I'm kind of...well...I don't care one bit about the loss/income aspect of having a website, and I don't have mine because I want to be famous.
But that is beside the point.
"And yet, ChargingPeople is far from the Web standard, even though it solves every single economic issue on the Web today, and several of the aesthetic ones. You make money instead of losing money."
The ideal of making money for your news and commentary writing is a new one, two examples of people spending money and not expecting income from it would be the tradition of handing out bills in Colonial North America and the initial establishment of newspapers in towns in the American and Canadian West before and after the Civil War.
Samual Adams didn't have bills with comments about the state of the Colonies printed up and worry about the price.
The first newspapers sole exsistance in towns in the American West was to hype up the town to make it bigger so that someday there might be enough advertising to make a profit, not to comp the cost of ink and printing press.
But beyond that, there is an aspect that all the micro-payment boosters seem to forget, and the aspect that all the tax-the-Internet boosters forget at the same time.
I'm already paying for content on the Internet. Crap, I'm paying the Feds, States, Local Governments and I'm paying for a computer to get on the internet.
A payment example - otherwise known as Why I Won't Pay for Slashdot. Slashdot has a solution where you pay for early content and other crap. I made my /. account the first day they had accounts to create, I'm UID 1029 and I've posted there about...2000 times.
I won't give them a red cent because thier story submission system sucks, thier editors suck and the editors can't spell.
And that's my headache induced rant.
I am willing to provide a measure of support to sites that (a) ask for it, (b) are worth it. I have a quarterly reminder to hit the tip jars of the blogs I regularly read who ask for support. It's cheap entertainment (and infomration and education). If providing a buck or two here or there helps make it possible for them to stay online (or encourages them to do so), cool.
On the other hand, I've no interest in paying for straight news content from a newspaper or TV station. Part of that is because I find it annoying. The other part is that there are plenty of alternatives. If the alternatives all dried up ... I might reconsider.
