I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
Don’t you think the reason news has no real value is because many news organizations have been hollowed out due to a lack of a business model that can pay for journalism?
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
it was "here's forty-odd pages of news, sports, stocks, local politics, comic strips, curated reviews, curated op-eds, tailored editorials and a pile of coupons worth more than the newspaper's price from a local organization that has one or maybe two competitors for giving you this information... for two bits."
There's really no comparison anymore.
Any "valuable" news/sports/politics/stocks is all freely available from dozens of competing sources.
What's left is Opinions, Reviews and Editorials, which are freely available from thousands of free competitors.
the idea that anyone would blindly microtransact ("pay $0.02 to read my clickbait article ChatGPT wrote for me!") is one waiting for all free content to go away first.
So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
The answer IMO is easy, and we should have learnt it after over 30 years of Internet and World Wide Web growth: because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Even if they are publishing something from a common source. Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience etc etc
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Great point. That's how news should be read and how news should be presented. A filtering by the journalist to shorten, highlight, explain, and then a link to the complete and original source, so that interested readers can verify and dig deeper.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
I agree with keeping up with things that might affect you, but that is a tiny sliver of the news.
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
True that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model".
The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
They're not interested and it's not for technical reasons. It's for business reasons:
• Advertisers want subscribers because that's a proxy for wealth and often, locality.
• Only quite rich people are willing to pay for an ad-free newspaper. The Spectator is one example of such a thing in the UK (subscription only, no ads).
• A lot of subscriptions are driven by a desire for opinion and opinionated takes, often by a single star writer, not news and certainly not neutrally written news.
Extremely slanted opinion sells like hotcakes and subsidizes all the rest, but the market for drive-by micropayments for opinion is very small. This opinion-subscription-bias amongst readers is why Substack works and also the Guardian (the Guardian is 90% just opinion pretending to be unbiased news).
I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
I guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
Congratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. Plenty of systems like that around.
>I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is.
It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.
Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.
It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.
I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
https://taler-ops.ch/ is live in Switzerland and allows exactly this: anonymous microtransactions. What law exactly would prevent someone from doing the same in the US?
Can I send money to someone else and then have them pay? Example: etsy knows who I am but maybe every individual store does not? Similarly patreon knows who I am but each person I'm supporting does not? How about only fans?
They don't. Start doing a lot of activity in cash, and the banks file a report on that too. It's called a Currency Transaction Report. They may not be able to find you as easily, but they can create a link between you and being an individual with an unusual predilection toward doing economic activity in cash.
I was (somewhat obliquely) quoting Arthur C. Clarke from 1969. It's been 56 years, and in that time the present system has yet to come close to destroying itself.
You can not say it hasn't come close yet: that is not measurable. How many brinks have there been in the last 56 years, is surely undefinable because we don't know the effects of quantum butterflies in the counterfactual timeline.
We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet?
And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird!
Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.
I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
I wouldn't mind sending 10c or some such but have never in ~30 years of internet use been offered that. It's all "sign up now for $1/month! (smallprint: after first month it's $29/mo billed annually up from and a pain to cancel)"
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
Let me remind people that ABP (ad block pro) the OG ad blocker, collapsed and gave rise to uBlock because ABP understood that the internet would go to shit if no one viewed ads, so they tried to strike a truce between users and ad companies.
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
And it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
> This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
It is essential, but the ones I mention are something that is very hard to do without. While there are alternatives they're not widespread and require significant shift in operating style to roll out. Newspaper content is not a necessity so it doesn't work the same way.
> Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute).
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.
> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
> I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
Well no, it's not necessarily an indication it "doesn't work", that's only one possible indication. It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions, or it could indicate that the News companies BELIEVE that to be true whether it actually is or not.
It could also indicate that the news "industry" has been utterly decimated and destroyed and defunded over the past 50 years and they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies because they are desperately hanging on as it is and have all sorts of data showing them that they will never have the business they had 50 years ago no matter what because the simple reality is that humans prefer listening to a moronic talking head not ask hard questions over actual journalism anyway.
> It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions
which is exactly what "doesn't work" means - not enough revenue from microtransations compared to another avenue (such as subscription + adverts).
> they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies
i suppose that's possible as well - but some news outlets do have sufficient revenue to experiment, and they either hadnt, or have and found it wanting.
> not ask hard questions over actual journalism
that has nothing to do with the funding model. You're conflating separate concerns - one being a business concern, and one being a civic concern.
Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c".
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
They're not if the infrastructure is there (and it is.. apple pay, google pay, paypal, even tokens... although that's a bit of a hurdle)
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
The guardian works because it has a reach far beyond the UK for having a clear progressive identify and deep insights. They're a paper that still does what it should. Most don't. I've subscribed for a while too but I dropped it during Brexit. I'm not in or from the UK and I got sick of reading about Brexit every day and Boris Johnson asking the EU for things he knew he couldn't possibly have (like the separation of goods and services market)
> The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
> The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
There have always been two main things preventing this from happening.
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.
Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.
The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.
This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
> The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
No, the downside is constantly being monitored. It doesn't matter whether there's actual real-life consequences. It makes me feel watched and change my behaviour. If someone follows you on the street and writes everything you do and look at down, you would mind too even if he doesn't do anything with that info.
And whether I'm "paying into the system" by buying stuff I didn't need, that's a really shady and wasteful business model we shouldn't encourage in these times of environmental disaster.
We ALL pay for ads, even if we don't consume them. Advertising is a huge, huge cost to companies and is reflected in prices. And it's a barrier to entry for competitors.
You have to account for the massive amount of money google and the rest of the advertising industry makes. It's NOT companies lighting money on fire irrationally, and it does have to be paid for.
So it feels free because we all pay for it already. There's no agency. Adding micropayments or ad-free premium services aren't alternatives, they are an additional cost.
It is interesting how different this plays out in real life. The billboard on the corner doesn’t support anything I use. It is probably making the owner $50k in billings passively a month that they use to screw around with.
Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.
But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
It's undeniable that ads work. This has been endlessly researched for decades. Trust me, companies don't just throw away billions without spending millions to see if it is worthwhile.
My girlfriend works in the beauty industry on the product side. Even more important that having a good product, is having a good marketing campaign. Products live and die by their advertising. And believe it or not, lots of people click on ads.
Step back and evaluate the situation considering your thoughts on the whole population, people in general, not looking at it from your perspective with people you associate with.
I always find this kind of reasoning shallow or somewhat circular. Plenty of tech in history has been too much ahead of their time, bogged down by missing related tech, a larger movement or otherwise didn't just make it big until later.
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
Yes many newspaper offer this super cheap first month options. However, at least I, would rather pay 1 € to read one article without a subscription I need to worry about later, than pay € 2 to subscribe for a month.
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
How is your reasoning? If an article isn't even worth 50 cents, then why is it worth your time to read it? We only have limited time in this world, death is approaching swiftly.
The reasoning being that at that price you make your profits on volume. Not a lot of people are going to buy an article unless the price is pretty much throwaway.
A physical copy of the daily newspaper is $2. There’s no way I’m paying $0.50 for one article in the entire newspaper. It should probably be less than $0.05 an article.
I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ a month. And then everything I want to read is readable. Let somebody else decide how split that 10$. Of course the problem with that is that Spotify isn't very fair about giving artists their cut. But that should be a fixable problem.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
This is a tangent from the original topic, but what do you see as unfair in how Spotify pays rightsholders?
