Readability author payment plan

[tomjeatt]

Two really interesting articles on Readability's failed author payment plan:

• An Important Announcement (Readability blog post)
• Lessons from the Failure of Readability’s Author Payment Plan

The comment thread on the blog post is particularly interesting. I think it was a nice idea (and not 'the most egregiously unethical startup in Internet history' as the first commenter said) but it does seem a little bit naive. The main problem seems to be that with millions of domains, and only $150,000 collected, the return for the majority of publishers was always going to be too small to be worthwhile signing up for. I also think they should have seen this coming, and had contingency plans in place. While I think giving the money to charity is a noble-sounding idea, I think what they really should be doing is returning the money to the people who gave it to them in the first place.

[tomjeatt]

A third article which adds a bit more context:

• Readability Directs Shared Articles to Own Servers, Cuts Out Original Publisher

[David]

I've just started using Readability and I really like it. Prisca and I are currently looking into the possibility of delivering course materials with it next year.

Clearly a completely mad business model. I imagine the majority of sites whose content is used do not even know of the existance of the service. For all I know, content from my sites has been used but until recently, I hadn't heard of Readability.

My view is that the money should go towards the creation of more good content although charitable donations is probably less contentious.

[tomjeatt]

Yes, completely mad! It seems like a bit of a utopian ideal more than something that would work in the real world. And I suspect most subscribers would have been happy with 100% of their subscription fee going to the developers, rather than this strange attempt to pass it on to the authors without asking them or telling them.

Prisca and I are currently looking into the possibility of delivering course materials with it next year.

I think that would work really well. I've been looking into the possibility of integrating it with my thesis project to generate Kindle versions. It was something which was in my original plan, but which I'd decided to postpone, but this could be a nice way of doing it.

[Tom]

Maybe the 'business model' is Dotcom era, not mention Facebook: build it and flog it.