1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate.

2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back.

3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.

So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages.

I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term.

The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic.

Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed.

So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended)

Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing.

Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price.

So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles."

Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people.

There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence.

The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web).

If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus.

[1] The exception for fan fiction is noted.

[2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.

Wouldn't that just create more content that appeals to the least common denominator? Why would you want to focus the efforts of a professional writer toward creating that?

You misunderstand what was written. ChuckMcM was suggesting that most people only read an article once. Even if they frequently go back to the same website, they don't re-read articles that they've read from 5 years ago. That makes the economics different than buying a book or a magazine. People do save magazines. My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009, and when I was a kid I would read through old issues to get a sense of how science developed during the decades before I was born. Nobody does that with web articles. So the economics are different. You can become the owner of a magazine, but trying to claim ownership of a digital article is a subject of endless debates regarding copyright law.

As ChuckMcM said, the web is 99.999% "one and done". People read articles once and never go back. They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.

Actually, I have a fundamentally different perspective.

> They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.

The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader. Even if they read it once. This is true of literary content, educational content, news content, and even entertainment.

But more than that, what good content does is establish a relationship that can be cultivated. Even if you read an article just once, it can become part of the greater relationship that serves a larger purpose. (Perhaps, educational, building towards expertise in a certain knowledge area. Or, perhaps, entertainment, where the reader can reliably expect a change in their emotional state.)

> My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009

Many of my subscribers save all of the emails I send them. How is that different?

> Nobody does that with web articles.

Have you never referred back to the same web resource? How many times have you viewed this discussion? Do you wonder why there is a "bookmarks" menu button on your browser? Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later, or printed it out? These are all common behaviors.

Someone regularly comments on my Facebook article posts, saying "bookmarking", just so they can reference it later.

Ironically, I often email the same article to the same audience multiple times, and the readership rate remains high.

Yes, the web is full of low-quality content that degrades the reader, the writer, and the entire culture of the internet. Maybe that content earns 1/3rd of a cent per view -- and deserves it. But is that really what we want to be supporting?

"But is that really what we want to be supporting?"

you are instead remarking about how things should be. Maybe there is some alternate universe where utopia has been established and people pay a lot of money to support good content. However, I would suggest that you read Clay Shirky's remarks on the death of print:

"When you have an audience mostly made up of nostalgists, there’s not much market demand for unvarnished truth. This kind of boosterism wouldn’t matter so much if it were only reaching weepy journos whose careers started in the Reagan administration. But the toxic runoff from CJR and Nieman’s form of unpaid PR is poisoning the minds of 19-year-olds."

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2014/06/nostalgia-and-newspaper...

There was a long time, during the 1990s and early 00s, when it seemed it might be possible for newspapers to gain revenue by publishing on the web, but we now know that is impossible.

See also "This is why the news media is dying: global online ad revenue is $40 billion"

Combine that with “Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising“.

That leaves at most $25 billion for every content site in the world. Pathetic. Consider that television advertising in the USA is $160 billion a year.

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/this-is-why-the-news-me...

Again, my comments are more about how people actually use the web, rather than how they should use the web.

Which is why I addressed each of your points, before adding a new point.

> whereas when you write: "But is that really what we want to be supporting?"

In this case, I was adding a new point.

People DO go back and engage with content more than once. The assertion that people don't do that is wrong. Your reply alone is evidence of that.

The additional point I was attempting to make is that bad content is "one and done." Not only does bad content leave the reader unmoved, it is quickly forgotten, usually anonymous, and does nothing to build a relationship with the reader.

I'm not sure why you bring up newspapers. 1/3rd of a cent for a newspaper article "view" is in no way sustainable.

As for newspapers: today's Sydney Mornig Herald is a few dozen pages, with multiple articles per page. Let's call that 100 articles (current affairs, technology, finance, sports). It costs about a dollar per day. So each article is worth about a cent, for a paper newspaper delivered to your house.

The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.

Of course I would prefer to spend my money on a non-Murdoch paper. But that gets into politics rather than economics.

> The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.

That demonstrates perfectly how the micropayment model is fundamentally different than the subscription model.

The assumption with micropayments is that you're paying only for what you view – not for everything the website produces.

With a subscription, you're paying for everything, whether or not your read it.

Say you 10 read articles in the paper each day. That works out to $0.10 an article, not $.01 an article, if you're being charged just for what you read. A huge difference. $0.10 would possibly be sustainable for micropayments, especially if you guaranteed the publisher a minimum payment each month. 1/3rd of a cent is simply out of the realm of reality – unless you're agreeing to pay, in advance, for all of the articles they produce. In which case, I don't think you're talking about micropayments anymore.

Thus $0.01/article is still a fair pricing.

I would like to see the the empirical support for this.

Indicated by data collected from advertisers, internet content consumption is driven largely through social media platforms and mobile direct messaging. Shareaholic's report from the beginning of this year [1] indicates Facebook drives a quarter of hits to sites.

Social platforms and mobile applications thrive on new content. If people are getting to their content through social / mobile apps, and those places maintain eyeshare by presenting fresh, new stuff, it would lead that those platforms de-emphasize old content, not pushing users to return to it.

https://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-01-...

