The newspaper industry is in trouble and there are a lot of people out there doing good work for free. There are organizations looking for donations, and and worthy causes in need of money. Is there a solution to these issues and opportunities?
One of the great things about the internet is the vast amount of free information available, but at the same time, this free information bombards us with dizzying amounts of advertising, advertising which generally doesn't adequately compensate the content providers.
To me, the solution to these issues is to allow donations or charge people who use the information. I'm not talking dollars here, but small amounts of money, and in a manner that is easy for everyone. I often times read interesting articles, or utilize content created by someone for free, that I would gladly donate a few cents to. Multiply this by the large number of readers who would donate and we could be talking about decent money that could go far in alleviating some of the issues mentioned above. But who is going to pull out their credit card to spend 1 or 2 cents?
This really lies within the realm of the large payment companies, like Paypal to implement. I envision a system where I load up my Paypal account with $10 at a time. Website owners then post a "donate" or "charge" button on their website, for a few cents. A visitor can then click on the buttons, which then takes the money out of their preloaded account. This would make payment of very small amounts pretty easy.
Expanding on this thought some more, the payment system could actually even be a "rate this article/website/etc..." function. Visitors rank the site on a scale from 1-10, which then charges their account the corresponding amount of pennies out of their account! Imagine a search engine that ranks websites based on this ranking, a ranking where the value of the content is more real, since people are have voted with their money.
Clearly, there could be some very negative implications of this, but perhaps this is a solution that could benefit everyone.
