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from the if-you-pay-for-it,-are-you-no-longer-the-product? dept.
Facebook will start managing paid subscriptions to publishers' posts later this year.
AdWeek reports Facebook Says It Will Start Testing a Subscription-Based News Product in October:
A paywall is coming to Facebook, much to the delight of publishers.
Head of news partnerships Campbell Brown made the announcement at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York Tuesday, as reported by Leon Lazaroff of TheStreet.
Her announcement comes just over one week after several prominent publishers, as well as smaller newspapers—nearly 2,000 publishers in total—teamed up to form trade organization The News Media Alliance with the aim of pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption to negotiate with Facebook and Google.
According to Business Insider, Facebook is going to let publishers start charging readers to view stories:
With subscriptions, Facebook is opening up another way to make money off its platform at a time when some of its other publisher offerings, such as Instant Articles, have disappointed publishers. Facebook is also testing mid-roll video ads with a handful of publishers that it plans to eventually roll out to everyone.
And from TheStreet we have Facebook Exec Campbell Brown: We Are Launching a News Subscription Product:
"One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that 'we want a subscription product -- we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'" Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, an industry conference, in New York City on July 18. "And that is something we're doing now. We are launching a subscription product."
(Score: 2) by PapayaSF on Friday July 21 2017, @04:31AM (1 child)
Remember, this is not a system to just apply to any link that appears anywhere. It's in effect an inexpensive paywall for websites. Might some scammers set up clickbaity sites that don't provide what they claim? Yup. Just like everything else online, you'd have to be careful. But I doubt if the NY Times or Joe Cartoonist or Jane Musician is going to be trying to rip people off for pennies.
I don't see anything that can't be dealt with by a combination of the market and whoever is running the system. Sellers set prices. The system makes sure the displayed price is the charged price. Sites get reputations and reviews. If people can successfully deal drugs over the dark web with cryptocurrency, why is an entirely legal paywall system that uses micropayments such a difficult problem, and so open to abuse?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 21 2017, @05:24AM
Oh but it is. That is the whole POINT. The NYT does pretty good selling digital subs, same for the WSJ. Microtransactions aren't for them. They are for all of the other web properties who steadfastly refuse to admit that they are in the selling eyeballs business. That are utterly convinced that the Internet revolutionized all that away, that they are now free of that grubby capitalistic nonsense and can, and should be, free to just create 'great content' and that the money they need to survive on will simply appear by magic. That is why they don't want to build out the billing systems, they demand Zuck do it for them. They don't want to deal with the international aspects either, somebody just solve it and give them money.
So project that defective thinking to the logical conclusion and recoil in horror NOW, before you help bring the nightmare into reality.
Every blog quickly becomes at least a $0.01 link instead of a sidebar link to Patreon because begging causes bad feelz. Ok. Annoying but you just nuked the 3rd world right the f*ck off the Internet as a side effect. And remember that you don't see the content until after payment. Ponder all the ways the Internet would change, all the ways to abuse such a system, all the people who would want a cut and the ways they would dream up to get it. EVERY BAD THING WOULD HAPPEN because the Internet has almost no mechanism to stop abuse, see SPAM. Remember UseNet? And remember that while the 3rd world wouldn't be able to pay the penny to see most links, they would be inversely motivated to harvest hits, since that penny means a lot more to them. One easy way to get content is to simply steal it and sell it cheaper, i.e. piracy. And once money moves across an international border, good luck policing it. Seeing the problems yet? How many more can you find in a half hour of serious effort to find abuses. Now imagine how many the same people who run our current scams will find with their boundless energy.
Then imagine the whole "Pirate Bay" of Internet content that would almost instantly spawn. Now combine the horrors. Remember that problem I mentioned with the 3rd World? How long before "something must be done to address this inequality" and we get tiered pricing structures. Remember what I said about pirating content, buy low, sell high! VPNs would also collide with the "redistribution of information" movement. Hilarity would ensure for sure. But would it be a better Internet?
Now lets get to the actual tech. So Facebook is tapped right into essentially every Internet user's bank account and to make it painless it 'just works' in the background as your browser opens pages. What happens when your PC gets infested and starts quietly opening pages in the background? Currently the most they can do is try to steal your credit card and worry about ordering something without triggering the safeguards when they try to deliver it to an address in Estonia. But now they trigger thousands / millions of pageviews to servers spread around the world and with luck have it all converted to BTC and discontinue those virtual hosts before anyone catches on. Amazon might have "one click shopping" but it only delivers stuff to your home address. Now every can browser quickly distribute money around the world. Most people run Windows. Connect the dots.