Somewhere at Microsoft, there is a closet packed with leftover Slate umbrellas — a monument to the folly of asking society to pay for what they read on the Net. These umbrellas — a $20 value! — were the premium we offered to folks who would pay $19 for a year’s subscription to Slate, the Microsoft-owned online magazine (later purchased by The Washington Post). We were quite self-righteous about the alleged principle that “content” should not be free. The word itself was an insult — as whether we were just making Jell-O salad in order to sell Tupperware.

The experiment lasted about a year. Still, every so often the dream of getting folks to pay recurs. It’s recurring now considering of the newspaper crisis: they have been hemorrhaging subscribers and advertisers for their paper editions, even as they give away their contents online. In the current day, its former managing editor, Walter Isaacson, urges a solution: “micropayments.”

Micropayments are systems that construct it easy to pay small amounts of money. (Your subway card is an example.) You could pay a nickel to read an composition, or a dime for a whole day’s newspaper.

Well, possibly. But it would be a first. Newspaper readers have never paid for the substance (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that substance is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting nearly a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc. The Times is more svelte and more expensive. It might even have a viable business model whether it could sell…

[Source] dhiram