7 ms·

I always imagined that some website/mobile app/service would appear that would let you buy subscriptions for access to multiple publishers at once. I think peop

by mevile 10y ago

I always imagined that some website/mobile app/service would appear that would let you buy subscriptions for access to multiple publishers at once. I think people have a hard time spending $5 here a month $10 there a month, but would spend maybe $49 for a range of access to sites. I don't know why something like that hasn't taken off yet. You could pick the sites you want access to or they could do a pay out based on where you went and what you read.

iLoch 10y ago
Google Contributor would be your primary competition. I think typical users just aren't ready to pay for access to regular websites.
- mevile 10y ago
  This only works for sites that show google ads. This is not a subscription service and probably doesn't pay sites much as I am signed up for this and I pay maybe $6-$9 a month and I spend a lot of time online. Google Contributors is a way for readers to opt out of ads, it's not a way to fund sites other than to maybe opt to whitelist in an adblocker. But it's not a lot of money.
techsupporter 10y ago
I'd love to have something like that. We already have Spotify (et al) for music. PressReader for newspapers. If the music industry can be dragged kicking and screaming into the bulk buying model, why can't online publishers?
Mz 10y ago
You can also just do a tip jar model or patreon. So far, for me, the tip jar has been more successful than ads or Patreon (though I am new to Patreon, so, time will tell). I would be happy to get rid of ads altogether (with the exception of one site, for REASONS) if I thought that would drive up tips. But I have experimented a bit and it didn't seem to drive up tips. Then, whenever I read these discussions, there is a great deal of vitriol about the evil of ads, yet, most people don't actually want to pay for content. They just want it free. When you suggest this is a broken model and content producers also deserve compensation, the answer is typically "not my problem," basically. As a content producer, I find it enormously frustrating to read some of the awful things that get said. It reminds me of the line in All in the Family where Archie says men are supposed to have experience before marriage and women are not and his daughter asks "Who are they supposed to get their experience with?" My snarky son's answer: Elderly widows should be deflowering young men. It fits all the parameters of the expectations while horrifying most people. An awful lot of people are only thinking about "I don't want ads" and that's it. They basically want it for free, then don't think about what that means for the big picture. /rambling vent
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I don't mind the ads up to a point. For example, I buy "Mopar Muscle" for the ads, not the articles. I'd buy computer mags (yes, I'm dating myself) for the ads as much as the articles, too. The Yellow Pages (I'm really old) were useful for the ads. Not all advertising is objectionable.
  - Mz 10y ago
    If you know of a better means than google ads to do advertisements for a one person shop that isn't going to take enormous time away from producing content, I am all ears.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      We don't use ads for the D programming language. What we do, and I've done in the past, is write articles about programming that are interesting in their own right, and that happen to use D: http://digitalmars.com/articles/ http://digitalmars.com/articles/ Pretty much all programming products, even free ones, operate this way. Much of the content you see on Hacker News, and on reddit/r/programming, is of this form. There are TV shows that do the same thing, such as "Detroit Muscle". Each show is about how to do a repair/customization job on a car, and various tools and products are used to do it (and the makers of those tools and products pay for the show). Tupperware parties are another example of this sort of thing. It's like having a free cooking class where you show people how to cook with butter, and you're in the butter business. The hit TV show "This Old House" was all paid for by the products and tools used in the show. It didn't look like advertising, but that's exactly what it was. And it works, and people love the show (I loved it, too). I.e. organic marketing.
      - Mz 10y ago
        That is basically my plan for my next website. But some problem spaces are not served well by that model. Also, I think there is a substantial learning curve for doing something like that well and not being borderline con artist.
specializeded 10y ago
Have you tried Blendle? It's exactly as you say towards the end, articles are ~20 cents each with lots of good publishers. I've been using them since they launched in the US and couldn't be happier, they even offer refunds for clickbait!
- countryqt30 10y ago
  How have you heard about Blendle?
dcw303 10y ago
I'd be interested in something that was the web site equivalent of Spotify, but not if it was HTML HBO. I think the reason the online music subscriptions have done so well is that their catalogs span multiple publishers, and customers really don't want to subscribe to multiple services. While there's minor differences, you pretty much can get access to any music you can think of. Otherwise you just end up with some crummy bundling service where you pay a premium for a few things you are interested in, and waste money on the rest of the junk.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I started subscribing and paying for Blendle about a month ago. Their service shows me article summaries from otherwise expensive publications like The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Economist, etc. I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements. I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for. I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  I've just started trialing Blendle, it looks very promising although the prices feel slightly higher than I'd be happy with and I'm not sure how I feel about the browsing/article discovery interface. But in principle I'm a huge fan of micropayments for journalism, so I'm going to keep using it for a while and see how it goes!
  - mark_l_watson 10y ago
    I tend to only read a few articles a week on Blendle so itt is not expensive, butt yes, for a 'news junkie' who reads news everyday it could get expensive.
- ac29 10y ago
  >I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements. Thats at least an order of magnitude more expensive than its worth (to me), and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more than they would make from ads. As an ad-blocking user who reads a lot of online content, I am in favor in the pay for content model, but it has to come at an appropriate price. A couple cents per reading minute is the high end of what most news/magazine/blog type writing is worth to me.
  - guelo 10y ago
    Pre-internet you could buy the Sunday edition of your city's newspaper for 50 cents. This included dozens of in-depth articles. So yea, probably on the order of a penny per article. Though it was heavily subsidized by car dealer advertisements and the classifieds.
WalterBright 10y ago
I probably wouldn't mind paying for the online newspaper an article at a time, like a nickel. For some reason, the idea of a subscription just irks me - it makes me feel guilty when I don't read the paper, because hey I paid for it.
BillyParadise 10y ago
It already exists... in the world of porn, though.
Untit1ed 10y ago
Sounds very much like what Brendan Eich's trying to do with Brave.
nabla9 10y ago
The reason why it has not taken off is because success depends strongly from network effect. Starting small provides no value for subscribers. What we need is subscription payment service network __protocol__. It should be protocol because we don't want to give monopoly for single organization. You pay something lke $5 -$60 per month for one company of your choosing. Whenever you visit a web page and pay, consume content or tip, your browser leaves an anonymous authenticated tokens/coins/whatever behind. Services can turn these tokens into money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
zuzun 10y ago
There's no reason to believe that this would get rid of ads in the long run. Once the big publishers have established such a payment model, what keeps them from adding ads on top of it? You pay $5 for printed newspapers and magazines, do they come ad-free?
tomaskafka 10y ago
Piano Media tried this in central Europe and folded. Reason as I understand it: downward spiral. Publishers of worthy content learn to make people pay for content, and then go off-platform once they have large enough audience to keep the whole profit. Weaker publications stay in a bundle, but at that point not many people want to pay. Is this a future of Spotify model as well? Taylor Swift or Adele are now powerful enough to try to break away. (use Google translate) https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-splnil-svoju-misiu https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-spln...
mcintyre1994 10y ago
texture.com looks quite promising, they cover well known magazines (Time/New Yorker/Forbes etc.) I don't know anything else, I just heard them advertised on a podcast - US/Canada only for some reason so I can't check it out.
xanderstrike 10y ago
I like OkCupid's solution to this problem a lot. You pay $5 once and they never serve you an ad again. If you think about it, $5 is probably more than they could ever hope to make serving ads to a single occasional user.
TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
Sounds like the start of cable: pay a monthly fee, and get the programming without ads. That lasted, what? Months? And we got the ads anyway.