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
this is why payment integrated into wechat is a success. everyone (in china) has wechat already, and sending a few cents worth is trivial. heck, you can even give money to beggars using wechat. and you don't even need to connect a bank account to get started.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
Many countries have easy, accessible systems already. I can transfer single eurocents to everyone I have an IBAN for, and it'll appear on their bank account in seconds. Places like the US seem to prefer some kind of hybrid system where their bank integrates with one or more different companies to deal with doing easy bank transfers. The biggest problem right now is that you'd need to implement paying and receiving money for every single country's payment culture.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
SEPA is nice, except until recently my bank charged me money to use it (fortunately they changed that now). but i don't want to use my bank account for micro payments. i do want a separate wallet for that. my bank account has a credit card that works like that. if i want to use the credit card i have to actively load up money from my bank account before i can use it. i want the same for a digital wallet. i do not want to use my banking app where i receive my income for that. in my case i don't use the phone for online banking at all for the same reason.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
I worked at a small group of local dallies doing IT/Dev stuff about 15 years ago. Just the struggles we had dealing with very basic login/password with a large fraction of our userbase...
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
The subscription model happened before the sale; Blendle wasn't profitable. News conglomerates like DPG Media leaving the platform to set up their own payment plans also didn't help. I think it would've succeeded here had the news industry not collapsed into a few megacompanies.
The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
A news organisation tends to have a single editorial opinion. Heck. the consistency between all the murdoch papers is frequently a source of jokes.
Give me 5 or 6 sources of news, maybe in packages, curated for the best reporting on a day to day basis and I would pay 5 bucks a month for that.
That sort of emulates my current pattern which is Guardian for the bulk of my input, but flitting back and forth between BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC and others to pick up highlights or specific stories not carried, or carried briefly by guardian.
Throw it on a scrollable feed and I might even drop facey and masto.
They were forced to make private arrangements to pay various media companies what they thought their content was making on their platform. In aggregate its roughly the same.
For me, the ideal setup would be simple micropayments with 1 or 2 confirmation clicks and absolutely no subscriptions or accounts required. Just a simple payment.
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
You can do this with a centralized service that offers redeemable bearer tokens for arbitrary amounts that transfers a predefined amount from requester’s account to the redeemer’s account.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
Regarding your issues around buyer's remorse, I just don't see this as a problem. If you're paying 25 cents for something, and it turns out to be garbage or full of ads or whatever, you shrug, eat the 25 cents, and never visit that website again. For such a small amount of money, I think a "no refunds" policy is reasonable.
Sure, except that SEO-optimised AI listicles are currently on top of the search results for a non-trivial fraction of my searches, and the cost of generating an AI article to match any novel search term is much less than even 1¢, which means any given person will either learn to not bother reading the news at all, or find the AI generated *literally fake news made up on the spot for you when you look at it* is compelling and keep giving their money to it while mistaking it for a real source of truth.
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias.
Still others will tip based on quality.
However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
If that's what's bothering you, I can put your mind at ease by pointing out the absurdity of our world today. Half the news you read is, in fact, part of a coordinated political agenda.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
Sure both sides can have either an agenda or incorrect facts. But micro-payments should incentivize a high quality product.
For example I typically don't read or watch MSM. But with the recent Middle East conflict the most up-to-date information is through mainstream channels.
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
Micro transactions are a classic example illustrating the differences between what people say they want to do, and what they actually do. They’ve been tried many different ways and never worked financially. There’s no conspiracy; most customers just didn’t want to use them.
When I was a child in the 1980’s I was blissfully unaware that many adults around me were convinced the world was about to end. I went to school, came home to read and ride my bicycle, then went to bed. I didn’t really care the news existed or bother trying to consume it.
After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?
It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.
I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.
But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.
What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
For as long as there is financial gain to be had from it, business and investment news will continue to be a profitable niche. Sports also seems to do just fine, I don’t personally understand Sports very well, but even from an outsider perspective, there continues to be a lot of money and emotional investment in Sports, and that includes coverage of Sports. Not sure anything else is safe, but they weren’t exactly in a safe position prior to AI either.
The only way I would consider paying for news[^1] is if they removed all the negative first and second order effects of advertisements and clickbait for paying subscribers.
In other words:
- Neutral front page with informative titles and headings that are designed to inform, not make me click. Articles written from the ground up with the inverted pyramid[^2] in mind.
- Remove most "psuedo-events"[^3] based "reporting", and if not analyse them critically.
- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
- Do proper investigative journalism.
- Be conscious of the 5 filters outlined by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent and actively resist them.
In short, the news should live up to the narrative of being the fourth estate it claims legitimacy from, instead of being an entertainment product serving the lowest common denominator in terms of audience.
(This will of course never happen.)
[^1]: With the possible exception of being forced to pay for my nation's public broadcaster through taxes.
Reminds me of the YouRube extension DeArrow[0], that renames videos and replaces the thumbnail with an accurate still from the video to make the content less clickbaity. It’s a seriously valuable change in my experience.
>- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
A huge part of the problem with news media is that what people want is completely divorced from what makes good journalism.
Good journalism requires that you continue to pay despite the fact that they haven't been able to to release a piece in a while because they are still knee deep in three different big things that still haven't played out. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay despite the fact that the big story this month is about how you are a bad person who belongs in jail for arguably defrauding half your customers. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay when the article is about how your entire world view is wrong.
But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
I actually wonder if tabloids have been hit as hard business wise as say the NYT has.
Ultimately not everyone wants that, and the audience that would would appreciate well researched and methodologically sound journalism are lacking in options at least partly because they aren't the biggest and thus most lucrative audience.
Nonetheless, even if there were outlets willing to serve such an audience, the problems which remain include "how do I know the money I pay for a subscription will actually fund good journalism instead of garbage". Especially garbage third parties pay to have fed to you.
It's less clear how to be readily transparent with that or to quantify it. How do I know reporters are seeing past their own biases? How do I know they will report on things which might impact their paycheck by making the owners of the company (or their owners in turn) look bad?
Also, once you've found such an outlet how can you finance funding several to try to cover over available blind spots and increase the benefits of horizontal reading?
>But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
Compulsion isn't desire. People are compulsively checking the news, Tiktok, Reddit etc. because thousands of smart engineers' full time job is to maximize how much time people spend consuming content. If you ask people if they want to spend 6+ hours doom scrolling every day, very few people would agree. Don't confound revealed preference with intrinsic desire. The former is just an assumption of an economic model.
I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
Dark patterns around subscription cancellation have led me to only use subscriptions I can do via Apple. Having a single menu in the Settings app to manage all your subs is such a comfy feeling.
I can say you owe me money too. The hard part is collecting said money. The overheads of collecting from a non-cooperative customer would not make it worthwhile.
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
Same for the Economist. I was on their signup page about to start a subscription when I figured I'd better check how cancellations work. Sure enough there's no simple online cancellation option like there is for signing up. There are a whole bunch of stories out there of people being given the run around and wasting a stupid about of time cancelling their account.
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
The FTC was looking to do this stuff with "Click to cancel" but it's currently in limbo "to give the companies more time to comply" for some freaking reason.
Nobody wants a subscription to the Podunk Nowhere Times—they just want to read the one damn article they published this decade that is actually interesting.
People in Podunk Nowhere might want to read it more often. And everything about Podunk Nowhere Times' monetization structure will be designed around those repeat customers, not people who visit their website once a decade. If you hit a paywall and don't want to pay, most likely you're not the target audience anyway.
Most people don’t pay because the flow is broken. You’re curious, you click, and then you hit a wall. The moment is gone. It's not about money, it's about momentum.
I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
I'm still confused because I think the word "part" and "model" are used multiple times with different meanings and I can't figure out which is which from context.
