• Marketing
• Martech
• Writing

Here it goes:

The question shouldn’t be ‘how can we engage readers to the point they are happy to pay for content?’ but a much more ambitious model where users can earn, spend, invest and speculate as part of the experience.

Google has just confirmed that it is working on a micropayment system for the Newspaper Association of America based on Google Checkout. This is good news for the industry and not-so-bad news for consumers if pricing will indeed be ‘micro’.

How about ‘micro earnings?’ If user-generated content becomes core content publishers may well start reward schemes enabling people to gain from their efforts. For example, a reader that posts 100 insightful comments earns premium access for a month.

I know little about economy but these seem to be the basic ingredients of how markets work. So why not make things a little bit more interesting and allow that economy to develop? Here are a few ideas that may or may not work for an online newspaper:

• Establish a currency (eg. the New York Times dollars – $NYT) can be bought and sold and perhaps even tied to the value of the newspaper in terms of real $$$
• Allow members to earn $NYT by contributing content and posting comments (different rates would apply) and spend them buying access to content, features, games, etc… or even exchange $NYT between themselves
• Allow members to pool together and invest in the production of special reports and earn a % of the revenue the reports generate
• Establish affiliate schemes members can earn from
• Prize giveaways

This doesn’t sound too far-fetched if you’ve tried Second Life. If you haven’t, have a look at their market data.

Newspapers would generate revenue from selling content as well as taking a small % of every transaction. I wonder if this scenario would help create a stronger bond between the brand and the user too.