As micropayments are integrated into Internet content and people decide what should remain free content and what should be paid content, another important factor will have to be decided on.... pricing content.
Initially, in the excitement to try and make their fortune with micropayments, I think a lot of content providers are going to overprice their content, causing sticker shock to a lot of web surfers, and inadvertently slow the integration of micropayments on to the Internet. Yet, once they notice that no one is visiting their websites, they will probably adjust their prices to a more reasonable level, but it will probably take some experimentation and trial and error before content prices settle down to uniform prices across the Internet.
The good news is that it will be the web surfers that determine the value of content by voting with their wallets. As it is, people are not going to be overly excited about having to pay for content that just yesterday they were getting for free, but if they are going to have to pay for content, they're going to expect quality content at reasonable prices. And if the prices are too high, they'll go to websites that offer the content they want at a price they're willing to pay.
From the content provider, it's going to be a combination of experimentation and common sense when it comes to pricing content. Really, it comes down to, if you're the websurfer, what are you willing to pay to read a newspaper article, or watch a video, or download a sewing pattern? Chances are it's not very much, maybe a couple cents, but that's okay, because the lower you can keep your prices, the better, because now you're making money every time someone accesses that content, whereas before you were only getting a 2 or 3% click through rate on your website ads. In the long run, volume of clicks is going to add up a lot faster than what you would have made on ads.
As the old saying goes, "Something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it." which holds true for internet content as well as virtual goods. But convenience of access and quality of content will play just as much of a role as price when it comes to how willingly people will switch over to a monetized internet. As more websites add micropayments to their content, and people get used to paying for content on an ala carte' basis, it will create a fierce competition among websites to get the best content, offer the best value to their visitors, and give them incentive to return.
As the free content internet disappears, so will free visitors and contributors. If people are going to have to pay for content, as a content providor, you're going to have to offer more cutomizeable content delivery options to your visitors, whether that's per-click access or day long subscriptions that would offer full access to content for the day, or other creative methods that give the visitors the ability to customize their experience.
iTunes has proved that people will pay for content if they know it's coming from a trusted source, is virus-free, legal, and convenient. Going from a free internet to a pay internet will be like going from trying to find music with Napster, to iTunes. With Napster you had to dig around to find what you wanted, which was sometimes very difficult, if not impossible, worry about whether it was infected with viruses, deal with slow downloads if only a couple people were seeding the song, among other things. To say the least it was a huge hassle!
Then iTunes comes along and offers those same songs for only 99 cents, virus free, easy to download, and legal! Pretty quickly people figured out that it was worth 99 cents to posess a song legally then deal with all the hassles of Napster. Now iTunes is the accepted way to get music on the internet.
That's exactly how a monetized internet would work too.
If people know that by paying a couple cents to access your content that they are getting a guarantee of virus-free, legal, and convenient access to that content that isn't going to destroy their hard drive, they're going to be much more willing to pay for that content. But as a content providor, you need to balance the price of that content with the value that you provide your visitors so it's a win-win situation for everyone. If people feel like they're being cheated or not getting value for their money, they will just go somewhere else, which in time will drive the bad websites off the web and let the quality websites rise to the top.
Overall, it will create a more competitive, quality, internet that in the long run will create a better user experience, and higher quality content.
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