What if you could selectively pay a fraction of a dollar for every news story you read in much the same way your e-tag works in your car? With just a click of a button you could donate a set amount of money to the author and publisher in order to fund the continued creation of the kind of content you enjoy and respect, without ever going over your budget.
This is what Sydney journalist and app developer Nick Ross is betting on with Nano Transactions, the micro-payments system he is developing in the hopes of restoring some order and value to an industry in decline.
Nano lets content owners and publishers set a value for the journalism they create with an easy "invisible" interface. It's the Office Space of paywalls where publishers and bloggers can charge just a fraction of a dollar per story. It's incentivised too, allowing journalists to earn money by independently publishing their own content and use it to pay to access other people's content across the web.
"Publishers can also use Nano to commission freelancers to create original content for them without spending money from their freelance budgets,” Ross told PC Mag Australia. “The payments automatically get split between the publisher and the content creator (the proportions can be decided by the account owner) and credit automatically to both of their accounts.”
Publishers can charge by the minute for music, videos, movies, streaming TV, radio and even access to websites, up to a maximum amount per day, week, or month, according to the budgets / reading habits of users. The app would simply alert you once you’d hit your limit.
"It basically is a paywall," he said. "But it’s an independent one that has a universal log-in and which won’t demand all manner of personal information. I want to make it as invisible as possible so that when you visit any site that has a tag, the payment system silently activates and tells you the price.
"You’ll be able to trust individual computers to avoid constant log-ins, logout remotely if you forgot to do so somewhere and automatically accept payments up to a certain amount on certain or all websites. Basically, avoid everything that that annoys the crap out of everyone right now. It should also be able to work with existing systems as a universal pay-per-view system… regular visitors can still subscribe to their favourite regular sites and save.”
And if you don’t believe him, you can check out Nano for yourself here.
So what can this micro-payments system do for journalism that current business models can't? Well for a start Nano could help kick-off a new value metric for news.
Nielsen and other metric systems like it only measure news on how many eyeballs are on a page at a particular time. What does it mean to be Australia's number one news website these days? Certainly not that you have the best quality journalism or the most accurate stories. A microtransaction system such as the one built by Ross could help readers take back control over news by rewarding quality content with a payment. Even a year's worth of data from systems like Nano would be enough to begin making value judgements on news publications that are sadly missing at the moment.
Ross admits that right now "there isn’t a single system that works well enough" but is adamant that small payments will be "the definitive system down the line" whether it is with his system or somebody else's.
"It’s inevitable,” he says. “It’s common sense in an internet world. Everything else has failed. I tried selling ads for a living. It’s a horrible job for most people. Meanwhile, the likes of Google AdSense hardly pay out anything."
"I just hope I can get it up and running before we lose anymore media and journalists."
It has been a pretty mixed year in the Australian media landscape. We lost The Global Mail. New Matilda lost its publisher and editor Marni Cordell. Renai LeMay ceased publishing his Australian technology website Delimeter. Asher Moses walked away from his technology posting at Fairfax. On the other hand we've seen the arrival of Guardian Australia, Techly, BuzzFeed, The Mail Online and of course this site, PC Mag Australia.
"As it is, Delimiter closing means that some very important Australian topics simply won’t be covered anymore by any Australian full-time journalist," said Ross. " There’s now literally a hole in our fourth estate ... We really need more money in this industry."
The technology editor of the ABC has been working on the app as a side project for more than a year and is crowdfunding the venture on Indiegogo.
Ross says publishers have been pretty receptive to the idea, but his challenge is first to win over the public.
“Reddit has been my test bed for this and results have been mixed to say the least,” he said.
“If I’ve mentioned it in a thread where discussion has been around Australia’s ‘piracy’ problems being caused by payment and availability issues, it’s proved popular every time.
"However, more often than not, the discussion threads revolve around hating overpriced Australian content and ‘paying too much’ and ‘this is why I pirate’ and ‘we hate the government cracking down on piracy so we’re going to pirate even moar!’ and ‘the media is so bad!’
"When I chirp in and suggest my system, which is ultimately based upon everything that they have been asking for and my FAQ answers all their regular questions, they absolutely rail against me for a variety of reasons… all of which are understandable... but fundamentally bogus.”
The journalist says there’s a great deal of resentment around the idea of “giving the media more money considering how rubbish it’s become,” an understandable mindset which he countered claiming “the exact reason the media has got so bad is because so many top journos have left the profession and not been replaced and that freelance rates and budgets have collapsed because they don’t pay anything for it anymore”.