Financial Times mulls "pay-per-view" system for online news

Thinking well outside the box, execs for the British daily say they're seriously considering an iTunes-like "micropayment" model for its online news site, which would allow readers to pay only for the articles they read. The two biggest issues: How much to charge, and how best to streamline the payment process.

According to PaidConent:UK, execs for the Financial Times may implement the "pay-per-view" strategy within 12 months, provided they figure out the right price points and how to avoid forcing users to fill out "three pages of forms" each time they want to buy a story.

OK, so how much should the Financial Times charge for an online story? Good question, FT.com exec Rob Grimshaw told PaidContent, adding that "we would like to test it around different price points."

One obvious but interesting issue raised by PaidContent is that while you could charge for news stories the same way as you would for a downloadable tune, customers treat music quite differently than they do songs. We usually read a news story once, and only once; songs, however, we keep, and listen to over and over (well, the good ones, anyway).

Given that, is a single news story worth less than a 99-cent song? Probably, and from the sound of the PaidContent story, execs at the Financial Times are giving that exact issue serious thought. (Here's a crazy idea: instead of 99 cents a story, how about 9 cents? There's a price point that would get me clicking.)

The Financial Times Web site currently uses a "frequency model" to charge for its stories, meaning that you can browse between three and 10 articles in a 30-day period (depending on whether you're registered) for free; after that, you'll have to pay $3.49 a week to keep reading.

The PaidContent story raises the intriguing possibility that the "pay-per-view" and "frequency" models of charging for online news "can work together." The article doesn't go into detail about this idea, but I wonder … how about a "micropayment" for, say, an hour of browsing the Financial Times Web site? (Perhaps 50 cents for 60 minutes?)

Of course, the only way for the whole micropayment idea to work is to make is easy as pie—no easy task, as I've noted before. Do you create a new payment platform? Would users have to create separate Financial Times accounts, or could they sign in via Google, Facebook Connect, or Amazon? However the FT goes about collecting its micropayments, it'll have to be seamless and painless.

In any case ... interesting stuff. Indeed, kudos to the Financial Times for thinking different about charging for online news. I think they're onto something, and were I the CEO of the New York Times, News Corp. (paging Rupert Murdock), or other big news organizations, I'd be paying close attention to the PPV experiment.