Jeff Bezos has invested in everything from rockets to a 10,000 year atomic clock, so there could be any number of reasons he agreed to spend $250 million to acquire the Washington Post. And given that Bezos’ day job as CEO of Amazon puts him at the center of the debate over some of the most important economic issues facing the country, his ownership of the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital will need to be watched carefully. But there’s at least one reason to believe his involvement in the paper could turn out to be a good thing: Bezos knows retail.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2011 in the GigaOM Pro report Building a Better Paywall: Strategies for Monetizing News Content:

The traditional indirect monetization model [for newspapers] was essentially a wholesale business. Publishers aggregated readers and sold them in bulk to advertisers: The bigger the bulk, the higher the price.

Selling content online, however, is a retail trade. As demonstrated by the consumer data from online gamers and music and video buyers, willingness to pay for online content can be influenced by many of the same factors that consumer goods retailers and marketers have long relied on: creating multiple SKUs at different price points, incentivizing desired behavior, simplifying and removing friction from the checkout process, etc.

The most apposite model, in fact, is not the traditional media business but ecommerce. The online video streaming service Hulu, for instance, achieved rapid consumer adoption in part by paying close attention to the presentation of the material and the user experience. It relied largely on advertising rather than direct consumer payment. The e-commerce background of CEO Jason Kilar, who spent several years at Amazon running its DVD business before joining Hulu, is evident in the site’s clean, easy-to-navigate interface, simple playback and broad selection of content.

Hulu’s ad selector feature, which allows viewers to select which commercials to watch, also shows the merchant’s touch by focusing on the user experience and encouraging engagement.

That merchant’s touch is not always a comfortable one for media companies, of course. Hulu has long had to struggle with its own network parent companies over control of the marketing and merchandising of its content. Yet in the online information market, where consumers have nearly infinite choices, competing successfully is as much a function of merchandising as the merchandise itself.

In thinking about designing paywalls, therefore, publishers might do better to take the job away from their subscription departments and hand it over to someone with experience in retail and e-commerce.

It would be hard to find a more influential and innovative retail merchant in America today than Jeff Bezos.