So when Techdirt points out that the various surveys saying people will (or alternatively won't) pay for content online are a lot less reliable than seeing what happens when someone actually starts charging*, I have to agree. Would I pay for content online? Yes, under one extremely hypothetical commercial model. Do I think that model will ever be made available to me? Almost certainly not. So what's the right answer to the very general question "will I pay for content online?" I guess it's a maybe or a probably not.  

*We already know this bit from long experimentation, of course - all the readers go away. Still, the last experiments in this field were carried out several years ago before everyone spent their time online playing on social networks, listening to music and watching streaming video, so it would be easy to argue that the circumstances have changed significantly. Got worse, specifically, from the point of view of charging for content. But getting worse is still a change.

He proposes a "hunter becomes the prey" solution in which instead of being bombarded with misleading advertisements for products people get to post up the details of the thing they want ("two weeks in Aruba"; "a toaster"; "I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I'm on a budget") and then let the relevant products find them. Transfer the costs, quite rightly, from consumers having to wade through ads trying to find the product they really want to providers having to wade through ads trying to find the consumer who really wants their product.

Vin came up with this in 2004 - the Internet-mediated demand-led market. And, perhaps even more interestingly, people already do it. I already do it. When I organised a ski holiday a few years ago I ended up, naturally enough, with a wiki which had all the details of our requirements on. "12 people chalet France November 2006", said the wiki, and sure enough

(a) Google started serving us ads that gave us just that and

(b) buying it, via a click from our own wiki, made us some money from the referral fee.  

It's the second bit that always strikes me as funny. You can already do this stuff, if you can be bothered to knock up a web page and run AdWords over it, and assuming you can describe the thing you want to buy reasonably accurately you can even get paid for buying it.

If you don't already follow big_ben_clock

It goes "bong", you see.

(You might also, if you like receiving a photo of a horse most days that I remember, enjoy following my own daily_horse.)

Like Stephen Pollard I am...more than a little concerned now about entering into any sort of private contract allegedly governed by the laws of England and Wales in case the Chancellor decides public opinion is in favour of tearing it up. I quite liked the certainty of owning my house because I paid for it and the security of receiving an income to do my job because I had agreed this with my employer. After today I am left merely hoping that Alastair Darling does not take exception to either of these arrangements, or rather does not hallucinate that some demagogue or other has called for him to arbitrarily dismantle them. 

The transformation of medieval institutions and habits into modern ones is often rightly described in terms of a shift from status to contract. For agreements between free individuals to be even possible those individuals must have some reasonable confidence that contracts will be honoured and therefore they must believe that those contracts will be enforced. Now...well, it would be sensible for us to have a little less confidence that they will be, is all. And perhaps it would be more sensible to do business somewhere else - somewhere operating more under the rule of law and less under the whim of a dying political party's guess as to which way the wind is blowing. 

The problem with trying to re-silo content at tis stage in the game is threefold.

First, online consumers do not have a problem finding content or finding specific content. In fact, that's the opposite of the problem we face. Content is dyfunctionally abundant. There is so much of it that the problem is filtering through the billions of pages/articles/songs/photos/films/games/posts/tweets for something useful, entertaining or relevant. Take some of the content away and unless it is actually unique you've made searchers' lives a little bit easier (thanks!).

Second, and relatedly, if I'm looking for commentary on the latest NYTco quarterlies and some of the potentially useful information doesn't show up in my search because it has been deliberately withheld from the engine, I'll never know. People resopond to incentives. Hiding content from me when I search doesn't incentivise me to try any other particular alternative behaviour (I'm going to realise that the article which would have answered all my questions is on the New York Post website but since Google doesn't know about it I have to surf over there and look for it? Just how am I going to know that?).

Third, content in a silo will attract no new readers. Two years ago I didn't read Marginal Revolution, but I found it and now I do. Ditto Unqualified Reservations. Ditto...well, everything in my feedreader. It's an interesting idea to run a paid content business that no-one can find. I wouldn't fancy it myself. Newspapers have enough demographic problems without shutting themselves off to the main potential source of new readers.

Mike Arrington theorises that the end-game is for content-providers to cut deals with other (non-Google) search engines, leaving Google high and dry but the content catalogued and searchable somewhere. Fair enough. Assuming that different providers cut deals with different engines (otherwise it's not a market and we've just swapped the Googlopoly for the Bingopoly, whoop-de-doo) we'd be looking at a potentially massive inconvenience for users with no upside benefits at all as they jumped from engine to engine searching for different content. Happily such a deliberate fragmentation of search ignores the existence of adequate search aggregation tools that pre-emptively obviate the obstacles. Data that can be usefully brought together online generally is, because it can be, because that's how it's most useful (hence indeed, err, Google). Trying at this stage in the game to fragment it all again is no solution, it's just another cycle around while someone knocks up a better aggregator.

Digital channels fragment media. They fragmented music, so now we find songs by the track on iTunes and Spotify instead of buying albums. But where the music industry continues to enjoy inherent commercial upside from its fragmented content (iTunes cost money, Spotify has unskippable ads or subs to pay, ringtones are a goldmine) text content has no such inherent commercial upside as a distributed fragment. Read an article on a newspaper website and you see an ad. Read the same content on Google or in Bloglines and you don't. The problem to solve here is not to stop people finding the stuff and reading it on Google - it's to make money when they see it there, to embed some inherent commercial upside in that experience. RSS banners, universal IntelliTXT, anything that follows the content around and makes money from it wherever it's seen. Hell, even movies manage it with product placement and one day they'll work out how to charge extra for all the millions of times those placements are seen by BitTorrenters.

But take the content off Google and I no longer know it exists, and I'm not going to use three or four different search engines to check every time I have a query. Hide it and it simply isn't there.

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you'll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it's quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere - to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars. 

There's another one for the list of jobs that it would have been hard to predict existing in the C21st - virtual corpse spammer. But there seems to be quite a lot of skill to it.