Dutch privacy advocates Bits of Freedom have setup a tipjar requesting donations for their ongoing fight to preserve privacy in the Netherlands.
We could not wish for a more deserving cause to use TipiT and we would urge you to consider donating to them.
TipiT was represented at the Dutch Media Professionals event last week called “Show me the Money”. A small writeup can be found on Alper’s blog.
Another still-born attempt to try to make people pay for content: bitcents. Didn’t we try this before?
Also compare that to Springer’s jump on the bandwagon idea to charge for online content. A broader initiative with richer content linked to a tremendously easy payment method may have some success, but the old media executives trying to safeguard their bonuses indulge in a nontrivial amount of wishful thinking:
“How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said. (NYT)
And an interesting remark at the end of the article:
American publishers, he said, have been too timid in dealing with threats to their future […]
“The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down,” he said. “This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this.” (NYT)
A collaborative strategy such as the one discussed by Murdoch and Microsoft vs. Google, may work in the short term but in the long term it will probably provide a too lucrative and seductive upside to defectors. At least it would be an interesting play in a too boring discussion.
The above initiatives are why TipiT allows people to pay whatever they think your content is worth after they have seen it. This solves many of the problems associated with the pay-for schemes above.
