The Wardman Wire

Barely uncovering Cameron
Last night’s Dispatches which perhaps optimistically claimed would uncover the real David Cameron was, despite its unrevealing nature, a good watch. There were two very revealing moments however during the programme that summed up for me where the Tory campaign is faultering.

It’s not the economy, after all, stupid
Firstly the economy. When Bill Clinton coined the phrase “it’s the economy stupid” it immediately became a truism along the motherhood and apple pie lines. A strong economy and the government of the day will win; a weak economy and it will lose. Well somehow, something has happened in the past twelve months or so that looks to challenge that axiom.

The very man who has overseen a decade of continuous growth and claimed it was his sole doing that led to it is now benefitting from it all going wrong as well. How on earth did the Tories let this happen? The answer is they were too short termist in their strategic thinking.

Failure to plan for the full campaign
They knew twelve months ago that they would ring chimes with the electorate if they said the state needs cutting back. What they didn’t think about was that one day they would have to say what they would want to cut. Labour knew full well this would be the case and resisted the temptation to do the same – instead they used it as a means for drawing a distinctive line between themselves and the opposition.

Last night we heard from Lib Dems, economists, the Bank of England, the government, the Treasury. All of them said that the sort of cuts the Tories will make will be damaging to the economy. Perhaps more importantly, the vast numbers of public sector workers and low income earners have heard the message too – they will be victims of cuts and possible unemployment. It is not a vote winner.

These Tories aren’t very good at turning
The Tory high command has realised this recently and have attempted a manoeuvre that is so half baked it is hard to call it even a u-turn. Apparently the cuts to government departments will not be taken from existing budgets and services, rather the Tories will clean up the wastage. Of course, there is a horrifying amount of wasted spending in the public (and private) sector, but to think that the Tories can cut the nation’s huge deficit with it is derisible.

In fact, if the Tories are seriously staking their economic credibility on it then accusations that they are policy light do not even cover it.

It’s not just Lib Dems and Labour
It is not just the anti-Tory mob who is losing their heads over the failure of the Cameron team to get their message across and deliver some strong policies. Norman Tebbit, Peter Bingle, ConservativeHome, and many more are all asking the same questions (even if they do all seem to have different motives). Why are the Tories not doing better than they are? You have Nobel prize winning economists, civil servants from both Labour and Tory administrations, experts in the bank of England. None of them can fathom the Tory economic policy.

What does Cameron stand for, anyone?
Then there was the second telling moment; right at the end of the programme various figures both Tory and non-Tory were asked what does Cameronism mean? A simple question – what does the man who would be PM actually stand for – surely something the comms team at CCHQ would have nailed down by now. Surely something the electorate would want to know before voting a new PM in.

Cue a segment of people who really should know better, people at the heart of the Cameroon project, “umming” and “ahhhing”. Even David Cameron himself could not answer the question. Even David Cameron himself! He claimed not to be a man of ideology more a practical man. Surely he can do better than that after 4 years as Tory leader?

One man knew staright away
Only one man got in there like a dog out of trap one. Peter Mandelson knew exactly what Cameronism stood for – “Cameronism is a reversion to the cardinal principle of Tory party politics, which is that their duty is to be elected.”

Who is to say Mandelson is right or not – but the fact is he had an answer. He was well drilled. He had conviction. He was convincing. Why do they Tories lack all of these qualities so close to an election?

Change for change’s sake?
We may ask ourselves do we want another five years of Brown. We may all be desperate for change and the feeling of a new chapter that was felt in Obama’s America. But at what price do we want that change? It may be enough for the Tories to win on the “not-Brown” ticket, but the spotlight is only getting brighter on David Cameron.

Maybe the reason last night’s programme failed in uncovering Cameron is because there really isn’t very much to uncover.

Fraxion Payments have just launched a Wordpress Plugin which allows micropayments to be implemented on the Wordpress platform. This is one more way in which freelance writers, journalists and other bloggers can build their own income streams, at a time when media are under pressure financially.

Chris Wilkins, one of Fraxion Payments’ founders, gave this exclusive in-depth interview to the Wardman Wire.

Who are you?

Fraxion Payments is really two people, Chris Wilkins and Dan Stevens. We started working together something like eight years ago on another project called www.towergames.com. It started out as a hobby and has grown from there, but not very far. However, the technology within Tower Games is brilliant and ahead of its time in terms of interaction on the internet. However, Tower Games is a topic for another discussion.

The important aspect is that for well over seven years Tower Games has had an extremely well functioning “micropayments” system for its internet games. People pay about $1 for each game. We have never had any objections from our members about the cost except that we didn’t have enough games. We know where to take the site but, frankly, never had the money to do it.

