Evaluating PayBITS

TidBITS, the Macintosh weekly online publication, has been experimenting with payment for content. This article summarizes the results to date.

At this point, I remain positive about PayBITS, not because I believe it’s the solution to the problem of how those of us who create content of all types can earn a living, but because I fear we’re headed for a dark time in which monied corporate interests will attempt to exercise ever more control over how we are allowed to consume content in general, and that in turn will dictate what and how we’re able to create and publish. To avoid a future where all our content comes from huge media conglomerates, we need new approaches like PayBITS to show content creators that there are viable alternative business models.