Which Europeans remember Blendle? You put a few € into your account and then you browsed all popular magazines and news papers. If you saw an articled of interest you bought it for 10-70 cents.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
News is technically stuck in the 2000s. I would pay a Netflix-like subscription of 10$, but would not want to install custom Apps for each and every news product that tracks me. Send me the newspaper in an open format (pdf, epub, mobi) everyday via Email - that is a news subscription worth paying for.
The reason corporations are greedy isn't because they just love money, it's because you love money too and those corporations are taking your money. And just like them you care a lot about money too.
I'm continually upset that it took me 15 years to realize this.
Corporations are way more shameless then people, because they are not people.
My needs are met right now, I genuinely don't need any more money. I would take less even if it meant working at a place whose mission I vibe with more.
No amount of money would get me to build surveillance devices or slot machines or lie about how much I'm polluting.
I pay taxes and vote for candidates that would increase them to better provide for everyone.
having been screwed by multiple peridocials when I wanted to cancel I'm very suspect on signing up again. and when I did It was such a pain to stay logged in. Archive.is is easier. If they fixed that and allowed simple cancellation I'd actually consider it.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
In the ad-fundeed years, we got used to not feeling tied to the opinion bias of one or two publishers. Even if effectively we are tied, not really routine-checking more than one of two news sources, it would feel like a huge loss loving ourselves down by a subscription or two, as we did in the paper age (those of us old enough to remember).
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
I would pay double my local newspaper subscription if it would get me access to a couple dozen articles from other newspapers each month, especially regional papers where I’m never going to subscribe for that one-off piece about a friend but I want them to survive.
> I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication"
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
I would if they were more affordable or consistently offered a pay $1 to view this one post option.
My local news paper is $17 a month for digital or $45 a month for print and digital for a paper that prints three day a week. I know news isnt cheap but... I just cant justify that for what is a pretty OKAY newspaper. They mostly repost national news and cover local elections or town issues. Oh and lots of ads or "Partner articles"
I'm glad they exist but if they went away, which I'm sure they will eventually, I wouldnt really miss it.
$10 a month could be reasonable. I know they must have done the numbers but I imagine there are a lot of people like me who want to support x news org but just cant justify the only very limited payment options that are offered.
I would certainly have negative money if I subscribed to every prompt. How would a person even manage that? The emails. You would have to hire someone to unsubscribe. The model clearly isn't functional. It seems like only the entertainment outlets can afford to be free. So we have MAGA and really wild people.
Lies have their own pataphysics. In my mind "fake news" is characterized not so much by its falseness but by the way it plays on people's emotions.
News gathering, on the other hand, means riding a regional jet coach to a flyover state, talking to people you don't know, working for six months on a data project and sometimes putting your life on the line. [1]
The sad thing is that most clicks to The New York Times are for the editorial page where the likes of Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Charlie Blow blow it out their ass every day. [2]
[2] It's not whether I agree with them or not but rather that it is all low effort and it sells because it plays to people's emotions. I can see things to agree with or disagree with with Klein's "Abundance Agenda" essay but it's the kind of thing a high-schooler could write as an essay.
Not really, there's more than an abundance of truth to be had for free, you can even pick what truth you want, from the boring "aligns with my beliefs" to the more exciting "makes me slightly uncomfortable" and even spicier than that when you're looking for a complete makeover.
I pay for sites that I frequent. For the ones where I'm just interested in a single article, I would be willing to pay to read it if the price for it were reasonable and I didn't have to subscribe or have an account.
I pay for a subscription -> a year later I see that I paid $ for something I barely read.
At the same time, I would love to pay $2 (a half of a cup of coffee) or so for a quality article. Most people, as I understand, would rather waste their time and attention than pay anything.
It would be interesting to compare this with The Guardian's model - it's not paywalled, but you are encouraged to donate / subscribe (similar to Wikipedia). I have not only subscribed to digital edition, but also included physical delivery later. I think people would be more willing to pay after receiving a knowledge service, seeing the quality and being satisfied with it.
Yes I subscribed too in the past. Few good news sources that are as aligned with me. I dropped them during Brexit though, i got sick of the topic. And never subscribed physically, too difficult and annoying when not living in the UK.
But Brexit moved me from a slight "like" of the UK to a definite "dislike" and I've cut most of my ties with it.
The guardian suffered. I might have stayed if they'd made a Brexit-news-free front-page but that must have been a sensitive topic inside the UK. Sometimes their front page was half Brexit news and I was so sick of it.
Maybe the problem isn't why people won't pay, but why the news industry still thinks the old model works. People are willing to pay for music, games, coffee, but news isn't engaging or pleasurable anymore. It's more like spinach: good for you, but you don't crave it.
Devil's advocate, the best solution to this would be a cryptocurrency protocol that could actually scale to micro transactions along with sufficiently good UX. It needs to be trivial for anyone to tip anyone a few cents here and there.
paying for the physical paper made sense specially for local papers - since relevant local ads/ opportunities were in those papers.
now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.
now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?
internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
I'm not paying for something that is more annoying on mobile than on a notebook or desktop. You want money you should learn how to interact with humans.
Redirect: "https://archive.is/newest/%s"
Bang: a
[X] URL Encode
Then, when I hit a paywall, just prepend "!a " into the URL Bar and boom content!
// Yes, I'm aware I could do a bookmarklet or whatever, but the Kagi solution works across all my digital addictions and only has to be configured once.
Of course I don't pay for news. I had a WaPo subscription for a couple years, but I cancelled at some point once I felt Bezos was exercising too much editorial control.
Most of my news comes from aggregators, where every day I click through to many sites that I may have never visited before, and may never visit again. Even sites I will come back to, I might read 3 or 4 articles a month. That's not worth $15/month to me. Even if it was something more reasonable like $2/month (for that quantity of articles), I'm not going to subscribe to a news source (or lots of sources) when I don't actually visit their sites directly; it's like roulette through the aggregators.
If I hit a paywall, I'll mostly just close the tab. Occasionally I'll see if it's on archive.is, if it's a topic I'm really interested in, but if I'm clicking through from something like Google News, odds are there's another site without a paywall that is discussing the same thing.
News agencies should have immediately merged after google was formed to create a counterbalance to google earning all the profits of news and destroying journalism by accident.
They did. Something like 99% of local news outlets are gone or were acquired. Now, the remaining ones are centralized enough to be effective propaganda outlets.
But does it actually matter in terms of what happens in the world? My impression is that people deeply involved in business, politics, etc. do pay for the news, and often pay for multiple subscriptions to things like the NYT, The Economist, Financial Times, etc. and they all seem to be doing just fine financially.
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
I think this would need to be integrated into web browsers as a standard or as an extension. You have a chunk of money you've prepaid to a service, and that service lets you pay (makes you pay?) $0.05 for viewing an article, and remembers that you did it, and the paywall gives you the option to instantly pay with PayService.
Of course then PayService will have surge pricing turned on. And that will be fun. But still - viable?
Micropayments never went anywhere, so how about this? Part of the exorbitant highwayman fees collected by ISP's could buy credits for content creators. A bazillion risky online payments is the problem, not the solution. Breaches are a matter of when, not if.
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
I was thinking that you get credits to spend as you choose. Smacks of "free market" :-)
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
Is there a HTML snippet/button that each site must embed? If so, it'll be gamed/frauded like crazy, kinda like with ads today. Except unlike ads, there is no incentive to keep fraud away, so all the credits will likely go to people who know how to game the system.
Or is there a page hosted by your ISP where you allocate where the credits go? If so, which fraction of ISP subscribers will be visiting it? And if they do visit it, what are the chances they'll still remember the name of that freelance writer or artist, and not just pick a well-know/popular brand instead?
Or some sort of (again, ISP-provided) browser/browser plugin? If so, how many people would install it? I certainly would not trust _anything_ my ISP provides.