This is a lofty goal. Very little on The Web comes within shooting distance of it. What's more, it has little to do with the fact that paying for access to soft copies of material is -unfortunately- [0] quite a bit different than paying for hard copies of the same thing.

> > Nobody does that with web articles.

> Have you never referred back to the same web resource?

Unless it's a reference manual or similar such thing, almost never. Even the issues of SciAm that I did save were saved for the sections that could be used as reference manuals. Frankly, I'm not one for sentiment. :)

> Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later...

I've emailed the URL to an article to myself to read later because I was either

* too busy with another task at the time to read it, but it looked like it was related to another one of my projects

* on a smartphone, which is often terrible for reading idea-heavy material

[0] I say "unfortunately", because it seems that "most" people don't understand how to save complete copies of online resources to their local machine.

If quality is the same, that is exactly what will happen. You are already using software, iphones and TVs built in 3rd world countries for $5 a day.

Any evidence supporting your statement? Or is it just pure anecdote. To counter your point: there is a long list of writers with accolades in writing (in English) who are not native speakers.

There are people who are just poor at language, native or learned. Also, there's a class of errors that only exists among 'native speakers', the most grating to me, is "would of"

   its completely incomprehensible.

With love,

Your non English speaking 3rd world citizen.

I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.

I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else

Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French (Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like in the US.

If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.

But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.

This is the same fallacy that content providers make with piracy; you can't just multiply the number of pirates by the cost of the item to see how much money you 'lost' to piracy. You will always get more viewers/readers/users when something is free.

I don't believe this has been established yet. Sure there are lots of people who won't even give up their email address and they run AdBlock and they whine everytime an article to the WSJ or NYTimes is linked to on HN.

But that preference for "free" information is being proven unsustainable as we type. And Apple's moves are going to make it that more obvious. And like Netflix which showed piracy was a service problem not a content problem, so is written text on the Internet.

Imagine there was a service that you could pay $25 a year for, that in exchange for your $25 a year, would take all annoying ads off every page of every website you cared about to read. Think about that. And if that $25 got distributed, a third of a cent at a time, to every web site that participated in this, and you read their articles, that money flowed to them, for providing the content you wanted to read? It changes the dynamic, it changes the parameters of A/B testing, and I suspect that a large chunk of the 40 million AdBlock+ users would sign up for it. A web site with a million of those page views a day, would bring in $90,000 a month.

Piracy, and articles on the web, is a mismatch between what the content provider thinks something is worth, and what something is really worth. If you artifically price it above what people think it is worth, you get piracy. If you provide a way for market dynamics to price it and capture the value you can see what it is really worth.

So rather an author saying "This article is worth $10,000" you throw out that article into a networked system which has millions of "small" votes, all articles compete for votes based on their value to the community. Value wins.

And like Netflix where a movie that is a dog may not make any more revenue by being part of the instant catalog, articles that aren't actually valuable won't suddenly have value by participating in this market. Conversely, articles that do have value, will automatically do very well financially.

And here is the problem. Content creators are still finding out painfully that what they create isn't worth what they believe it to be. Welcome to price discovery!

But if you've been watching this develop as long as I have its really fascinating to see how these markets emerge.

But what happens if it turns out that an insufficient minority are willing to pay for content to make businesses like the NYT and other publishers viable businesses (or at least viable at their current scale in their current incarnation)?

My current thinking is that if they were to stop writing, people would just get their news from elsewhere, and other publishers would gladly fill their shoes.

What are your thoughts around that? If enough people keep rejecting approaches to payment models (indicating they are not willing to pay), will we simply see the publisher space continue to shrink/degrade until it reaches equilibrium with the revenue they can manage to eek out?

I think about it slightly differently. If you ask the question "Will all the news organizations and publishers go out of business?" And the answer is obvious, no they won't.

The reason they won't is because there is a demand for content and the only people left standing will be the ones who can deliver content in a way that pays their own bills. Will the NYTimes go out of business? Perhaps.

This is the fallacy in a nutshell : "My current thinking is that if they were to stop writing, people would just get their news from elsewhere, and other publishers would gladly fill their shoes."

Nobody will commit finanical suicide to serve a market. They have to believe that there is a way to make money at it, so the only way "other publishers" jump into the market is if they can do so without losing their shirts.

What we're observing is the death of the "put up some content and slap some ads on it" way of making money. That it has worked this long has been very impressive as there is very little barrier to entry, but the commons is so thoroughly stomped upon with blog spam and content farms is finally killing it. Having service providers listen to their users and allow them to disable ads, puts the final nail in that coffin. Is it no wonder they scream loudly?

The vote is being called as they say, "Either put up with ads, or pay for your content."

The challenge though is how to negotiate what the content is worth? How do you make a market so that people can actually implement that choice over a wide range of pricing so that the market collectively they can arrive at a price?

It is something I thought Bitcoin like systems might help with, but any microtransaction system if it has low enough friction would work. Publishers could tweak the price of page views, readers could read or not read the content provided. Prices would float up to equilibrium and people will be able to once again reason about what an article is worth, whether it was written by a hack in a third world country or written by someone with an established reputation for quality.

