In early February, Noam Bardin stepped down as CEO of navigation app company Waze, after running it almost from its inception, and altogether for twelve years, which saw its acquisition by Google for $1.1 billion in 2013. After leaving the company, Bardin published a long article critical of Google's enterprise culture. At least in local technology industry circles, the article provoked many strong reactions.
Bardin has not remained idle for long. Yesterday, he presented the new venture he is working on, called Paygo Media. The aim is to create a new business model for high-quality journalistic content on the basis of micro payments. Users will pay for each article or other content that they access, without the need to buy a monthly or annual subscription to the news site in question. Bardin describes the new product at this stage as an MVP (minimum viable product).
After joining the platform, users will have to load their accounts with a balance of at least $3. They will then be able to pay for content that they access via the site. Reading an article, for example, will cost $0.15 while viewing a video clip will cost $1. Bardin's platform will of course take a percentage of the price of each transaction.
The first content producer with whom the new venture has formed a tie is US journalist and broadcaster Dan Rather, who for years presented the main news broadcast on the CBS network in the US.
According to Bardin, although 75% of US media entities have switched to a paywall model, only 20% of people in the US are subscribers to news websites, of whom 66% subscribe to one site only. "The truth lies behind paywalls, while lies are for free," Bardin warns in an article published yesterday.
"I believe that the current subscription model is bad for both consumers and publishers," Bardin writes. "Consumers have to pay for several subscriptions and to share their personal details with each publisher just in order to read one article. Subscriptions push publishers to create content for a small section of users, and to lose the opportunity of earning revenue from the majority of users desirous of accessing their content," Bardin says.
Bardin's solution, as mentioned, is not a free model, but one that makes it possible to pay directly for individual content items through micro payments.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 24, 2021
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