The Feedly Platform: A revenue model for content micro-payments
Recently the rhetoric around micro-payments for content has increased exponentially. As is the case with any adoption of technology, baby steps are necessary for users to become acclimated with the idea. With the significant drop off in the ad revenue, and users becoming accustomed to paying for software and music, the market for paying for content is ripe to explode. The logistics of profitability have yet to be hashed out however a platform where it could make sense has finally emerged. Feedly is amazingly good at presenting content you subscribe to through RSS feeds. It leverages your existing RSS feeds and while there is currently no subscription fees associated with the service, micro-paying for content read is a logical next step towards monetizing the service.
Google Reader, as is the case with most RSS readers, takes the meta-data (text, pictures) from existing sites and presents it in a drab inbox so to speak. While a powerful source of organizing news sources specifically interesting to you, there has clearly been little thought in the actual presentation. So much so that the use of RSS feeds still remains largely a techie phenomenon. Feedly can change that. By taking the feeds and organizing them into a magazine like format, thats intuitive and adding relevant youtube videos as well as additional related articles, it takes the things your content you subscribe to and builds it into a real-time magazine that updates as you read it. Its simply brilliant.
Magazines have long since enjoyed the royalties of loyal subscribers. Feedly allows you to build your own, and that in it of itself is something worth paying for. But because, they do not actually create any of the content, a micro-payment for the meta-data (from other sites) should be employed to create a revenue stream. For example, if you read a full a article from some site, you are charged some nominal fee. If you start reading an article but lose interest, you are either charged nothing or some minimal amount. As a thought experiment, assume if you read 75%-100% of what is posted, you are charged what would equate to a monthly subscription fee (lets say a magazine subscription would cost $24 [it could be less or more] to make the math easy, thats $2 a month). If you read 50%-74%, you are charged half ($1), and below that you aren't charged anything.
As an example of how this might work, I looked at the trends of my own usage of Google Reader to see what I'd end up paying (see my usage statistics above). Feedly doesn't have any trending tools (that I could find) so I used the ones available from Google Reader.
I have 203 subscriptions.
I actively read over 75% of the posts on 17 of these subscriptions: 17 * $2 = $34
Beyond that, I read just over 50% on 2 additional subscriptions: 2 * $1 = $02
My total would be $36 a month.
Thats really not that bad. I could easily spend that amount picking up magazines in any book store. And that example is VERY simplified. Clearly, a subscription to "Silicon Alley Insider" where I've read 660 articles can't be monetarily equated to "Sandhya Photography Blog" where 10 articles were posted. A tiered model would have to be introduced, further reducing the cost the overall cost.
Lets say, if a subscription yields over 100 articles of which over 75% are read in 30 days, $2 is charged, and between 50-100 articles (with the same percentage read), $1 is charged. In this same model, any percent between 50%-75% read with over 100 articles is charged $0.50 and under that nothing is charged. Further below 50 articles with over 75% read, $0.10 is charged.
My monthly bill would be:
9 (subscriptions w/ over 100 articles where over 75% were read) * $2 = $18
0 (subscriptions w/ over 100 articles where between 50% - 75% were read) * $1 = 0
12 (subscribtions w/ under 50 articles where over 75% were read) * $0.10 = $1.20
The total = $19.20
These are VERY simplistic models and yet they are totally palatable for an end-user (at least me). Now if Feedly takes a percentage for presentation and actually pays the content providers for articles read, an eco-system of self-reliance will form where one will promote the other in cooperative marketing.
One might argue, if complex billing systems are introduced that value different articles at varying rates, the user will refuse the model as they won't know what they are paying for. This could very well be the case, however, if the total amount is low enough most users won't bother digging into the payment rates. Could the system be cheated? Of course, but the convenience of paying minimal amounts (as is the case with iTunes) will out weigh the gains of abusing the system.
Thoughts?