So, along comes Walter Isaacson with his article about micropayments (”How to Save Your Newspaper“) and we saw something; it would be very easy for us to migrate our system to be used for bloggers for their content. And since we had refined and polished our system over many years we knew exactly how to do it, how to make it work, what people want, and how to make it easy. Thus Fraxion Payments was born.

What is Fraxionpayments?

It is purely and simply a way for bloggers to charge micropayments for their content, as little as US1c. We have never believed in this strange idea of “free” content. We saw the failure of “free online games” with Tower Games. Some years ago the web had hundreds of free online games paid for with advertising. Nearly all of them are dead and gone now because they never made any money. Tower Games still chugs along because we charge.

We can contemplate a time over the next few years where all the blogs which are free will disappear. Now this thought may start up a howl of protest from those who are almost religious about the concept of “free with (google) ads”. But I would point out that if this worked then all the thousands of former-journalists both in the UK and USA would merrily go and get a blog, put Google Ad words on there, and away they go. They would have a wage, and wouldn’t starve. But this is not happening. So no matter what some pundits say, this model is broken.

Plus after a while it becomes very unsatisfying, putting in lots and lots of work to produce good stories on a blog, but getting nothing in return.; eventually something has to come back in order for someone to keep doing this.

So we said, just as we do with Tower Games – how can we charge for the content? A (WordPress) blogger can now get our plug-in, install it, and within minutes charge for their content.

This will be good for journalists and writers. This will be good for readers because without payment, an exchange for work, effort and quality, good writers have zero incentive to write good articles and publish them on their website. They get nothing, or very little, out of it.

Perhaps in the past the mainstream media would acknowledge them and pay a blogger for an article. But even that avenue is under threat, with many free-lancers saying their payments have declined dangerously with newspapers and magazines paying less and less for good articles.

And the readers? Why wouldn’t someone pay 1c, or even up to 5c, with one click, for a good quality read, something of note and has some real information in it? Of course they will once they are educated to do it, and enough bloggers have picked up the plug-in. Once that critical mass has been reached I think the days of people zipping about the web reading whatever they like, vaccuuming up mountains of content that took literally days to create, will be gone.

Which platforms do you support?

Currently we have only the one plug-in, and that is for WordPress. I believe it supports all recent versions (but wouldn’t hurt if writers upgraded their WP to the latest edition). In the future we may well create plug-ins for other blogging platforms.

Wordpress Multiuser is also a platform we are going to be checking out.

What models of micropayments do you use?

We use a simple form of micropayments, that is, a small payment for an article. We do not consider other models, such as monthly subscriptions, to be micropayments. I don’t believe that other models, such as those that give you a number of pages per month and then you have to pay, won’t work.

Humans being humans, when they hit the limit they will simply wait for the end of the month to come before they read again. Systems like this have been tried in various fields and always run into this problem.

The simple answer is; you pay per article as you go. End of story. And that is what Fraxion Payments does and why it is unique. To get a system to do this is not simple. In fact, if we hadn’t had the seven years of experimentation at Tower Games we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it either. When we decided to put this together we found 80 per cent of what needed to be coded had already been done.

So our model is simply a method of “locking” articles. An author can lock as much of an article as they want, and charge as many “Fraxions” as they want for a reader to unlock. A Fraxion is about US1c. They aren’t all the same value because some people can buy larger amounts and get discounts. So in fact most Fraxions will be less than one cent.

And once a person has a Fraxion Payments account for the most part to unlock an article will require only one click. Once people get the hang of this it will work wonderfully. And our experience at Tower Games is that people are willing to pay when they see value for money.

There have been some “micropayments” systems that I have seen that charge $1, $5, or in one case $20 for an article. This will simply not work because people have an instinct for weighing value. But 1c, or even 5c or 10c, I can’t see anyone complaining about that. Some who are used to free content may be upset for a while, but when they see that the stories are so much better quality they will be happy to pay.

Perhaps some writers will publish poor quality content. But then they won’t create a readership. So this is not an issue. Those who write good stuff, their internet readers will keep coming back and they will prosper, with happy readers.

To quote Walter Isaacson, who I mentioned earlier, “A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.”

(Read more here: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,00.html)

But of course it wouldn’t be just “ordinary folks”. It might also be some of those tens of thousands of journalists the mainstream media has let go over the last few years. They can grab a lap top, fire up a WordPress site, go talk to the huge list of contacts they have built up over many years, and get back to work. But this time working for themselves.

So, in summary: Fraxions, worth about US1c each, to unlock an article is our model. And writers / publishers set their own prices.

Read more »