I am not from the US but I can relate. I don't watch the news, I don't want to waste time on it and avoid it as much as possible.
Journalists an news organizations were supposed to be the ones keeping governments in check by digging up the skeletons of those who call themselves leaders today.
Instead a lot of the news is now clickbait and attention seeking and many news organizations are actually financed by governments (BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and so on...) thereby removing any hope of having an unbiased news source because you simply don't bit the hand that feeds you.
If I want to know facts, I'll buy a book about some specific topic/event 10 years after it happens, so that the whole picture can be understood instead of reading editorials and opinions about ongoing events that most likely will be invalidated by the end of the week.
So it is what it is. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Does the rise of paywalls also correlate to an increasingly politically divided public? Echo chambers can be reinforced if wider and balanced voices are behind paywalls
here is the crux of it, new term, "adverstalking"
say you are just a tiny bit dopy and off you game, something interesting, harmless, relaxing, evoctive of some dream, pops up, you click, for one fleeting sub second moment there is a nice layout, plenty of text, pic's ,and the blam, the midway carnival jams back in and picks up where it lost you earlier, and well.at a certain number of repitions, it is a take up arms or walk away decision, and 99.99999999999% walk away, some few
go all in on adbusting and firewall penetration as a proxy for squishing heads, but there is no one who does not find themselves shaking a clenched fist, which personaly I channel into my biggest smileyest bright eyed cheshire,I am overjoyed face, double down and find some new way to decouple from the asymetric market and do what I can for myself and the people I have made promises to.
A weird, provocative headline creates misinformation.
Of the people who try to access the article, only 12% actually read it (1% who pay, and 11% who bypass the paywall). Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
And those are only the ppl that tries to read the news, the majority of ppl doesn't even bother trying to open the news link.
This is interesting because about next month, I'll start working on paywall as a service to add to Gethly.com platform. There are few challenges with this and I am not surprised we have not seen much traction with this.
My website has a dedicated news portal and we don't have a paywall but a guiltwall where we beg for $3 a month like wikipedia does but less obtrusively (it'll even pop through most adblockers until you manually div block it)
I've been paying for NYT for five years. I remember the NYT paywall before that. I've been interested in local news so after my 5th hit in recent memory hitting my local newspaper's paywall, I finally bought a year subscription.
On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
Suppose this report is more about behaviour and the UX of paywalls rather than subscriptions.
But meanwhile was under impression that digital subscriptions at key players were rising rapidly in the last 3-4 years. Data points like NYT digital subscriptions having banner years up like 1M subscribers over last year, and sub sports site The Athletic turning a profit for the first time since acquisition in 2022.
And what about sources closer to home here like The Verge introducing paid options recently? How's that working out?
Pre-web, when high-quality news seemed to actually exist, and I could just pay for dead-tree editions of that, I did. Probably over $2k/year, in today's money.
Now - most newsrooms have been gutted, once-great magazines like Scientific American are sick parodies of their former selves, supposedly top-tier news sites are full of click-bait drivel, they monetize your personal information every way they can, and cancelling your subscription may require lawyer. I pay $0/year.
Is that a problem with people or with the news itself? And are people incapable or just unwilling to sift through the haystack?
And if it is a problem with the news or people are simply unwilling to sift through the haystack, why should we expect people to pay for that privilege?
I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
Most "news" is probably just paid content creation with some kind of agenda behind it.
One of largest advertiser's is the state. All those public health ads and so on.
Don’t you think the reason news has no real value is because many news organizations have been hollowed out due to a lack of a business model that can pay for journalism?
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
Were the any better pre internet? When the sold papers.
Much the same if you ask me.
it was "here's forty-odd pages of news, sports, stocks, local politics, comic strips, curated reviews, curated op-eds, tailored editorials and a pile of coupons worth more than the newspaper's price from a local organization that has one or maybe two competitors for giving you this information... for two bits."
There's really no comparison anymore.
Any "valuable" news/sports/politics/stocks is all freely available from dozens of competing sources.
What's left is Opinions, Reviews and Editorials, which are freely available from thousands of free competitors.
the idea that anyone would blindly microtransact ("pay $0.02 to read my clickbait article ChatGPT wrote for me!") is one waiting for all free content to go away first.
Yeah, when I really want to learn about something I buy a book. Power Broker, Secrets of the Temple...stuff like that. Real journalism.
So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page? The answer IMO is easy, and we should have learnt it after over 30 years of Internet and World Wide Web growth: because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Even if they are publishing something from a common source. Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience etc etc
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
Because a lot of HN voters and commenters just read the headlines and not the articles.
Great point. That's how news should be read and how news should be presented. A filtering by the journalist to shorten, highlight, explain, and then a link to the complete and original source, so that interested readers can verify and dig deeper.
> but a lot of news has no real value.
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
I agree with keeping up with things that might affect you, but that is a tiny sliver of the news.
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
True that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model".
The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
They're not interested and it's not for technical reasons. It's for business reasons:
• Advertisers want subscribers because that's a proxy for wealth and often, locality.
• Only quite rich people are willing to pay for an ad-free newspaper. The Spectator is one example of such a thing in the UK (subscription only, no ads).
• A lot of subscriptions are driven by a desire for opinion and opinionated takes, often by a single star writer, not news and certainly not neutrally written news.
Extremely slanted opinion sells like hotcakes and subsidizes all the rest, but the market for drive-by micropayments for opinion is very small. This opinion-subscription-bias amongst readers is why Substack works and also the Guardian (the Guardian is 90% just opinion pretending to be unbiased news).
I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
I guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
Except it's actually 13 cents because of the Apple tax.
In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
Congratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. Plenty of systems like that around.
too bad the middleman sells that too
>I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is.
It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.
Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.
It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.
I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
https://taler-ops.ch/ is live in Switzerland and allows exactly this: anonymous microtransactions. What law exactly would prevent someone from doing the same in the US?
KYC is mandatory in the US. You can't send money without knowing your recipient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
Can I send money to someone else and then have them pay? Example: etsy knows who I am but maybe every individual store does not? Similarly patreon knows who I am but each person I'm supporting does not? How about only fans?
It's not you transferring money, it is Etsy, Patreon,.. they have to know recipient.
Unless you are allowing 6-digit fraudulent payments, as documented in this other thread currently on page 2.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377104
In this hypothetical scenario, we know the recipient, just not the sender.
Funny how all these rules and privacy violations fall apart when you start paying cash.
They don't. Start doing a lot of activity in cash, and the banks file a report on that too. It's called a Currency Transaction Report. They may not be able to find you as easily, but they can create a link between you and being an individual with an unusual predilection toward doing economic activity in cash.
Let them have that then. Better than seeing my merchant history.
The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) as amended under USA-PATRIOT.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act
That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
The present system seems perfectly capable of destroying itself without our help.
I was (somewhat obliquely) quoting Arthur C. Clarke from 1969. It's been 56 years, and in that time the present system has yet to come close to destroying itself.
You can not say it hasn't come close yet: that is not measurable. How many brinks have there been in the last 56 years, is surely undefinable because we don't know the effects of quantum butterflies in the counterfactual timeline.
We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet?
And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird!
Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.
There’s plenty of destruction going on and it doesn’t look like a brighter future.
sarcasm is too complicated for the average HN viewer, obviously smh
Sarcasm is cheap and parses as defeatism. Everybody knows the system is doing financial mass surveillance. How do we get it to stop?
I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
> Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
I wouldn't mind sending 10c or some such but have never in ~30 years of internet use been offered that. It's all "sign up now for $1/month! (smallprint: after first month it's $29/mo billed annually up from and a pain to cancel)"
You clearly never “zapped” a few says before via any Nostr client.