The existing market is collapsing, and in its place a new market will emerge because people really do like reading stuff. And enough people like it to make it into a market. Capturing that value which was learned back in Ben Franklin's days for what became newspapers, will be relearned given the channels and technology we have today. Its cost structure will be different, I would hope more of the value would flow through to the authors but one can never predict these things. Music is in the middle of the same process. But the music industry won't cease to exist, but it could very easily transform into something we would not recognize.

There are other high quality music outlets for people to choose and they are choosing them instead. C'est la vie. The same could happen to writing on the web, or something else could happen. You don't know until you run the experiment. But it is possible that people will not be interested enough to either put up with ads or pay per view (in whatever form) for readable content on the web.

There is the issue of location (i.e. you have to live in or near a big city to be able to go to an orchestra), but that is a consequence of the physical world (you need to be close to something to visit it, and for niche things like an orchestra, there will only be enough people to support it in a big city). This isn't the case on the internet - if your worldwide market is small, you can still reach them wherever they are.

I, too, have thought about a system like what you describe ($25 a year, distributed to each thing you visit). However, there are some issues.

1) You say 1/3 of a cent per visit... what happens after you visit 7,500 sites in the year? Where does the money come from at that point?

2) Say that instead of a 1/3 per year fee, you just take the whole $25 and divide it by the number of sites I visited...so if I visited only 5 sites in the year, they each would get $5, but if I visited 25,000 they would each only get 1/10 a penny. The question then becomes, how much is a reasonable amount to charge per year, if we are going to charge the same rate to everyone? Should someone who consumes much more pay more, or is it a flat rate?

3) No matter your system, there are going to be issues of content. Does a click-baity article that takes 10 seconds to read cost the same as a 10 page, in depth and well researched, article? You are going to incentivize people to make cheap and quick content, since you are not rewarded for anything besides clicks.

I also think your analysis of piracy being a result of pricing something above what it is worth to be a bit of a stretch; no matter what something is worth, if you offer the same thing to me for free, I will take the free.

To give an example: Suppose I was selling $10 bills for $10, and the guy next to me was giving away $10 bills. Everyone will obviously take the free $10 bills from the guy next to me - that doesn't mean I was selling the $10 bills for more than they were worth, it just means that people will always choose to pay less for something no matter what it is worth.

1) Something of a red herring, my VOIP provider starts sending me emails when by balance drops below $20. But it works well in terms of periodically topping up the balance.

2) For markets to work it is essential for them to reward individually. A basic income for authors would simply raise the noise level, an income for "quality" authors based on readership encourages an increase in signal level.

3) Perhaps we could use the phone call method, and accrue fractions of a penny the longer you stay on a page. I agree that you would want to be able to express a desire for less click baity and more useful articles, the mechanism for that isn't as clear.

On the whole piracy thing, I presume you were around when NetFlix streaming knocked the winds out of torrent streaming? It didn't do it because it disable the torrent protocol, it did it because people who had been pirating content switched to Netflix because it was a better service experience at a price they were willing to pay. That is a very very important lesson for content providers. Their pricing authority is extremely limited in a high tech world.

I like your story but we both know that the guy next to you would quickly be out of free $10 bills, and then he would have to go to the bank and give them some money for another stack to give away, and eventually, like content providers today, would get tired of giving away $10 bills to people. And eventually he would run out of the funds as well.

The basic economics of a functioning market are that suppliers try to get as much as they can for their product and buyers try to pay as little as they can. The process for creating the process creates a price floor, below which nobody makes the product because they go broke doing so. Between that sad place, and people paying way more for a product than it costs to produce, lives the market economy.

Historically people have argued that information flies in the face of this view of the world, after all if I can produce infinite supply of something (copies) shouldn't the price go to zero? And yet it doesn't. I've spend about 20 years looking at how information gains and loses value, and how people can capture that value in a transaction. Google, for example. doesn't sell the eyeballs of a person to an advertiser, they sell the eyeballs of a person who just asked a question about the product that advertiser sells. Google is selling the information about searcher intent and that is very valuable indeed.

There is a fun experiment you can run which can show you information pricing in action.

Set up a chessboard at some distance removed with the white queen on a certain square. At a nearby table, offer to pay someone $2 to go to the far off chess board and come back and report the position of the queen. As soon as its reported the queen is moved to a new position. Now an entrepreneur can walk down to the chess board and on his way back sell the information to someone coming the other way, walking less and getting a fraction of the value. A really creative entrepreneur can set up a web cam that watches the board and they sit there 10 yards from the source table repeatedly selling the new positions as they come in. In that respect they are doing what high frequency traders do, applying technology to achieve an information advantage which is then convertible into revenue.

Understanding how information develops value will illuminate the strategies that will capture that value. As more and more people figure this stuff out we will see more things like flattr.com and other services. For a long time I've been expecting a curation service to appear which does what an executive secretary might do for a busy executive, pull the the top 10 or 15 best articles describing that news of the day or the area of interest, and making those easily consumable on the go. Capturing the value of the information curated, versus a giant pool of information one is forced to forage through to get to the good bits.