by mevile 10y ago

iLoch 10y ago

Google Contributor would be your primary competition. I think typical users just aren't ready to pay for access to regular websites.

mevile 10y ago
This only works for sites that show google ads. This is not a subscription service and probably doesn't pay sites much as I am signed up for this and I pay maybe $6-$9 a month and I spend a lot of time online. Google Contributors is a way for readers to opt out of ads, it's not a way to fund sites other than to maybe opt to whitelist in an adblocker. But it's not a lot of money.

techsupporter 10y ago

I'd love to have something like that. We already have Spotify (et al) for music. PressReader for newspapers. If the music industry can be dragged kicking and screaming into the bulk buying model, why can't online publishers?

Mz 10y ago

You can also just do a tip jar model or patreon. So far, for me, the tip jar has been more successful than ads or Patreon (though I am new to Patreon, so, time will tell). I would be happy to get rid of ads altogether (with the exception of one site, for REASONS) if I thought that would drive up tips. But I have experimented a bit and it didn't seem to drive up tips. Then, whenever I read these discussions, there is a great deal of vitriol about the evil of ads, yet, most people don't actually want to pay for content. They just want it free. When you suggest this is a broken model and content producers also deserve compensation, the answer is typically "not my problem," basically. As a content producer, I find it enormously frustrating to read some of the awful things that get said. It reminds me of the line in All in the Family where Archie says men are supposed to have experience before marriage and women are not and his daughter asks "Who are they supposed to get their experience with?" My snarky son's answer: Elderly widows should be deflowering young men. It fits all the parameters of the expectations while horrifying most people. An awful lot of people are only thinking about "I don't want ads" and that's it. They basically want it for free, then don't think about what that means for the big picture. /rambling vent