BRB gonna make Superman 3 money
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
This is not at all what ads are...
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
Let me remind people that ABP (ad block pro) the OG ad blocker, collapsed and gave rise to uBlock because ABP understood that the internet would go to shit if no one viewed ads, so they tried to strike a truce between users and ad companies.
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
And it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
> This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
You are wrong. There have been multiple attempts at micro-transactions - and they all failed. One of the biggest was Blendle - https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
It is essential, but the ones I mention are something that is very hard to do without. While there are alternatives they're not widespread and require significant shift in operating style to roll out. Newspaper content is not a necessity so it doesn't work the same way.
> Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute).
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
> And nearly the entirety of retail sales
Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.
> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
> I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
> yet empirically, most people wont.
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
> So how do we know this, empirically?
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
Well no, it's not necessarily an indication it "doesn't work", that's only one possible indication. It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions, or it could indicate that the News companies BELIEVE that to be true whether it actually is or not.
It could also indicate that the news "industry" has been utterly decimated and destroyed and defunded over the past 50 years and they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies because they are desperately hanging on as it is and have all sorts of data showing them that they will never have the business they had 50 years ago no matter what because the simple reality is that humans prefer listening to a moronic talking head not ask hard questions over actual journalism anyway.
> It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions
which is exactly what "doesn't work" means - not enough revenue from microtransations compared to another avenue (such as subscription + adverts).
> they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies
i suppose that's possible as well - but some news outlets do have sufficient revenue to experiment, and they either hadnt, or have and found it wanting.
> not ask hard questions over actual journalism
that has nothing to do with the funding model. You're conflating separate concerns - one being a business concern, and one being a civic concern.
Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c".
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
They're not if the infrastructure is there (and it is.. apple pay, google pay, paypal, even tokens... although that's a bit of a hurdle)
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
The guardian works because it has a reach far beyond the UK for having a clear progressive identify and deep insights. They're a paper that still does what it should. Most don't. I've subscribed for a while too but I dropped it during Brexit. I'm not in or from the UK and I got sick of reading about Brexit every day and Boris Johnson asking the EU for things he knew he couldn't possibly have (like the separation of goods and services market)
> The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
> The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
There have always been two main things preventing this from happening.
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
Let me take it one step further though.
Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.
Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.
The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.
This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
> The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
No, the downside is constantly being monitored. It doesn't matter whether there's actual real-life consequences. It makes me feel watched and change my behaviour. If someone follows you on the street and writes everything you do and look at down, you would mind too even if he doesn't do anything with that info.
And whether I'm "paying into the system" by buying stuff I didn't need, that's a really shady and wasteful business model we shouldn't encourage in these times of environmental disaster.
We ALL pay for ads, even if we don't consume them. Advertising is a huge, huge cost to companies and is reflected in prices. And it's a barrier to entry for competitors.
You have to account for the massive amount of money google and the rest of the advertising industry makes. It's NOT companies lighting money on fire irrationally, and it does have to be paid for.
So it feels free because we all pay for it already. There's no agency. Adding micropayments or ad-free premium services aren't alternatives, they are an additional cost.
It is interesting how different this plays out in real life. The billboard on the corner doesn’t support anything I use. It is probably making the owner $50k in billings passively a month that they use to screw around with.
Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.
But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
It's undeniable that ads work. This has been endlessly researched for decades. Trust me, companies don't just throw away billions without spending millions to see if it is worthwhile.
My girlfriend works in the beauty industry on the product side. Even more important that having a good product, is having a good marketing campaign. Products live and die by their advertising. And believe it or not, lots of people click on ads.
Step back and evaluate the situation considering your thoughts on the whole population, people in general, not looking at it from your perspective with people you associate with.
I always find this kind of reasoning shallow or somewhat circular. Plenty of tech in history has been too much ahead of their time, bogged down by missing related tech, a larger movement or otherwise didn't just make it big until later.
Microtransactions for viewing news would just start a flood of AI generated sludge designed purely to harvest those microtransactions.
To watch this play out, get an Apple News+ subscription.
(Unless it improved in the last few years.)
I don't know if you have noticed that the internet has been a flood of slop content for years now just to harvest ad views.
Rather than ad-blockers we could have "junk content provider" blockers.
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
Actually i saw bloomberg doing this a couple of days ago, it was “subscribe for 1.99 a month” and you could use apple pay. [1]
I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.
But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...
Yes many newspaper offer this super cheap first month options. However, at least I, would rather pay 1 € to read one article without a subscription I need to worry about later, than pay € 2 to subscribe for a month.
It would have to be $0.05 an article. 50 cents is way too high.
Not at Bloomberg's end of the market.
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
One of the reasons why mobile games sell game credits.
How is your reasoning? If an article isn't even worth 50 cents, then why is it worth your time to read it? We only have limited time in this world, death is approaching swiftly.
The reasoning being that at that price you make your profits on volume. Not a lot of people are going to buy an article unless the price is pretty much throwaway.
Can you give some examples of purchases for 5 cents that you have made?
A physical copy of the daily newspaper is $2. There’s no way I’m paying $0.50 for one article in the entire newspaper. It should probably be less than $0.05 an article.
I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ a month. And then everything I want to read is readable. Let somebody else decide how split that 10$. Of course the problem with that is that Spotify isn't very fair about giving artists their cut. But that should be a fixable problem.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
This is a tangent from the original topic, but what do you see as unfair in how Spotify pays rightsholders?
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
Very much this.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
this is why payment integrated into wechat is a success. everyone (in china) has wechat already, and sending a few cents worth is trivial. heck, you can even give money to beggars using wechat. and you don't even need to connect a bank account to get started.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
Many countries have easy, accessible systems already. I can transfer single eurocents to everyone I have an IBAN for, and it'll appear on their bank account in seconds. Places like the US seem to prefer some kind of hybrid system where their bank integrates with one or more different companies to deal with doing easy bank transfers. The biggest problem right now is that you'd need to implement paying and receiving money for every single country's payment culture.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
SEPA is nice, except until recently my bank charged me money to use it (fortunately they changed that now). but i don't want to use my bank account for micro payments. i do want a separate wallet for that. my bank account has a credit card that works like that. if i want to use the credit card i have to actively load up money from my bank account before i can use it. i want the same for a digital wallet. i do not want to use my banking app where i receive my income for that. in my case i don't use the phone for online banking at all for the same reason.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
I worked at a small group of local dallies doing IT/Dev stuff about 15 years ago. Just the struggles we had dealing with very basic login/password with a large fraction of our userbase...
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
Not sure i want to pay to read an article and then also have to see an ad too. Maybe. I sure won't put up with that for video content.
There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
Blendle was the bom.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
The subscription model happened before the sale; Blendle wasn't profitable. News conglomerates like DPG Media leaving the platform to set up their own payment plans also didn't help. I think it would've succeeded here had the news industry not collapsed into a few megacompanies.
That's how Minitel used to work: each page you accessed would add a few pence to your bill.
The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
We really just need a good aggregator.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
Yeah all implementations thus far have sucked I am well aware.
My read is thats because the aggregators wanted to be blind middle men.
These days you need to curate. I would almost pay just to remove the bottomless pit of pseudoscience from my feed.
> We really just need a good aggregator.
Right, all those different writers can band together, perhaps get an editor to curate the best and make sure there's no major blunders…
But isn't that just a news organisation?
A news organisation tends to have a single editorial opinion. Heck. the consistency between all the murdoch papers is frequently a source of jokes.
Give me 5 or 6 sources of news, maybe in packages, curated for the best reporting on a day to day basis and I would pay 5 bucks a month for that.
