It's a nice article, and the reference to Gresham's Law[1]
is something I haven't seen before applied to content.
The microtransactions idea isn't new, and as other people have said, the main issue is adoption, by both producers and consumers. Making it voluntary after the fact rather than a pay-wall might improve adoption, at a potential loss of overall revenue.
As I see it, there are 3 main classes of blogs, from the author's perspective:
As a marketing tool - to gain readership by writing around the field you do business in, and pointing them towards your products. You don't really care about the money - it's part of your marketing/advertising budget.
As a hobby - writing about things you enjoy doing, but would like some small amount of money as validation of your content quality, and to cover things like hosting expenses and maybe to fund your hobby projects.
As a business - writing things with a direct emphasis on SEO, going for maximum advertising revenue by targeting niche keywords, generating crappy quality content from MTurk, etc.
All of those would benefit from tipping, but in all likelihood only the first two would actually receive tips, and only the second really requires them.
Would it be enough to operate without/with reduced advertising? I suspect not, but you might be able to tie some incentives into tipping like removing ads from other content for the day/week/whatever. Would be an interesting topic to research, but without a decent microtransaction system it's impossible to know.
The microtransactions idea isn't new, and as other people have said, the main issue is adoption, by both producers and consumers. Making it voluntary after the fact rather than a pay-wall might improve adoption, at a potential loss of overall revenue.
As I see it, there are 3 main classes of blogs, from the author's perspective:
As a marketing tool - to gain readership by writing around the field you do business in, and pointing them towards your products. You don't really care about the money - it's part of your marketing/advertising budget.
As a hobby - writing about things you enjoy doing, but would like some small amount of money as validation of your content quality, and to cover things like hosting expenses and maybe to fund your hobby projects.
As a business - writing things with a direct emphasis on SEO, going for maximum advertising revenue by targeting niche keywords, generating crappy quality content from MTurk, etc.
All of those would benefit from tipping, but in all likelihood only the first two would actually receive tips, and only the second really requires them.
Would it be enough to operate without/with reduced advertising? I suspect not, but you might be able to tie some incentives into tipping like removing ads from other content for the day/week/whatever. Would be an interesting topic to research, but without a decent microtransaction system it's impossible to know.
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gresham%27s_l...