Bare With Me

OK, so I’ve come out and said that I think Nielsen is wrong, and I do on almost all points. You’ll have to read this entire post to know that I’m not being contradictory. I do think that Nielsen makes one somewhat valid point in, “The Case for Micropayments.” He says that “subscription fees fence you in,” and it’s true, they do. For example, a lot of newspaper Web sites make you subscribe before you can retrieve any articles from the archives. You end up having to pay a subscription fee to look at even one article. It would make more sense if sites like this would charge you a small fee for each article you download rather than making you subscribe and pay a much larger fee. This would benefit both the site and the users as the users would get what they want, and the site wouldn’t turn people away with their subscription fees.