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How to Charge for Content. Theoretically.

February 11, 2009
by Alan Mutter
Managing Partner, Tapit Partners

Alan Mutter

It won’t be easy for publishers to overcome the Original Sin of giving away their valuable content for free. But it could be done. Theoretically.

The most logical way, as suggested prominently by David Carr in the New York Times and Walter Isaacson on the cover of Time Magazine, is some sort of micropayment system.

Here’s how it would work: Consumers would use their credit cards to fund accounts to purchase online content through a single system deployed at the largest possible number of participating Web sites. We might call the system the Universal Simple Interactive Network, or UN-SIN for short.

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