Publishing For The Little Folks

from the makes-sense dept

Wired News is running an article about a new site called RedPaper, which is an interesting experiment in both self-publishing and micropayments. They compare RedPaper to a number of different things ("it's like eBay for content!"). The idea is that anyone can upload content, and set a price for it. If you sign up for an account, you put some money into the account, and can then buy up the content for whatever price the buyer sets. RedPaper seems to be pushing it as a news source - where anyone can write whatever article they want and then publish it at whatever price they think it's worth. Of course, selling news coverage is not that easy, since the going rate for consumers of news is close to free - and news is usually ad supported content. The site even shows how many times someone buys and downloads each item. It's unclear how they guarantee that whoever is selling the content has the rights to sell that content. Also, it's not clear how they prevent someone from downloading anything on the site and then posting it for everyone else on a free website (or file sharing network). It's an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure how much money they can really make in the long term. However, for people who have the ability to produce content and convince people to pay for it, it certainly could be a simplified way of handling the billing.