Hopefully no one will create problems for them since it seems their intentions are good, and 826 Valencia (McSweeney's nationwide network of writing workshops for young people) is quite awesome.
I don't know what their original contracts with customers said, that contract is what needs to govern what happens to money collected that was not distributed. Perhaps the contract never thought to take into account left over money though. If that's the case, then the leftover amounts, calculated as the percentage of funds received per person that weren't disbursed based on their reading habits, should be refunded to the original customers. I think it would be worth also emailing each person and asking them what they want done - do they want it donated to 826 Valencia, or would they prefer their money back. Most will give permission to donate it since they are each small amounts anyway, but others will have problems getting ahold of them because their emails will bounce. But it will at least allow getting permission from many as to what they want done. This is all presuming, to state again, that this case of undistributable funds was not covered in the original contract.
There is one case I am familiar with where a person collected money for a certain cause, but wasn't able to use the money for that cause. He didn't keep track of the people who he collected the money from (some of this was passing baskets around at churches) and so he just decided to donate all the money (around $10,000) to a different charity he chose. He ended up charged with theft and misappropriation of funds. So you have to be careful with this stuff. (No case citation as I know the person professionally and don't wish to call attention to him, just making the point that collecting money for one thing and then spending it on another can lead to problems in some cases even when your intentions are pure.)
"Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers."
And somewhere out there Ted Nelson is saying, "I told you so. We needed transclusion, transcopyright, and micropayments in our hypertext from the beginning!"
This is why I think that people that predict that custom native apps will displace the web are getting ahead of themselves. I'm willing to install a dedicated app for a handful of services I use all the time but otherwise I'm happier to just keep a bookmark.
The cost of my deciding whether or not an article is worth whatever the cost of reading it is, let alone the huge privacy invasion that per-article pricing implies (tying information content and payment to a single user) is a non-starter for all but a very few sites.
That leaves us with accompanying advertising, patronage, syndication, content-as-promotion (propaganda/advertising), and self-publishing.
"Accompanying advertising" is the existing model of display or other ads accompanying content. This works for some sites, but not particularly well, and there are concerns in the mobile space.
"Patronage" is essentially sponsorship of work, as fine art patronage was fairly common in the past.
"Syndication" would require a model of mechanical payments and essentially a tax-like funding stream (part of your monthly data plan) from which content providers are paid.
"Content-as-promotion" is where the initiative for creating content is its own utility in promoting the commercial or ideological goals of the author. Bands promoting live acts, political or religious organizations.
"Self-publishing" is essentially vanity publishing -- where many blogs are (possibly a special case of content as promotion).
Of this list, the syndication model is the only one I see as having strong viable economic potential for general works, though it requires the creation of a syndicate. Small-scale syndicates, in the form of paywall/paygate operators could be the start of this -- major periodical publishers (NY Times, Murdoch/Dow Jones), Apple, Amazon, eBay. But for general content, I'd see a mix of a mechanical reproduction right, a flat (or very simply tiered) level of content payments, and what would amount to an all-you-can-eat or bandwidth-based scheme through a data service provider or independent syndicate provider. It's a leaky system, but might just work.
What about Flattr model where there’s no mental transaction cost as everything is prices equally? (You have a monthly budget, one click payments, at the end of the month budget / number of clicks = click value)
Works the same way in mobile apps for example (although you need to OAuth your account initially) and you can keep your privacy so publisher only knows that someone paid, not who did so.
Economics and financial transactions work well with fairly evenly paired buyers and sellers, and largely undifferentiated goods (bulk items, water, food, etc.). Where market power is unbalanced, you end up with monopolistic or oligopolistic markets, where goods are highly differentiated (think: enterprise software sales) you end up with very prolonged negotiation over quality and deliverables (hence the high cost of such sales).
Information economies violate both precepts.
We've never had a market for unbundled information goods purchases. A newspaper or magazine is a bundle of articles, a book is a bundle of chapters, cable TV is a bundle of channels. Most entertainment parks sell a bundle of rides rather than tickets to spend on any given ride. Even music and video sales are a very different experience when you can sample and preview what you're getting.
