말미잘불가사리

www.cjr.org/opinion/dont-call-them-micropayments.php

Argues for micropayments over subscription for news.

Interesting take-on is that:

- only few concentrated subscription models survive, leaving

- others barely surviving at the mercy of random clicks and search-engine-based viewership.

Subscription models thereby are similar to caging subscribers within their model.

it demands commitment to the reader, and lock people out from casual readership.

1) For, writing a news report exhausts amount of effort and time for the writer,

and every dime spent on reading such news must account for the value derived from the product

2) Newspaper/magazines dealt with various subjects with various depths for different readers and different level of intensity; unlike an academic journal.

Unfortunately, the writer has no clear breakthrough to counter the problems he's aware of.

Quoting his support for pay-per-view methodology(micropayment, or 'casual payment', as fashioned by the writer),

"Some publications are worth two dollars, some twenty cents and they should be able to charge what they’re worth. But that’s just the start: every click, every registration, every form to fill in is a hassle. Payment needs to be as casual as browsing."

I fully agree on the last statement, that casual browsing should flow naturally into casual payment; otherwise, digital journalism may not survive without advertisement covering half the screen on every non-subscription-based journalism outlets.

But on the other end, outlets servicing subscription-based paywall do so because they have their clear competitive edge unique to their own - providing more depth, information ahead of others, well-received & dedicated journalists

i.e.) Financial Times, New York Times, Politico Pro, Seeking Alpha, 네이버 웹툰 미리보기

Thinking its contrapositive, outlets without paywalls may be losing their piece of the pie because they have no clear edge to attract viewers.

My point was to drive at this: why can't niche-market-oriented professional journalism excel in this age, where people have differentiated tastes for in-depth information?

It seems it's not the supply side, but the demand side, the lack of sophisticated readership.

Who honestly, takes casual news on tv seriously nowadays? The gravity of everyday news is much less significant,  primarily due to the differentiated interests we pursue; our identities have become much thinly segmented now than ever before. (Q.What do marketers rely on to appeal to potential customers then? - A: catchy tunes and videos, targeted ads tracking private online records)

If casual payment, or micropayment materializes to support writers' individual excellence than the lump-sum appreciation of the news platform, sophisticated readership may grow to sustain an ecosystem of small clusters of readers-writers association, which may grow into bigger projects flexibly.

This is much related to the problem of money - as medium of exchange between supply and demand of a good/service.

As a unit of account, money measures value[functions as identity, or unit basis of value](standard of denomination for all valuable, tradable things);

As store of value, stores amount of value[functions as multiplicative scalar applied to unit of account](i.e. 1 dime -> $0.10, $1 -> value of dollar-operated economies)

As a medium of exchange, money transfers certain amount of value in a transaction of goods/services

liquid, convertible asset

As liquidity/convertibility, transfers value across different forms of store of value most swiftly/with unabated trust, respectively.

Micropayment model for journalism, or any other service, is first confronted by assessing value and tagging price to the tradable good/service. As Austrian economists would like to argue, price is the outcome of subjective preference and thus arbitrary demand of the consumer. In small-demand markets, the bigger part of the equation truly is up to the market standard(competitor's pricing) and the consumer's utility-based assessment of value(unless luxurious icing on top of good/service really makes the difference as pricing strategy)There should be a basis unit that facilitates the value assessment, be it $1 minimum, in moneytary unit. Otherwise, reading itself cannot be casual, as paying is part of the process.(interval scales of 5 are used for surveys, with reason, convenience!) Thus, different articles written by different authors with different taste and depth, must be generalized at the moment of payment, for convenience.

Subscription models, from what I've experienced, need to be more flexible to meet the demands. I hardly get the juice out of my 1-year subscription at Financial Times; intensive use happens only once-in-a-while. Perhaps hours-based, number-of-articles-based(preferred, like recharging coupons! why not!)

Flexible payment and access will surely shape the contents into the viewership's tastes and preferences.(But is that what is ideal? Maybe separate core contents and flexible contents)

Between 1925 and 1929, Myrdal studied in Britain and Germany. He was a Rockefeller Fellow and visited the United States in 1929–1930. During this period he published his first books, including The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory in 1930. Returning to Europe, he served for one year as associate professor in the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.[1]

The Political Element is a compilation of Myrdal's lectures presented at the University of Stockholm. It gives us the historical account of the influence of politics in the development of economic theory and the relation between them. Gunnar believed that economics would be considered a true science only when the political aspect was dissociated. It was initially written to criticize the older generation of Swedish economists such as Eli Heckscher, Gustav Cassel, and Brisman, for combining and confusing facts and values in their theories of ‘maximum welfare’, ‘price level’, and ‘national income’. But later it turned out be a general critique of the economic theory where he emphasized that economics should be objective and independent from values. He wrote that although economists claim to be scientific and objective, their conclusion from their analyses was always politically inclined. The Political Element was translated to German in 1932 and to English in 1953.[5]

Gunnar Myrdal was at first fascinated by the abstract mathematical models coming into fashion in the 1920s, and helped found the Econometric Society in London. Later, however, he accused the movement of ignoring the problem of distribution of wealth in its obsession with economic growth, of using faulty statistics and substituting Greek letters for missing data in its formulas and of flouting logic. He wrote, "Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces." Professor Myrdal was an early supporter of the theses of John Maynard Keynes, although he maintained that the basic idea of adjusting national budgets to slow or speed an economy was first developed by him and articulated in his book Monetary Economics, published in 1932, four years prior to Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.[3]

William Barber's comment upon Myrdal's work on monetary theory goes like this:

If his contribution had been available to readers of English before 1936, it is interesting to speculate whether the ‘revolution’ in macroeconomic theory of the depression decade would be referred to as 'Myrdalian' as much as 'Keynesian'.[6]

Economist G. L. S. Shackle claimed the importance of Gunnar Myrdal's analysis by which saving and investment are allowed to adjust ex ante to each other. However, the reference to ex ante and ex post analysis has become so usual in modern macroeconomics that the position of Keynes to not include it in his work was currently considered as an oddity, if not a mistake. As Shackle put it:

Myrdalian ex ante language would have saved the General Theory from describing the flow of investment and the flow of saving as identically, tautologically equal, and within the same discourse, treating their equality as a condition which may, or not, be fulfilled.[7]

Gunnar Myrdal also developed the key concept circular cumulative causation, a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.