(2002-04-26) h

A couple thoughts on Business Models For Information.

• The Ny Times should be charging more like a nickel to read an article from the archives, not "as little as $0.80" (actually, a la carte it's $2.50!). This would be an interesting Micro-Payments Experiment.

• At the same time, they should have an Affiliate Program, so that a site which drives traffic to an article during its initial "free" life would earn credits, which would pay for the first viewers clicking through during it's "paid" life. To use bogus numbers, if an affiliate earned $0.01 per click-through during the free period while sending 100 people, and the per-view cost was later $0.05, then the first 20 people clicking through after the fee kicked in would still get in for free.

  • An alternative: accrue the credit for the sender's own use (e.g. if I generate ad-supported traffic then I earn a credit toward reading non-free content), rather than for his readers'.