That sort of emulates my current pattern which is Guardian for the bulk of my input, but flitting back and forth between BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC and others to pick up highlights or specific stories not carried, or carried briefly by guardian.
Throw it on a scrollable feed and I might even drop facey and masto.
> Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
They were forced to make private arrangements to pay various media companies what they thought their content was making on their platform. In aggregate its roughly the same.
> In aggregate its roughly the same.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
>Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
I mean you would be "paying" just as much to facey even if the scheme wasn't in place.
For me, the ideal setup would be simple micropayments with 1 or 2 confirmation clicks and absolutely no subscriptions or accounts required. Just a simple payment.
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
Flattr was exactly that. Was. Didn't work out in the end, I guess, but we'd all be better of with that...
You can do this with a centralized service that offers redeemable bearer tokens for arbitrary amounts that transfers a predefined amount from requester’s account to the redeemer’s account.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
(reposting my standard comment when someone brings up micropayments again. Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 )
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
Regarding your issues around buyer's remorse, I just don't see this as a problem. If you're paying 25 cents for something, and it turns out to be garbage or full of ads or whatever, you shrug, eat the 25 cents, and never visit that website again. For such a small amount of money, I think a "no refunds" policy is reasonable.
Sure, except that SEO-optimised AI listicles are currently on top of the search results for a non-trivial fraction of my searches, and the cost of generating an AI article to match any novel search term is much less than even 1¢, which means any given person will either learn to not bother reading the news at all, or find the AI generated *literally fake news made up on the spot for you when you look at it* is compelling and keep giving their money to it while mistaking it for a real source of truth.
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
Quite possibly. But scams tend to proliferate. What ratio of scam to legit causes someone to refuse to use the micropayment system itself ever again?
Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
> Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias. Still others will tip based on quality. However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
If that's what's bothering you, I can put your mind at ease by pointing out the absurdity of our world today. Half the news you read is, in fact, part of a coordinated political agenda.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
Sure both sides can have either an agenda or incorrect facts. But micro-payments should incentivize a high quality product.
For example I typically don't read or watch MSM. But with the recent Middle East conflict the most up-to-date information is through mainstream channels.
> Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
Why not just have an extension on your phone's browser that does this automatically for you? Firefox still lives!
That's how flattr used to work. Like all well-intentioned attempts to pay creators, it collapsed because people lost interest.
I was just discussing this, earlier today, with a fellow on HackerNews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
microtransactions are not doable with the fees of the overhead
Micro transactions are a classic example illustrating the differences between what people say they want to do, and what they actually do. They’ve been tried many different ways and never worked financially. There’s no conspiracy; most customers just didn’t want to use them.
Toss a coin to your paper, O browser of plenty.
When I was a child in the 1980’s I was blissfully unaware that many adults around me were convinced the world was about to end. I went to school, came home to read and ride my bicycle, then went to bed. I didn’t really care the news existed or bother trying to consume it.
After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?
It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.
I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.
But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.
What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
With search transitioning to AI previews and traffic to news sites dropping substantially as a result, how long will the news business model last?
For as long as there is financial gain to be had from it, business and investment news will continue to be a profitable niche. Sports also seems to do just fine, I don’t personally understand Sports very well, but even from an outsider perspective, there continues to be a lot of money and emotional investment in Sports, and that includes coverage of Sports. Not sure anything else is safe, but they weren’t exactly in a safe position prior to AI either.
The only way I would consider paying for news[^1] is if they removed all the negative first and second order effects of advertisements and clickbait for paying subscribers.
In other words:
- Neutral front page with informative titles and headings that are designed to inform, not make me click. Articles written from the ground up with the inverted pyramid[^2] in mind.
- Remove most "psuedo-events"[^3] based "reporting", and if not analyse them critically.
- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
- Do proper investigative journalism.
- Be conscious of the 5 filters outlined by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent and actively resist them.
In short, the news should live up to the narrative of being the fourth estate it claims legitimacy from, instead of being an entertainment product serving the lowest common denominator in terms of audience.
(This will of course never happen.)
[^1]: With the possible exception of being forced to pay for my nation's public broadcaster through taxes.
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
[^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event
Reminds me of the YouRube extension DeArrow[0], that renames videos and replaces the thumbnail with an accurate still from the video to make the content less clickbaity. It’s a seriously valuable change in my experience.
[0]: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
Do you know if it uses AI to generate any of the titles?
It's crowdsourced (at least that's what it says on the site). Same creator as sponsorblock, so it's built on the same principle.
>- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
A huge part of the problem with news media is that what people want is completely divorced from what makes good journalism.
Good journalism requires that you continue to pay despite the fact that they haven't been able to to release a piece in a while because they are still knee deep in three different big things that still haven't played out. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay despite the fact that the big story this month is about how you are a bad person who belongs in jail for arguably defrauding half your customers. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay when the article is about how your entire world view is wrong.
But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
I actually wonder if tabloids have been hit as hard business wise as say the NYT has.
Well, that's the same problem as nutrition then.
Ultimately not everyone wants that, and the audience that would would appreciate well researched and methodologically sound journalism are lacking in options at least partly because they aren't the biggest and thus most lucrative audience.
Nonetheless, even if there were outlets willing to serve such an audience, the problems which remain include "how do I know the money I pay for a subscription will actually fund good journalism instead of garbage". Especially garbage third parties pay to have fed to you.
It's less clear how to be readily transparent with that or to quantify it. How do I know reporters are seeing past their own biases? How do I know they will report on things which might impact their paycheck by making the owners of the company (or their owners in turn) look bad?
Also, once you've found such an outlet how can you finance funding several to try to cover over available blind spots and increase the benefits of horizontal reading?
>But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
Compulsion isn't desire. People are compulsively checking the news, Tiktok, Reddit etc. because thousands of smart engineers' full time job is to maximize how much time people spend consuming content. If you ask people if they want to spend 6+ hours doom scrolling every day, very few people would agree. Don't confound revealed preference with intrinsic desire. The former is just an assumption of an economic model.
More people might be willing to pay for news and journalism than we are to pay for ads, clickbait, ragebait, and ""entertainment"".
I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
Dark patterns around subscription cancellation have led me to only use subscriptions I can do via Apple. Having a single menu in the Settings app to manage all your subs is such a comfy feeling.
Exactly. I wish all the Apple bashers good luck. Well worth the 15-30%
California has this and it's great. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202320240ab...
I use privacy.com proxy cards for this. Don't even bother unsubscribing most of the time, I just cancel the card and let nature run it's course :)
Legally, can't they let the subscription run and say you owe them the money?
I can say you owe me money too. The hard part is collecting said money. The overheads of collecting from a non-cooperative customer would not make it worthwhile.
But what if they pass it to a debt agency? I think it's a risky strategy.
Ignore it? Even a debt agency has profit margins to hit and wouldn't take on unprofitable clients.
Depends if they allow signup from a prepaid visa. There's no one to chase, its a prepaid.
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
Same for the Economist. I was on their signup page about to start a subscription when I figured I'd better check how cancellations work. Sure enough there's no simple online cancellation option like there is for signing up. There are a whole bunch of stories out there of people being given the run around and wasting a stupid about of time cancelling their account.
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
You can subscribe to The NY Times through the App Store and then cancel painlessly just like any other app subscription.
very agreed, they have tons of good articles which is about as many times as I've been warned never to sign up with them because you cancel.
The FTC was looking to do this stuff with "Click to cancel" but it's currently in limbo "to give the companies more time to comply" for some freaking reason.
Nobody wants a subscription to the Podunk Nowhere Times—they just want to read the one damn article they published this decade that is actually interesting.
