formerly described as journalism being eliminated, last year. Fourteen thousand times 97 percent, means that McDonald’s will have the pick of 13,580 of Obama’s permanent campaign staff, formerly paid by the liberal media outlets. They can now work, without the potential for destroying the world, flipping burgers, and steaming out trash cans. The elderly, and the poor, deprived of their starvation wage jobs by increases in the minimum wage, will need spotless trash cans, to contain the leavings they must sort through, to find anything to eat. So, in a way, the liberals who preached and may yet accomplish, American decline, and the end of prosperity, with The One’s election, will be able, at last, to claim some credit, for improving the health of our starving elderly, and the poor, if they steam the trash cans often and well. But, that would require that they adhere to the tenets of trash can steamers, a lot better, than ever they did to the basic tenets of journalism. I doubt their work ethics will improve, so the poor must return to the grocery store and other food market’s dumpsters, and choose wisely, what they eat, from unwashed dumpsters.
The US MSM was never the main stream, and is no longer rightly the media, as that function is increasingly served by educated people who can afford to spend countless hours online, reading, and often writing, the few dozen English language newspapers that will survive by printing both sides of any issue. Paying readers delight in tearing to bits, any article that is biased, unless the writer is unashamedly selling his bias, as part of the product his outlet is offering, as in Fox News, and the chain of major US Media giants dangling from Rupert Murdoch’s charm bracelet.
Allowed a micro payment model, millions of us will pay, a cent or two, to the author of an article, to read it, if the parent publication allows, encourages, and referees, unbiased commentary, as the WSJ, ABC, Market Watch, et al, do so well. We will pay that earned fee, so long as the publisher does not lard our reading with bias, and meddle into politics, threatening the destruction of the world’s economy, and the last bastion of Liberty and Justice for all, that is, America, with every day’s sales of biased writing, by liberal hacks.
Unbundled, writers, of conservative, liberal, religious, atheist, and all other ists, bents and cants, will be able to sell their work, or fail and go steam trash cans, for a cent or two a read, with some small percentage, say five or ten cents of each dollar the author earns, going to pay the publisher’s costs, profits, and incentives.
The publisher’s percentage must never be large enough again, to enslave the writers, and hence the paying readers, to a particular publisher’s political bent. Does this bode ill for the majority of media outlets? Yes, and rightly so, as America is a conservative Republic, by nature and habits. The rich will still be able to flaunt their wealth, and pay liberal hacks to support their political views, until they run out of money, or their heirs sell the papers to Murdoch. By and large, paying readers prefer their news straight, with all sides of any issue set out without the censorship practiced by the worst drivel mongers now going bankrupt, or selling out, to more able hands. Few of us will pay, any more, for the frauds perpetrated by the great liberal papers now mostly dead or dying, and the utter garbage spewed by the failing television industry will of course, fall away, as unbundled video markets emerge, and all liberal, all the time, fails as a marketing ploy, on television as well as in print media.
Successful content providers will not pay for thousands of 53 foot tractor trailers of trees to be destroyed, and millions of citizen’s noses assaulted with the stench of our remote paper mills. We can save those of our citizens being killed in the physical paper’s share of the 4000 some truck related fatal accidents each year. We refuse to pay for the deaths, and medical costs associated with the dangerous sneezing attacks that I experience each and every time I open a fresh magazine, or newspaper, and inhale the ink fumes. And don’t get me started about the waste, and carbon footprint involved in daily printing, distribution and landfill disposal of the physical products that are no longer part of the paying reader’s fare. Yesterday’s article on the major library that donated it’s physical books to local schools, and liberated paying students from the weight and expense of those outdated artifacts, is a long overdue harbinger of the future of content sales models. We can make the contents of the Library of Congress available to an African kid, learning with a solar charged car battery, driving a Gates/Buffet school computer/reader, for less than we can ship him the still usable set of encyclopedias that certainly helped my children prepare for Princeton, and graduate with honors. A key fob hard drive ships easier, can be updated instantly, and if stored in a ziplock bag, will survive better, in the wilds, than our cherished, but outdated bound books. More importantly, just like our overloaded kids in America appreciate a lighter book bag, that African student will be able to carry his whole book collection, when his nomad family moves again.
So, the direct marketing of words, video, et al, online, from competent journalists, unbiased, or clearly identified as biased, and proud of it, will succeed, but there are customer needs that will dictate the success or failure of the model. In general, consumers of words do not like to be lied to, messed with, nor disrespected. I often read free articles that are purely political rants, determine the threats their authors pose, to my own beliefs, and the nation I have served for decades. I will not pay to read or listen to those I abhor, nor to those products that comprise an insulting lie, in every line, sometimes in every word, as politicians of every stripe are imminently skilled at mouthing, or paying others to write or mouth.

In a word yes, however it all comes down to how the content is paid for. Banner ads are a classic example of paid for content but paid subscription services… I’m in doubt!