Monetizing Content – How much would you Pay?

Yesterday, Fred Wilson made a good post on monetizing content. However one point he did not touch upon is how much would people really pay. Hope Fred will put up a poll for that.

Anyhow, my idea is to pay somewhere in the range of $10-20/year for the year to publications like NyTimes. WSJ’s pricing($150/year) is out of the reach for the most. Besides the cost, i think there can be another reason high priced model will not work:
From my experience in news content creation at StartupSquad.com, any time there is money to be made from content, there is stiff competition. As, companies like NyTimes move towards a paid model, you will see rise of smaller players, that will scrape, rephrase and publish NyTimes content, and making easy Ad dollars.

So, as a user you would have 2 options –

1. Pay $100-$150 to NyTimes
2. Pay nothing to a blog that reports perfect human generated(meaning not a dumb copy paste bot) news 5-15 minutes late

I will take the option 2.

Filed under: Freemium

New Runtime language @ Google App Engine

Looking up the roadmap at Google App Engine, i see the following entries:

* Service for storing and serving large files
* Datastore import and export utility for large datasets
* Billing: developers can pay for more resource usage
* Support for a new runtime language
* Uptime monitoring site

As anyone can guess, Google would like to be secretive about the entry 4 above – Support for a new runtime language . But, come on, if you really going to release the new language, what is the harm in telling it right now. In my PoV, since it is going to be a major launch, better make developers prepared for it. If the new lang is going to be php, i for one, would put on hold few projects to make use of the Google App Engine. Anyway, as it seems, we would just have to wait for the launch.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Freemium