Amazon to Pay Bloggers for Subscriptions

May 14, 2009 at 9:33 am PT

Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader has already inspired hope for new digital business models for book and newspaper publishers. Now the Kindle wants to do business with bloggers too.

On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a beta program that pays bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts.

The Kindle comes with an experimental Web browser that allows users to surf ordinary Web sites. But for the sake of convenience, Amazon also sells Kindle subscriptions to a select list of blogs that are automatically updated and made available on the device’s home screen. Those subscriptions can cost as much as $2 per month.

Under the new program, Amazon will pay registered bloggers 30 percent of its subscription fee–pretty low, considering that Apple (AAPL) gives iPhone developers a 70 percent cut on sales of software applications for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most expensive blogs.

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Tagged with: Amazon, Apple, bloggers, blogs, digital, digital business model, Dihits, e-book, frontpage, Geoffrey A. Fowler, hardware, iPhone, Kindle, newspaper, software, subscription, The Wall Street Journal

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