News International Signals Micropayments Future

News International, the major publisher of leading UK tabloids and broadsheets The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World, have signalled their intention to move to a more discrete content purchasing model by partnering with online payments system PayPal.

The product concerned - PayPal's new fast checkout system, "PayPal for Digital Goods" - was, according to Payday, specifically introduced to help media businesses such as News International more easily monetise discrete items of online content such as news articles, stories, crosswords or puzzles.  

At the moment, News International's sites for The Times and Sunday Times papers do charge for access, but  only in a blanket model that requires readers to sign up for a day or a week for access to the entire content of the paper.  No content is now available freely, and around 79,000 people currently subscribe online.

The new system would allow the publisher to operate a more pick and mix approach, where users might be able to chose to pay for just, for example, thought leadership pieces and the infamous Times crossword on a daily basis and then add the Style and Magazine pieces on a Sunday.  Akin to charging more for internet marketing on the most popular pages of a site, the system would also allow differential pricing for different elements.  

It has long been obvious that online ads alone would not provide enough revenue to sustain newspapers in their current form.  With this news, and the recent announcement that the Guardian is going "digital first", it is an interesting time to be involved in online media.