14 DAY TRIAL // Seeing how the newspapers haven't been able to come up with something to start generating some real revenue online, with income from the paper versions going way south as well, but that they are hell-bent on blaming everyone else but themselves for their troubles, Google took it upon itself to offer them a solution. A favorite target of the newspaper industry, Google is developing a new platform for micropayments targeted, in part, at the news industry, which is determined to put up a pay wall for its content.
A document submitted to the Newspaper Association of America by Google, revealed yesterday, said it was working on an extension for its payment platform Google Checkout, which would allow publishers to charge for content on an a-la-carte or subscription basis, with prices raging from pennies to several dollars. This will allow news organizations to make some of their content accessible only to paying readers, something they've been planning to implement on a larger scale.
“While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year. The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time. Google will mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using our proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Merchant integration will be extremely simple,” Google wrote in the report.
The system could be attractive to news agencies, which have been looking at introducing some sort of payment system for at least part of their content, as Google will handle the hassle of the transaction costs and credit-card fees. For its troubles, Google will take a 30-percent cut of the payment in a model similar to Apple's iPhone App store or Google's own Android Market, though the exact details aren't fleshed out yet.
While, from a pure technical point, the newspapers might welcome the solution, their tense relationship with Google, which they believe is making money from their content without any kind of retribution neglecting to account for the huge traffic Google sends their way, might make it hard for the two parties to collaborate, but, at the end of the day, perhaps financial reasons may win over “ideological” ones. However, despite its proposal, Google doesn't see payed content as a viable solution for all cases, saying, “We do not believe it will be the norm for accessing content.”