People are paying for mobile music even though predictions a few years stated otherwise, and Charlie O'Donnell insists that internet content can be profitably sold. "What Apple proved, and what I suspect is the issue with web content, is that monetization was a product problem," he states on This is going to be big.

People pay for music because it is more convenient than searching for free content; in the same way, if news providers could make paid content easier to access than aggregating free sources, consumers might well go with the easier option and pay. "Despite over 15 plus years of progress," he writes, "little has changed about the way we consume articles on the web since the internet started. It's still largely a desktop experience driven and produced by publishers clinging to siloed production and consumption experience... The best hope you have for sending me an article that I read is to e-mail it to me or DM me on Twitter--and to hope that wherever I'm reading the web, I'm also checking messaging services."

An effective solution therefore, will be to simplify the reading and sharing experience, specifically by making use of already existing tools. O' Donnell describes these tools as "features and efforts that paint a clearer picture of what a great product experience needs to be."

To start with, an article should not be exclusive to any single medium. "Read everywhere," he calls it, referring to Amazon's one-click ebooks as an example. "The one-click Amazon to my Kindle experience is fantastic," he writes. "What's even more fantastic is that it also goes to my Kindle Android app. Click, I have a book everywhere I read." Such flexibility would encourage a user to stick with a particular product regardless of mobile device.

The social aspects must not be ignored too. Studies have shown that certain individuals are more likely to trust content they have been referred to, so opportunity must be provided for such recommendations to be made. "Remix, comment, blog, tweet...adding your two cents and passing something along in a seamless act of curation is a very powerful feature," the article remarks.

Important too, is an easy payment option. O'Donnell believes that micropayments have great potential as long as they depend on a simple one-click payment method. Unlike many others, he believes that these are more likely to succeed than a paywall erected over single publications. "If I have to start typing in my credit card numbers the second I read something, I'll just move on. However, if you let me read the premium article, but then you make me pay for it the next time I use the site when I have more time to sign up, perhaps that's a better alternative," he advises. A 'the more you share, the less you pay' system could also be a good incentive. In a few words, only when a product is "so easy and so sleek," can it become "the content consumption platform of choice" consumers are willing to pay for.

Source: thisisgoingtobebig.com