4 ms·

A lot of people not in the Hacker News/tech world will definitely won't want to pay for internet content. People grew up with the internet being free, which alo

by sna1l 10y ago

A lot of people not in the Hacker News/tech world will definitely won't want to pay for internet content. People grew up with the internet being free, which alone will make most people extremely hesitant to pay for content. People LIKE the free crap content on the web. There is a reason websites like Buzzfeed, upworthy, <fill in click baity website here> have become popular.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jakub_g 10y ago
I grew up accustomed to not paying for stuff because 1) it was free 2) I had no money. Now with the quality of stuff going downway spiral and my dev salary allowing me to pay, I could be potentially paying for quality content if a good, seamless micropayments standard emerged. I think ideal smooth, frictionless micropayments solution could be integrated on the browser level. It is hard a problem due to UX considerations, fraud (clickjacking) etc. but imagine this: There's a UI control built-in with the browser that is a button like 'pay 0.05$ for this article' (amount and some payment metadata embedded in the HTML page). The payment method is controlled somehow by the browser. On Android it caould be maybe integrated with Play Store payments, which already allows me e.g. to add a fee to my ISP phone/internet invoice. For security, the payments would not be instant, but require an interaction with a browser built-in special page that lists to whom you pay how much and make you verify/correct it ('will pay 0.30c to NYT for this and that article and 0.15c to WSJ for that, proceed?'). You will get a notification from browser once in a while. With such model it is voluntary micropayments though which may not seduce big players though.
- x0x0 10y ago
  $.05 as the author mentions is a ludicrous sum; less than a penny (your 0.3 cent or 0.15c!) is a laughably small sum, and I doubt sustainable (it doesn't take much fraud to eat all your profits when you make so little per user. Think Google's customer service is horrible? Just wait...) If a customer service agent costs $25/hour all in (terrible wages, desk, taxes), every hour they clock in consumes the profit from 500 articles at $0.05 per, even before any other costs. Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day? They certainly don't want to cannibalize their subscribers already paying $0.60/day. And note that keeping eg a reporter in Egypt is expensive. Further, even if you reply that they're only getting 5 cents for the ads you see (they get more: probably $100+ cpms for pmp ads), they can't afford to trade one-for-one: the people most likely to pay not to see ads are often the ones who advertisers most want to advertise to. ie people with disposable income. I'd imagine the NYT would need $2+ per article for the economics to work for them. And quite possibly much more.
  - douche 10y ago
    $2 an article would be ludicrous, when you can get the dead-tree version of the whole paper delivered to your doorstep for a dollar a day.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      You conflate a subscriber who pays $450/year with a person buying a one-off with no further obligation. A profitable business will charge them wildly different unit prices. Much like itunes will sell you a song for $1.29 each and spotify will charge you $5/mo for unlimited music. I'd charge $5+ for the article. Again, you also have to avoid cannibalizing subscription revenue.
      - douche 10y ago
        It still doesn't really make any sense. I bought the Grantland Quarterly (RIP, Grantland), for $20, and it's a hard-bound book with ~35 articles in it. $.57 per article, and that's high-quality, longform pieces. $5 will almost buy a paperback book of several hundred pages that will keep you occupied for at least a day or two. Text is cheap
        x0x0 10y ago
        Not everyone can be a dilettante's hobby project financially supported by espn. You don't think Grantland actually made money do you?
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day?" I'd wager most people who read the NYT's online content aren't subscribers. It's possible that they could generate more money by charging a smaller per article cost compared to what they generate from $0.60 per subscriber.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
It's silly to say that the only choices are "only ads pay for content" and "everyone pays the same for content". That's a silly level of reductionism and simplicity which was an outdated model even a century ago, and is absolutely not the way things work today. There are tons of content creators today, mostly artists, who nevertheless give away their work "for free". It's not rocket science how they do this, there are numerous different models for making it work. And some of them are millionaires. At the simplest you can use a pledge drive model, or patreon, where folks who want to pay can and folks who don't or can't pay don't. This has kept tons of public radio and tv stations in business for decades, for example. Another model is to do up-front crowd funding for projects. There are tons of these sorts of projects where the end production is available to everyone for free. There's little reason why journalists can't rely on such models (as indeed some have already). Those are just some among many business models, some of which are already being employed by content creators on the internet.

