Will bitcoin save journalism?

The initial purpose of the Internet wasn’t to make contents free. In his fascinating new book, “The Innovators”, Walter Isaacson, author of the great Steve Jobs biography, describes a key moment of the creation of the Internet. In the 90s, a team of Illinois university students were commissioned to develop the first Internet browser, Mosaic. Marc Andreessen, one of these “founding fathers”, describes this seminal moment: “When we started, the first thing we tried to do was enable small payments to people who posted content.”

Simply put, this would have allowed journalists to be paid every time a viewer read his/her article online. But this never happened, because of the banking system complexities. As a consequence, online journalism mainly relies on advertising, which isn’t lucrative enough to prevent the press crisis.

However, there may be a new chance, today, to implement such a system, in the form of Bitcoin. The digital currency, so far mainly linked to dubious transactions in the dark web, could become a very effective micropayment system for digital contents. In a recent article for Wired, Walter Isaacson quotes Andreessen again: “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in bitcoin of some similar form of cryptocurrency”.

Indeed, this currency allows the payment of articles and contents at the price of a few pennies, without any fees of commissions, something that even paypal doesn’t propose today. Instead of a rogue currency, Bitcoin could then become the press’ savior!

In our last post, we covered the emergence of a new model, where articles are sold per-unit, thanks to platforms such as Blendle, the so-called “Itunes of the press”. Bitcoin may dramatically foster this new tendency. Regardless of the nature of their work, an article, a book, a blog, the authors would be able to ‘SELL’ their hard work per unit, and this even if a single article only costs a few cents. On the readers’ side, the audience would get rid of ads, since online journalism wouldn’t rely anymore on advertising. Could bitcoin save journalism with the wave of a magic wand? What if a new seminal moment was about to happen?

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