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clayshirky + (5)

Newspapers have two principal sources of revenue, readers and advertisers, and they can operate at mass or niche scale for each of those groups. A metro-area daily paper is a mass product for customers (many readers buy the paper) and for advertisers (many readers see their ads.) Newsletters and small-circulation magazines, by contrast, serve niche readers, and therefore niche advertisers — Fire Chief, Mother Earth News. (Some newsletters get by with no advertising at all, as with Cooks’ Illustrated, where part of what the user pays for is freedom from ads, or rather freedom from a publisher beholden to advertisers.) Paywalls were an attempt to preserve the old mass+mass model after a transition to digital distribution. With so few readers willing to pay, and therefore so few readers to advertise to, paywalls instead turned newspapers into a niche+niche business. What the article threshold creates is an odd hybrid — a mass market for advertising, but a niche market for users. Clay Shirky on the economics of newspaper paywalls and why article thresholds seem to be the way of the future.
posted by storybored on Jan 10, 2012 - 15 comments

An Accelerated Grimace. Chris Lehmann takes down Clay Shirky's cyber-uptopianism by way of Evgeny Morozov.
posted by Sparx on Mar 13, 2011 - 39 comments

A great Rant About Women by Clay Shirky: (Women) "are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so." [more inside]
posted by bru on Jan 16, 2010 - 167 comments

On Dec 14, the often-linked Clay Shirky (most recently) ended his guestblogging stint at boingboing with a question for the commenters: What's going to happen in the next five years or so that will catch most of the rest of us by surprise, but not you? [more inside]
posted by finnb on Dec 16, 2008 - 88 comments

The Role of Inconvenience in Designing Social Systems (slyt via robowhiz) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Sep 19, 2008 - 26 comments

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus — Clay Shirky on post-broadcast societal outlets.
posted by blasdelf on Apr 26, 2008 - 40 comments

Clay Shirky, professor at ITP - NYU, often linked to at MeFi, presents at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the ideas in his new book on organizing without organizations. [more inside]
posted by gen on Mar 25, 2008 - 5 comments

Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software is Clay Shirky's latest essay on social software. It describes some interesting experiments and avenues for experimentation in reducing flaming in social discourse software. A prime example is Bumplist.
posted by turbodog on Nov 8, 2004 - 7 comments

Scott McCloud and Clay Shirky are trading ideas on Micropayemnts again. Clay Says user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.. Scott Says micropayments, well, BitPass are here to stay this time.
As a content producer I like the idea, but as a content consumer I'm just not sure yet.
If mefi went Micro, would you pay?
posted by Blake on Sep 13, 2003 - 28 comments