by sna1l 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jakub_g 10y ago

I grew up accustomed to not paying for stuff because 1) it was free 2) I had no money. Now with the quality of stuff going downway spiral and my dev salary allowing me to pay, I could be potentially paying for quality content if a good, seamless micropayments standard emerged. I think ideal smooth, frictionless micropayments solution could be integrated on the browser level. It is hard a problem due to UX considerations, fraud (clickjacking) etc. but imagine this: There's a UI control built-in with the browser that is a button like 'pay 0.05$ for this article' (amount and some payment metadata embedded in the HTML page). The payment method is controlled somehow by the browser. On Android it caould be maybe integrated with Play Store payments, which already allows me e.g. to add a fee to my ISP phone/internet invoice. For security, the payments would not be instant, but require an interaction with a browser built-in special page that lists to whom you pay how much and make you verify/correct it ('will pay 0.30c to NYT for this and that article and 0.15c to WSJ for that, proceed?'). You will get a notification from browser once in a while. With such model it is voluntary micropayments though which may not seduce big players though.

x0x0 10y ago
$.05 as the author mentions is a ludicrous sum; less than a penny (your 0.3 cent or 0.15c!) is a laughably small sum, and I doubt sustainable (it doesn't take much fraud to eat all your profits when you make so little per user. Think Google's customer service is horrible? Just wait...) If a customer service agent costs $25/hour all in (terrible wages, desk, taxes), every hour they clock in consumes the profit from 500 articles at $0.05 per, even before any other costs. Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day? They certainly don't want to cannibalize their subscribers already paying $0.60/day. And note that keeping eg a reporter in Egypt is expensive. Further, even if you reply that they're only getting 5 cents for the ads you see (they get more: probably $100+ cpms for pmp ads), they can't afford to trade one-for-one: the people most likely to pay not to see ads are often the ones who advertisers most want to advertise to. ie people with disposable income. I'd imagine the NYT would need $2+ per article for the economics to work for them. And quite possibly much more.
- douche 10y ago
  $2 an article would be ludicrous, when you can get the dead-tree version of the whole paper delivered to your doorstep for a dollar a day.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    You conflate a subscriber who pays $450/year with a person buying a one-off with no further obligation. A profitable business will charge them wildly different unit prices. Much like itunes will sell you a song for $1.29 each and spotify will charge you $5/mo for unlimited music. I'd charge $5+ for the article. Again, you also have to avoid cannibalizing subscription revenue.
    - douche 10y ago
      It still doesn't really make any sense. I bought the Grantland Quarterly (RIP, Grantland), for $20, and it's a hard-bound book with ~35 articles in it. $.57 per article, and that's high-quality, longform pieces. $5 will almost buy a paperback book of several hundred pages that will keep you occupied for at least a day or two. Text is cheap
      - x0x0 10y ago
        Not everyone can be a dilettante's hobby project financially supported by espn. You don't think Grantland actually made money do you?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day?" I'd wager most people who read the NYT's online content aren't subscribers. It's possible that they could generate more money by charging a smaller per article cost compared to what they generate from $0.60 per subscriber.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

It's silly to say that the only choices are "only ads pay for content" and "everyone pays the same for content". That's a silly level of reductionism and simplicity which was an outdated model even a century ago, and is absolutely not the way things work today. There are tons of content creators today, mostly artists, who nevertheless give away their work "for free". It's not rocket science how they do this, there are numerous different models for making it work. And some of them are millionaires. At the simplest you can use a pledge drive model, or patreon, where folks who want to pay can and folks who don't or can't pay don't. This has kept tons of public radio and tv stations in business for decades, for example. Another model is to do up-front crowd funding for projects. There are tons of these sorts of projects where the end production is available to everyone for free. There's little reason why journalists can't rely on such models (as indeed some have already). Those are just some among many business models, some of which are already being employed by content creators on the internet.