WalterBright 10y ago
I don't mind the ads up to a point. For example, I buy "Mopar Muscle" for the ads, not the articles. I'd buy computer mags (yes, I'm dating myself) for the ads as much as the articles, too. The Yellow Pages (I'm really old) were useful for the ads. Not all advertising is objectionable.
- Mz 10y ago
  If you know of a better means than google ads to do advertisements for a one person shop that isn't going to take enormous time away from producing content, I am all ears.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    We don't use ads for the D programming language. What we do, and I've done in the past, is write articles about programming that are interesting in their own right, and that happen to use D: http://digitalmars.com/articles/ http://digitalmars.com/articles/ Pretty much all programming products, even free ones, operate this way. Much of the content you see on Hacker News, and on reddit/r/programming, is of this form. There are TV shows that do the same thing, such as "Detroit Muscle". Each show is about how to do a repair/customization job on a car, and various tools and products are used to do it (and the makers of those tools and products pay for the show). Tupperware parties are another example of this sort of thing. It's like having a free cooking class where you show people how to cook with butter, and you're in the butter business. The hit TV show "This Old House" was all paid for by the products and tools used in the show. It didn't look like advertising, but that's exactly what it was. And it works, and people love the show (I loved it, too). I.e. organic marketing.
    - Mz 10y ago
      That is basically my plan for my next website. But some problem spaces are not served well by that model. Also, I think there is a substantial learning curve for doing something like that well and not being borderline con artist.

specializeded 10y ago

Have you tried Blendle? It's exactly as you say towards the end, articles are ~20 cents each with lots of good publishers. I've been using them since they launched in the US and couldn't be happier, they even offer refunds for clickbait!

countryqt30 10y ago
How have you heard about Blendle?

dcw303 10y ago

I'd be interested in something that was the web site equivalent of Spotify, but not if it was HTML HBO. I think the reason the online music subscriptions have done so well is that their catalogs span multiple publishers, and customers really don't want to subscribe to multiple services. While there's minor differences, you pretty much can get access to any music you can think of. Otherwise you just end up with some crummy bundling service where you pay a premium for a few things you are interested in, and waste money on the rest of the junk.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I started subscribing and paying for Blendle about a month ago. Their service shows me article summaries from otherwise expensive publications like The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Economist, etc. I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements. I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for. I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.

ajdlinux 10y ago
I've just started trialing Blendle, it looks very promising although the prices feel slightly higher than I'd be happy with and I'm not sure how I feel about the browsing/article discovery interface. But in principle I'm a huge fan of micropayments for journalism, so I'm going to keep using it for a while and see how it goes!
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  I tend to only read a few articles a week on Blendle so itt is not expensive, butt yes, for a 'news junkie' who reads news everyday it could get expensive.
ac29 10y ago
>I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements. Thats at least an order of magnitude more expensive than its worth (to me), and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more than they would make from ads. As an ad-blocking user who reads a lot of online content, I am in favor in the pay for content model, but it has to come at an appropriate price. A couple cents per reading minute is the high end of what most news/magazine/blog type writing is worth to me.
- guelo 10y ago
  Pre-internet you could buy the Sunday edition of your city's newspaper for 50 cents. This included dozens of in-depth articles. So yea, probably on the order of a penny per article. Though it was heavily subsidized by car dealer advertisements and the classifieds.

WalterBright 10y ago

I probably wouldn't mind paying for the online newspaper an article at a time, like a nickel. For some reason, the idea of a subscription just irks me - it makes me feel guilty when I don't read the paper, because hey I paid for it.

BillyParadise 10y ago

It already exists... in the world of porn, though.

Untit1ed 10y ago

Sounds very much like what Brendan Eich's trying to do with Brave.

nabla9 10y ago

The reason why it has not taken off is because success depends strongly from network effect. Starting small provides no value for subscribers. What we need is subscription payment service network __protocol__. It should be protocol because we don't want to give monopoly for single organization. You pay something lke $5 -$60 per month for one company of your choosing. Whenever you visit a web page and pay, consume content or tip, your browser leaves an anonymous authenticated tokens/coins/whatever behind. Services can turn these tokens into money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

zuzun 10y ago

There's no reason to believe that this would get rid of ads in the long run. Once the big publishers have established such a payment model, what keeps them from adding ads on top of it? You pay $5 for printed newspapers and magazines, do they come ad-free?

tomaskafka 10y ago

Piano Media tried this in central Europe and folded. Reason as I understand it: downward spiral. Publishers of worthy content learn to make people pay for content, and then go off-platform once they have large enough audience to keep the whole profit. Weaker publications stay in a bundle, but at that point not many people want to pay. Is this a future of Spotify model as well? Taylor Swift or Adele are now powerful enough to try to break away. (use Google translate) https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-splnil-svoju-misiu https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-spln...

mcintyre1994 10y ago

texture.com looks quite promising, they cover well known magazines (Time/New Yorker/Forbes etc.) I don't know anything else, I just heard them advertised on a podcast - US/Canada only for some reason so I can't check it out.

xanderstrike 10y ago

I like OkCupid's solution to this problem a lot. You pay $5 once and they never serve you an ad again. If you think about it, $5 is probably more than they could ever hope to make serving ads to a single occasional user.

TheRealDunkirk 10y ago

Sounds like the start of cable: pay a monthly fee, and get the programming without ads. That lasted, what? Months? And we got the ads anyway.