If I had to make a purchase decision for every single thing I read, I'd go stark raving mad (OK, this may explain something).
Commercializing every single transaction is not feasible.
I don't think it's really been a "them" for a while now; Xanadu as a funded project with employees wound down around 1993-94, and since then it's just been Ted Nelson occasionally sketching out designs.
"If you haven’t already registered your domain with Readability, you have until July 15, 2012 to do so."
They love to give money away, but a.) do not link to the page where to register or tell how to register b.) The signup page only caters to readers c.) The publisher page does not show how to register.
If you search the page, you will find a link buried beside others called "Register"
IMHO that is not the way to have millions of sites to register.
UPDATE: Registered for http://codemonkeyism.com
Now I get $0.18 - Wohooo! Didn't know before that they wanted to give me money. The model seems nice, easier than Flattr but when reading about Readability (and I'm a InstaPaper payer) I thought the model was only for big publishers, not small blogs like mine.
"If you registered as a publisher with Readability, we’ll be sending you any remaining money your site has earned by July 31, 2012, regardless of amount."
This is just goodwill-in-disguise. They've collected money on behalf of publishers, without consent, and now they realise that was a bad idea. They understand they obviously can't get away with keeping the money, but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners.
"but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners."
That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.)
No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those who gave it, but that may have its own problems.
"That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking."
Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort. What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20 or more.
Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion of the way they've ended this operation.
Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could put in work to contact those publishers.
Another option could be to allocate the money between the site owners that have registered in the same proportions as before. If they set a date to do this, and the planned amount for most sites ends up being significant, this may provide an incentive for more people to register.
They offered a service similar to adblock and noscript, but offered money back to the sites to make up for the loss of ad revenue. To my eyes, your post came across as critical of this service, so I apologize if I misunderstood, but you should be leveraging even harsher criticism against projects which deny sites their revenue and don't offer that money back to them.
That's where the problem lies, they first took money from users, and then "offer" to pay it back. They should've done it the other way around, only charging money for sites which actually signed up to the service.
They've done a good job at making it sound like a great service for publishers, but when you think about it a bit more it's quite shady.
There's no charging for reading on sites that have signed up. It was a voluntary monthly payment for them to try to distribute evenly to publishers based on your use, not a "use Readability on x.com, pay Readability $1 which we'll transfer to x.com" model. If it were the latter, I'd agree with you, but it's nothing like that.
As Groxx said, the money was collected, but not on behalf of the sites. The only reason it was offered back to the sites was because of good will. They didn't have to pay them a dime. They could have easily pocketed the $5/mo.
Is the complaint that they are holding the money in the hopes that people will claim it? Or that they should have been giving it all out to the ones who did register, and every new source would start from zero?
"... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner.
If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.
$150,000. "millions of domains". That works out to an average of a few pennies per domain. Given that the top 100 sites take a big chunk of the total, the median is probably much less.
We're still looking for that sustainable business model.
Why not make the minimum cheque $1k and award them randomly via weighted ballot method? That way everyone along the tail gets a piece (eventually) but you only have to collect 150 contact details?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the musical licensing and payments system is 1) supported by copyright law (17 USC 115(a) http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115), and 2) sanctioned by either regulation or industry as to the establishment .
You left out the Harry Fox Agency, which is actually responsible for the bulk of mechanicals in the US.
As a content owner, I had no idea readability was doing this. Like Peter Thiel says, the distribution is sometimes the hardest problem.
The idea isn't a bad one, and just because the domain owners never registered doesn't mean the idea can't work. It just means most domain owners probably don't even know about this.
Yeah, I am familiar with Readability but didn't know they had this program.
I think for the guys signing up and getting a 15 cent check, their form should also have the option of the site owner saying it's OK to just give the amount less than $1 or whatever to the charity since the cost of handling the check isn't really worth it on either end.
I stopped using readability when it changed from a simple bookmarklet that would work on any page, to a browser plugin/service combination. It's a shame, really, it was brilliantly useful then, and I haven't found anything that properly replaces it.
