A lot of writers toil for little reward when they are ‘emerging’ in the hopes that one day they will be raking in the big bucks (or at least, some bucks). However, sometimes logic says this will simply not happen.

To use use myself as an example, no matter how amazing my writing skills become, there is simply a tiny market for vegan food writing and, particularly, vegan reviewing. Sure I can do mainstream stuff, but in the general food media there is much less call for vegan content than for dairy- and meat-focussed content. In addition, I think it’s fairly safe to say that because of its fringe nature, most vegan publishing opportunities don’t pay very much (or, mostly, at all). So my publishing scope is limited, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interested audience who are keen to read vegan food writing and who are hungry for knowledge about vegan restaurants. So what if I approached this blog as a self-publishing platform and somehow charged for specific vegan content? (No, I’m not going to – just floating an example.)

Micropayments

Charging a fee per article is known as micropayments. It’s a model that newspapers are considering as they digitise. The benefits are that the reader can simply pay a small fee for the content they want to see (rather than, say, an annual subscription fee which gives you access to a whole bunch of content that you might not want to see).

To extend my example, if I wrote an article about eating vegan in Osaka, and offered it as a paid article, then you’d only pay to read it if you were interested in that particular topic. How-to articles or writing about topics you are a particular expert on could be lucrative in this way. For example, if fatfreevegan, a blog I like and whose recipes I trust, published a recipe for the ultimate decadent zero-fat cake then I would pay to access that. But I would need prior knowledge of, and trust of, the author before I paid; I would need to know it would be worth it. Then again, for a small amount of money, in some cases I would be willing to throw caution into the wind and hope for the best, especially if the information were rare.

I think another key point is that your content would have to be very niche. There are so many great vegan review blogs in Melbourne that if I charged for my reviews of local restaurants, I’m pretty sure no one would pay, because they could get the same content elsewhere for free (and with better photos). But if I, say, wrote an article on all the vegan-possible places to eat when travelling from Adelaide to Perth (a popular tourist route), I reckon I could probably get away with charging for that; it’s niche enough that no one would have done it, and many vegans hoping to do that trip would find it valuable enough to pay for.

A problem with micropayments is that they are small – it would take a lot of $1 (or whatever) micropayers for a single article/post/story to begin to pay off for a writer, especially if you are paying an editor. Another problem is that it’s really annoying for readers to have to pull out their credit card or paypal account every time they want to read certain content on your site, and I’m guessing that individual bloggers might not be able to set up the kinds of sophisticated systems that online newspapers could, or that iTunes can. There is a fair bit of discussion going on about micropayments at the moment, and I’m personally not convinced that it’s a viable model for individuals. For a reader, the feeling that you are constantly paying can be off-putting, even if the overall amount isn’t that much.

Subscriptions

Another model is the aforementioned subscription model. Put simply, you pay a fee (monthly or yearly would work best, probably) and get to access all the content. It’s a bigger financial committment than a micropayment, and a reader potentially wouldn’t be interested in all the content they were subscribing to. But it’s less fuss than micropayments. Of course, it costs more upfront, but in terms of the amount of delivered content it would probably work out less in the long-run (but only if you saw value in all the content). I think this model could potentially be more successful than micropayments for individual writers, as it seems like much less stuffing around by all parties… that said, there are many sites I would make a micropayment to access articles from, but far less (like, under five) that I can imagine subscribing to.

A balance between free and paid

Also, I don’t think a blog/site could survive with all its content locked for subscribers. Probably a balance between locked (paid) content and unlocked (free) content is needed (like Crikey does), but with categories and tags I don’t think that would be difficult.

Would you pay?

But of course, it all depends on the reader. Are there any blogs you read that you would pay for content from? And how much do you think you’d be willing to pay for a micropayment or subscription? (I know that last one is a bit broad and vague – it would totally depend on the site, writer and what was being offered, etc.)

Bonus reading material: Chris Anderson‘s new book Free: the future of a radical price looks at ‘free content as an online business model’. Although Seth Godin supports Anderson’s book, he also says this: “We’re always going to need writers, but the business model of their platform is going to change. People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people.”

*Photo by spodzone.