People in Podunk Nowhere might want to read it more often. And everything about Podunk Nowhere Times' monetization structure will be designed around those repeat customers, not people who visit their website once a decade. If you hit a paywall and don't want to pay, most likely you're not the target audience anyway.
Most people don’t pay because the flow is broken. You’re curious, you click, and then you hit a wall. The moment is gone. It's not about money, it's about momentum.
Not really. Even sites that make payments optional and present the dialog after you've been on the page for some time aren't successful.
The value proposition shifted. I subscribed to print paper and they had a model: hook you in on a dollar a week, move you up to a dollar a day.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
This sounds interesting, but I cannot understand what you're saying. Could you dumb this down a bit for someone with no experience in marketing/sales?
There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
I'm still confused because I think the word "part" and "model" are used multiple times with different meanings and I can't figure out which is which from context.
They are aware of the obvious answer. But they need to be a profitable business.
Which Europeans remember Blendle? You put a few € into your account and then you browsed all popular magazines and news papers. If you saw an articled of interest you bought it for 10-70 cents.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
These kind of things still exist. Libraries often have them. I think it might just be a case of weak marketing. We don't hear about them.
News is technically stuck in the 2000s. I would pay a Netflix-like subscription of 10$, but would not want to install custom Apps for each and every news product that tracks me. Send me the newspaper in an open format (pdf, epub, mobi) everyday via Email - that is a news subscription worth paying for.
So, Apple News?
No middle man/person please.
I sincerely believe many of our societal issues could be resolved if, somehow, people started paying for stuff again.
And vice versa, many of our societal issues would go away, if companies won't only be concerned about profits.
Let's not blame the players for the game rules being flawed.
Everyone is only concerned about profits.
The reason corporations are greedy isn't because they just love money, it's because you love money too and those corporations are taking your money. And just like them you care a lot about money too.
I'm continually upset that it took me 15 years to realize this.
Corporations are way more shameless then people, because they are not people.
My needs are met right now, I genuinely don't need any more money. I would take less even if it meant working at a place whose mission I vibe with more.
No amount of money would get me to build surveillance devices or slot machines or lie about how much I'm polluting.
I pay taxes and vote for candidates that would increase them to better provide for everyone.
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, isn't it? Everything is so enshittified that very little (including news) is worth paying for.
having been screwed by multiple peridocials when I wanted to cancel I'm very suspect on signing up again. and when I did It was such a pain to stay logged in. Archive.is is easier. If they fixed that and allowed simple cancellation I'd actually consider it.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
https://archive.is/MaMdu
Hilariously enough, this Pew article would not have been worth having paid any subscription term to have read.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
Did all the pay-per-article services fail (like Blendle) or are there any decent ones remaining?
I don't want to read the news often enough that I'd pay for a subscription. Not anymore, anyway.
Maybe I should go back to paying [7 bucks](https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers) every time I want to sit down and read the news.
I subscribe to a print newspaper every day, it's about $2.35 per day, delivered to my house.
In the ad-fundeed years, we got used to not feeling tied to the opinion bias of one or two publishers. Even if effectively we are tied, not really routine-checking more than one of two news sources, it would feel like a huge loss loving ourselves down by a subscription or two, as we did in the paper age (those of us old enough to remember).
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
I would pay double my local newspaper subscription if it would get me access to a couple dozen articles from other newspapers each month, especially regional papers where I’m never going to subscribe for that one-off piece about a friend but I want them to survive.
> I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication"
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
Isn’t this basically Apple News? It would be great if you could select your local news source, and it funneled part of your subscription their way.
I would if they were more affordable or consistently offered a pay $1 to view this one post option.
My local news paper is $17 a month for digital or $45 a month for print and digital for a paper that prints three day a week. I know news isnt cheap but... I just cant justify that for what is a pretty OKAY newspaper. They mostly repost national news and cover local elections or town issues. Oh and lots of ads or "Partner articles"
I'm glad they exist but if they went away, which I'm sure they will eventually, I wouldnt really miss it.
$10 a month could be reasonable. I know they must have done the numbers but I imagine there are a lot of people like me who want to support x news org but just cant justify the only very limited payment options that are offered.
I would certainly have negative money if I subscribed to every prompt. How would a person even manage that? The emails. You would have to hire someone to unsubscribe. The model clearly isn't functional. It seems like only the entertainment outlets can afford to be free. So we have MAGA and really wild people.
Lies are free but the truth costs money.
Yep, because the truth is hard to vary but lies have few constraints.
Lies have their own pataphysics. In my mind "fake news" is characterized not so much by its falseness but by the way it plays on people's emotions.
News gathering, on the other hand, means riding a regional jet coach to a flyover state, talking to people you don't know, working for six months on a data project and sometimes putting your life on the line. [1]
The sad thing is that most clicks to The New York Times are for the editorial page where the likes of Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Charlie Blow blow it out their ass every day. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles
[2] It's not whether I agree with them or not but rather that it is all low effort and it sells because it plays to people's emotions. I can see things to agree with or disagree with with Klein's "Abundance Agenda" essay but it's the kind of thing a high-schooler could write as an essay.
By this logic, Twitter is truth?
>nyt is truth
Not really, there's more than an abundance of truth to be had for free, you can even pick what truth you want, from the boring "aligns with my beliefs" to the more exciting "makes me slightly uncomfortable" and even spicier than that when you're looking for a complete makeover.
you can even pick what truth you want
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
"all news is views"
Then modern capitalism moves in, and "truth" is redefined as "whatever maximizes our quarterly profit".
I pay for sites that I frequent. For the ones where I'm just interested in a single article, I would be willing to pay to read it if the price for it were reasonable and I didn't have to subscribe or have an account.
I pay for a subscription -> a year later I see that I paid $ for something I barely read.
At the same time, I would love to pay $2 (a half of a cup of coffee) or so for a quality article. Most people, as I understand, would rather waste their time and attention than pay anything.
It would be interesting to compare this with The Guardian's model - it's not paywalled, but you are encouraged to donate / subscribe (similar to Wikipedia). I have not only subscribed to digital edition, but also included physical delivery later. I think people would be more willing to pay after receiving a knowledge service, seeing the quality and being satisfied with it.
Yes I subscribed too in the past. Few good news sources that are as aligned with me. I dropped them during Brexit though, i got sick of the topic. And never subscribed physically, too difficult and annoying when not living in the UK.
But Brexit moved me from a slight "like" of the UK to a definite "dislike" and I've cut most of my ties with it.
The guardian suffered. I might have stayed if they'd made a Brexit-news-free front-page but that must have been a sensitive topic inside the UK. Sometimes their front page was half Brexit news and I was so sick of it.
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Maybe the problem isn't why people won't pay, but why the news industry still thinks the old model works. People are willing to pay for music, games, coffee, but news isn't engaging or pleasurable anymore. It's more like spinach: good for you, but you don't crave it.
Devil's advocate, the best solution to this would be a cryptocurrency protocol that could actually scale to micro transactions along with sufficiently good UX. It needs to be trivial for anyone to tip anyone a few cents here and there.
> best solution to this would be a cryptocurrency
No. Cryptocurrencies are never a solution to anything. Don't lie to yourself (or others).
paying for the physical paper made sense specially for local papers - since relevant local ads/ opportunities were in those papers.
now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.
now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?
internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
I'm not paying for something that is more annoying on mobile than on a notebook or desktop. You want money you should learn how to interact with humans.
For anyone using Kagi, you can set up a custom bang to get you to achieve.is:
https://kagi.com/settings?p=custom_bangs
Then, when I hit a paywall, just prepend "!a " into the URL Bar and boom content!// Yes, I'm aware I could do a bookmarklet or whatever, but the Kagi solution works across all my digital addictions and only has to be configured once.