You could try Instapaper, the original 'read it later' service. It has a bookmarklet, a website, and some really great apps for iOS, Android and Kindle.
I have, and from what I've found it has limitations of its own(namely, paginated articles will not work). I've also tried greasemonkey/stylebot scripts, which work great with the caveat that they're on a case-by-case basis. Really all I want is a damn simple way to invert the colors of any website, so white-on-black sites don't burn the eyes when reading at night. I'm not at all bothered by choice of font(unless it's really obnoxious and actually hinders reading of course), and changing the size of text is already easily addressed in modern browsers. Unfortunately Readability had extremely limited options for color(only -one- color scheme had light text on dark background) and font size.
Personally I see this as being in the realm of browser vendors - hopefully we will start to see them include such a feature, and flesh it out in such a way that it's customizable and really works for any site.
I use Safari Reader all the time and it loads paginated articles very well as far as I can tell. When you scroll down a bit you should see an actual separated second page, labeled "Page 2 of N."
I think it's great. When I don't have it, I use and recommend Readable, which does about the same thing that Readability used to do except without all the redirect shenanigans. Readable is awesome.
I'm on a Mac mostly and use Chrome(because of speed and security) and really miss that Reader functionality. I used to have the Readability plugin, but I suppose that will not work much longer.
What they may be sitting on here is a trust, for which the publishing websites are the beneficiaries. If they then repurpose the money for something else without the beneficiaries' permission, they'd be in breach of trust. Which is quite serious ju-ju.
Before doing this stuff they need to consult a lawyer.
I should point here that I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
Disclaimer: I am working on a startup that would have been seen as a close competitor.
It's great when people try new things, and honestly rewarding creators for the work they've created is a great thing. Here's the problem, outside of the sphere of influence people don't know about the service, and that's always going to be a problem.
Also a problem? People not caring enough to sign up, if your minimum is $50 and the average site makes is $3.50, why's anyone going to take the time to get that money?
Also a problem? A lot of readers like writers who don't like in the U.S., and a lot of the time that $3.50 then gets currency exchanged down to even less.
I'm glad they've held their hands and said 'we made a mistake', but it was essentially not the greatest idea in the world to start with. You have to run through all the weird edge cases before you even get started.
I am curious to know whether no one wanted to claim the money, or no one had a clue the money were available. Your "this didn't work" post is the first time that I've heard of this initiative. How many more users like me are out there? I'd bet, the majority.
I think it was a good idea that could/should have been implemented in a way that felt less sketchy. For instance: show uncollected revenues to each user on a per-site basis; allow users to withdraw unpaid money at any time, or re-allocate their funds to other authors who are collecting; have interest from all unpaid authors go towards uncontroversial charities.
Hopefully no one will create problems for them since it seems their intentions are good, and 826 Valencia (McSweeney's nationwide network of writing workshops for young people) is quite awesome.
I don't know what their original contracts with customers said, that contract is what needs to govern what happens to money collected that was not distributed. Perhaps the contract never thought to take into account left over money though. If that's the case, then the leftover amounts, calculated as the percentage of funds received per person that weren't disbursed based on their reading habits, should be refunded to the original customers. I think it would be worth also emailing each person and asking them what they want done - do they want it donated to 826 Valencia, or would they prefer their money back. Most will give permission to donate it since they are each small amounts anyway, but others will have problems getting ahold of them because their emails will bounce. But it will at least allow getting permission from many as to what they want done. This is all presuming, to state again, that this case of undistributable funds was not covered in the original contract.
There is one case I am familiar with where a person collected money for a certain cause, but wasn't able to use the money for that cause. He didn't keep track of the people who he collected the money from (some of this was passing baskets around at churches) and so he just decided to donate all the money (around $10,000) to a different charity he chose. He ended up charged with theft and misappropriation of funds. So you have to be careful with this stuff. (No case citation as I know the person professionally and don't wish to call attention to him, just making the point that collecting money for one thing and then spending it on another can lead to problems in some cases even when your intentions are pure.)