5 ms·

We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kar

We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is. The reason the media is so bad is because of economics, people have this bad habit of wanting to live in houses and feed themselves.

habosa 10y ago
Check out Blendle. It's pay-per-article news from all the big sources. NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist, etc. I use it a lot, paying between $0.09 and $0.59 per article. And at the bottom of each one is a "refund" button that's no questions asked.
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  Paying per article would appear to me to be too much friction, I want something where I pay $10 a month and say 70% of my subscription is apportioned among the articles I read and maybe even a supplement patreon style addon or something in this vein. The trick to keeping me paying is to make me forget I am paying once you have convinced me. "NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist" big journalist engines like these are part of the problem, even with this new style market place we wont fix the real problem until the service is cutting cheques directly to the authors.
- lint_roller 10y ago
  I really like Blendle and think it's great for people like me that consume a lot of high quality journalism and are willing to pay for it. The big question in my mind is how it will, or if it intends to, achieve mass appeal and bring high quality journalism directly to all as it does to us.
nosuchthing 10y ago
Brave browser will be including a micropayments system soon! https://blog.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-deal-for-publishers/ https://blog.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-d...
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  Convice people twice? Switch browser and use micro payments? I wouldnt want that funnel.
bradleyjg 10y ago
Are there Spotify success stories? Not as advertising for concerts or merchandise, but musical groups that make a decent living via it and its similar competitors?
Disruptive_Dave 10y ago
That would be more along the lines of Patreon of media (which already kinda exists) vs. Spotify, which is most definitely not direct payments to creators.
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  The problem with Patreon style is you have to convert every single transaction between Author and User. By direct payments I mean, Platform -> Author not Platform -> NYT (99% of the profits) -> Author (salary)
ProblemFactory 10y ago
I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics. Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation. So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user revenue would be much higher per view. Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen. So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.
  - ProblemFactory 10y ago
    I don't think that would be enough. How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then: * I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total, * I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing, * The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population. So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today. But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?
josu 10y ago
Steem[1] offers an interesting solution. [1] https://steem.io/ https://steem.io/
prawn 10y ago
Isn't an existing newspaper or media company doing that already to some extent, aggregating different types of media for a common fee? You can read the sections of a newspaper you want, and the company apportions salaries to content producers based on what seems to get the most interest.

habosa 10y ago

Check out Blendle. It's pay-per-article news from all the big sources. NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist, etc. I use it a lot, paying between $0.09 and $0.59 per article. And at the bottom of each one is a "refund" button that's no questions asked.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Paying per article would appear to me to be too much friction, I want something where I pay $10 a month and say 70% of my subscription is apportioned among the articles I read and maybe even a supplement patreon style addon or something in this vein. The trick to keeping me paying is to make me forget I am paying once you have convinced me. "NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist" big journalist engines like these are part of the problem, even with this new style market place we wont fix the real problem until the service is cutting cheques directly to the authors.
lint_roller 10y ago
I really like Blendle and think it's great for people like me that consume a lot of high quality journalism and are willing to pay for it. The big question in my mind is how it will, or if it intends to, achieve mass appeal and bring high quality journalism directly to all as it does to us.

nosuchthing 10y ago

Brave browser will be including a micropayments system soon! https://blog.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-deal-for-publishers/ https://blog.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-d...

Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Convice people twice? Switch browser and use micro payments? I wouldnt want that funnel.

bradleyjg 10y ago

Are there Spotify success stories? Not as advertising for concerts or merchandise, but musical groups that make a decent living via it and its similar competitors?

Disruptive_Dave 10y ago

That would be more along the lines of Patreon of media (which already kinda exists) vs. Spotify, which is most definitely not direct payments to creators.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago
The problem with Patreon style is you have to convert every single transaction between Author and User. By direct payments I mean, Platform -> Author not Platform -> NYT (99% of the profits) -> Author (salary)

ProblemFactory 10y ago

I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics. Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation. So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago
The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user revenue would be much higher per view. Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen. So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.
- ProblemFactory 10y ago
  I don't think that would be enough. How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then: * I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total, * I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing, * The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population. So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today. But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?

josu 10y ago

Steem[1] offers an interesting solution. [1] https://steem.io/ https://steem.io/

prawn 10y ago

Isn't an existing newspaper or media company doing that already to some extent, aggregating different types of media for a common fee? You can read the sections of a newspaper you want, and the company apportions salaries to content producers based on what seems to get the most interest.