When the internet was only a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, I saw a show about how technology would open up new ways to pay for things. For example, you could watch a movie with normal commercial interruptions, or you could take a survey, and the sponsor of the survey would foot the bill.
Somewhere along the way, we lost most of those revenue innovations. Things settled on just a few models: Free supported by ads, pay per use, and monthly membership. There are exceptions — like just now, when I got the offer in the subject of this post from Spotify — but generally speaking, despite our ability to do really cool things, people don’t.
I think that’s a shame.
I remember seeing that survey thing sometimes for a while. My local newspaper, and maybe some others, used to do that to unlock content for non-subscribers. Maybe it didn’t generate enough revenue.
More and more sites are offering subscriptions to unlock more content. I think this is partly financial, partly to control the ridiculousness that comment sections became over the last decade. I’m aware of a couple of conservative news/opinion “communities” that operate this way. They might have a blog you can read but not comment on, or a flagship podcast that you can listen to for free, but to get more content and to actively participate you need to subscribe, with different levels of content and participation at different prices. I’m sure there are similar things for other interest groups.
IIRC one such place used to argue that having an entrance fee — even a nominal one, like a cup of coffee a month — dramatically improved the quality of the conversations. The idea being that the financial investment made you feel, well, invested, without the price being so high you felt entitled by the purchase.
A priest friend recommended a novel once — can’t remember what it was called, but I think it was about a Mexican priest. Yep (he said, after googling), it was “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene. One argument that came up in the book was that priests had to charge for baptisms, because if they didn’t, people didn’t feel that they were getting something which was worth anything.
I’m not doing the argument justice after all this time, of course, but I remember going “Huh” and thinking about it for a long time afterwards.
While the Gore’s magnificent invention is a disappointment in so many ways, I would say that the access to entertainment is on the whole one of its assets. The enhancement of research is another one. I am at present translating a book from German into English (actually two books, but one of them is almost finished) which would have required innumerable hours in libraries without online tools. Of course the vast availability of entertainment and literature also has its downside. Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me and I temporarily lose track of my line of research. Still, it is better than what I had before.
*While Gore’s magnificent invention