I wouldn't be suprised if few Americans (proportionately few) read quality news at all. People seem more interested in forming into tribes
Most major news sources now have paywalls. NYT, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters... The legacy broadcast networks just dislike ad blockers, though.
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
good news doesnt pay for itself and neither does bad news
I pay for LWN. I will not pay anything for the garbage called mainstream news.
Of course I don't pay for news. I had a WaPo subscription for a couple years, but I cancelled at some point once I felt Bezos was exercising too much editorial control.
Most of my news comes from aggregators, where every day I click through to many sites that I may have never visited before, and may never visit again. Even sites I will come back to, I might read 3 or 4 articles a month. That's not worth $15/month to me. Even if it was something more reasonable like $2/month (for that quantity of articles), I'm not going to subscribe to a news source (or lots of sources) when I don't actually visit their sites directly; it's like roulette through the aggregators.
If I hit a paywall, I'll mostly just close the tab. Occasionally I'll see if it's on archive.is, if it's a topic I'm really interested in, but if I'm clicking through from something like Google News, odds are there's another site without a paywall that is discussing the same thing.
News agencies should have immediately merged after google was formed to create a counterbalance to google earning all the profits of news and destroying journalism by accident.
They did. Something like 99% of local news outlets are gone or were acquired. Now, the remaining ones are centralized enough to be effective propaganda outlets.
But does it actually matter in terms of what happens in the world? My impression is that people deeply involved in business, politics, etc. do pay for the news, and often pay for multiple subscriptions to things like the NYT, The Economist, Financial Times, etc. and they all seem to be doing just fine financially.
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
I think this would need to be integrated into web browsers as a standard or as an extension. You have a chunk of money you've prepaid to a service, and that service lets you pay (makes you pay?) $0.05 for viewing an article, and remembers that you did it, and the paywall gives you the option to instantly pay with PayService.
Of course then PayService will have surge pricing turned on. And that will be fun. But still - viable?
No shit. Who's going to sign up for every site hacker news links to? It's just impossible.
I pay for sites I read daily, that really mean something to me. Not the ones i get i linked to twice a month.
Micropayments never went anywhere, so how about this? Part of the exorbitant highwayman fees collected by ISP's could buy credits for content creators. A bazillion risky online payments is the problem, not the solution. Breaches are a matter of when, not if.
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
Graphic (imgbb)
https://i.ibb.co/d663L0X/waoi.jpg
so, how does one get to be a "content creator" and how much money to the pay?
If it's going to be per-view, who is going to be fighting ad^H^H view fraud, and what would be their incentive to do so?
If this this going to be fixed amount per content creator, why won't every random person sign up to be one?
I was thinking that you get credits to spend as you choose. Smacks of "free market" :-)
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
So, how does this work concretely?
Is there a HTML snippet/button that each site must embed? If so, it'll be gamed/frauded like crazy, kinda like with ads today. Except unlike ads, there is no incentive to keep fraud away, so all the credits will likely go to people who know how to game the system.
Or is there a page hosted by your ISP where you allocate where the credits go? If so, which fraction of ISP subscribers will be visiting it? And if they do visit it, what are the chances they'll still remember the name of that freelance writer or artist, and not just pick a well-know/popular brand instead?
Or some sort of (again, ISP-provided) browser/browser plugin? If so, how many people would install it? I certainly would not trust _anything_ my ISP provides.
I am not from the US but I can relate. I don't watch the news, I don't want to waste time on it and avoid it as much as possible.
Journalists an news organizations were supposed to be the ones keeping governments in check by digging up the skeletons of those who call themselves leaders today.
Instead a lot of the news is now clickbait and attention seeking and many news organizations are actually financed by governments (BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and so on...) thereby removing any hope of having an unbiased news source because you simply don't bit the hand that feeds you.
If I want to know facts, I'll buy a book about some specific topic/event 10 years after it happens, so that the whole picture can be understood instead of reading editorials and opinions about ongoing events that most likely will be invalidated by the end of the week.
So it is what it is. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Does the rise of paywalls also correlate to an increasingly politically divided public? Echo chambers can be reinforced if wider and balanced voices are behind paywalls
Why would anyone pay for poorly written propaganda?
I'm surprised "other" is only 2%. I bypass most paywalls with a couple of chrome extensions. (bypasspaywalls and the archive.is one).
Who wants to pay to be told what to think?
here is the crux of it, new term, "adverstalking" say you are just a tiny bit dopy and off you game, something interesting, harmless, relaxing, evoctive of some dream, pops up, you click, for one fleeting sub second moment there is a nice layout, plenty of text, pic's ,and the blam, the midway carnival jams back in and picks up where it lost you earlier, and well.at a certain number of repitions, it is a take up arms or walk away decision, and 99.99999999999% walk away, some few go all in on adbusting and firewall penetration as a proxy for squishing heads, but there is no one who does not find themselves shaking a clenched fist, which personaly I channel into my biggest smileyest bright eyed cheshire,I am overjoyed face, double down and find some new way to decouple from the asymetric market and do what I can for myself and the people I have made promises to.
That shows the danger of the clickbait economy.
A weird, provocative headline creates misinformation.
Of the people who try to access the article, only 12% actually read it (1% who pay, and 11% who bypass the paywall). Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
And those are only the ppl that tries to read the news, the majority of ppl doesn't even bother trying to open the news link.
> Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
How is the number '53%', calclated?
Whilst I'm here...
If the 53% got the information [they looked for], and it thereafter WASN'T 'misinformation', would that be considered a good, or a bad, thing?
This is interesting because about next month, I'll start working on paywall as a service to add to Gethly.com platform. There are few challenges with this and I am not surprised we have not seen much traction with this.
Imagine having to pay mostly for propaganda and fake news... No, thank you.
Read the news and you are misinformed, don't read the news and you are uninformed.
We need more paywalls in social media feeds.
My website has a dedicated news portal and we don't have a paywall but a guiltwall where we beg for $3 a month like wikipedia does but less obtrusively (it'll even pop through most adblockers until you manually div block it)
It has been pretty effective.
I've been paying for NYT for five years. I remember the NYT paywall before that. I've been interested in local news so after my 5th hit in recent memory hitting my local newspaper's paywall, I finally bought a year subscription.
On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
The Guardian is the only good US news site, and it doesn't have a paywall.
I donate and reccomend others do as well.
I just wish they had good RSS support
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Suppose this report is more about behaviour and the UX of paywalls rather than subscriptions.
But meanwhile was under impression that digital subscriptions at key players were rising rapidly in the last 3-4 years. Data points like NYT digital subscriptions having banner years up like 1M subscribers over last year, and sub sports site The Athletic turning a profit for the first time since acquisition in 2022.
And what about sources closer to home here like The Verge introducing paid options recently? How's that working out?
Pre-web, when high-quality news seemed to actually exist, and I could just pay for dead-tree editions of that, I did. Probably over $2k/year, in today's money.
Now - most newsrooms have been gutted, once-great magazines like Scientific American are sick parodies of their former selves, supposedly top-tier news sites are full of click-bait drivel, they monetize your personal information every way they can, and cancelling your subscription may require lawyer. I pay $0/year.
Apple News gives me access to most of the popular paywalled news sites at a reasonable price. I think Bloomberg is the only one that’s not covered.
Too bad I still don’t have that service in my European country.
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Most news aren't worth a penny. Whining about people not wanting to pay for your "tomorrow out of-date"-lies is pretty pretentious.
But some are. The problem is people don't know how to figure out which ones are.
Is that a problem with people or with the news itself? And are people incapable or just unwilling to sift through the haystack?
And if it is a problem with the news or people are simply unwilling to sift through the haystack, why should we expect people to pay for that privilege?