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I say pretty much the same thing when charities try to get me to sign up for a monthly payment. If I gave money to every charity that asked for it, I wouldn't

I say pretty much the same thing when charities try to get me to sign up for a monthly payment. If I gave money to every charity that asked for it, I wouldn't have any money left myself. Maybe what we need is a sort of central payment system for news media. Sort of like Spotify for news, except that the outlets keep their own sites and you have a single sign on for all the sites. Your monthly payment would be distributed according to how many articles you read on each site (or some other, more fair metric to reward high quality articles, maybe time spent?).

cbcoutinho 9y ago
There's already an app that I know of that does that - or at least close enough. Blendle is an app where you pay per article you read, paid through your in-app account. My uncle uses it to selectively read articles from some large publications. I think one downside is that those publications don't let you sign in on their systems, so you have to rely on the availability of the articles through a third-party. I agree that it would be great to have publications allow you to sign in through a third party system instead of their own. Maybe we can hope for one in the future?
- geraltofrivia 9y ago
  Also, while I'm sure it's there for practical reasons, the per article price makes me very uncomfortable. There's this split second decision that I make as open an article - is it worth my time? To ask "if it's worth my money?" before every read seems less than ideal. For instance if my music service asked me a penny for every song I play, I'd probably end up listening to a lot less songs than I do.
  - stiller 9y ago
    Blendle offers instant refunds for this reason.
- stiller 9y ago
  Blendle offers this service, it's called Blendle Button: https://pay-docs.blendle.io/ https://pay-docs.blendle.io/
lifeformed 9y ago
I wish I could just pay the sites I go to the equivalent of what they'd get from me in ads. How much could that be worth per month? Like $10? I'm sure loads of people would be willing to pay that to support and get ad-free content from all the sites they read. There's just no easy way to do that.
- lozenge 9y ago
  There is one called Google Contributor.
sleavey 9y ago
I think charities also become less frugal when they have many monthly subscribers. If they know they are getting a large repeat income every month, they will hire a chief executive with a big salary, and generally become inefficient with doners' money. If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. I think the same is true for online news.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. They also have to repeatedly spend money on fundraising. Monthly donations are good for charities, just like monthly subscriptions are good for software businesses - they have a very high LTV if churn is properly controlled and make the finances of the organisation far more predictable.
  - sleavey 9y ago
    Many still spend vast sums on fundraising even with healthy recurring donations - it just means they spend more on prime-time TV advertisements. Charities should not be trying to sell their services along side perfumes, car insurance and supermarket advertisements - single-use "things" - they should be going for the long term organic growth by fostering a great reputation for efficiency ("good done" per unit currency).
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      People selling perfume and car insurance clearly believe that prime-time advertising is cost-effective. Why shouldn't charities use the same media? If I give $1 to a charity, I'm more than happy for them to spend it on fundraising if they're getting $1.05 ROI. That's a fantastically effective use of my money, as long as the $1.05 gets used effectively to deliver on their charitable purpose. There's probably a good game-theoretic argument against fundraising activity if charitable donations are zero-sum, but I've yet to see any evidence that they are.
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
Human nature rears its head.. cant we optimize this, by breaking long articles up in thousand small ones. We are going to make soo much money. Hey, HN- Reader who suggested this, can you make a FlyWeigth implementation that treats every letter as a article?

cbcoutinho 9y ago

There's already an app that I know of that does that - or at least close enough. Blendle is an app where you pay per article you read, paid through your in-app account. My uncle uses it to selectively read articles from some large publications. I think one downside is that those publications don't let you sign in on their systems, so you have to rely on the availability of the articles through a third-party. I agree that it would be great to have publications allow you to sign in through a third party system instead of their own. Maybe we can hope for one in the future?

geraltofrivia 9y ago
Also, while I'm sure it's there for practical reasons, the per article price makes me very uncomfortable. There's this split second decision that I make as open an article - is it worth my time? To ask "if it's worth my money?" before every read seems less than ideal. For instance if my music service asked me a penny for every song I play, I'd probably end up listening to a lot less songs than I do.
- stiller 9y ago
  Blendle offers instant refunds for this reason.
stiller 9y ago
Blendle offers this service, it's called Blendle Button: https://pay-docs.blendle.io/ https://pay-docs.blendle.io/

lifeformed 9y ago

I wish I could just pay the sites I go to the equivalent of what they'd get from me in ads. How much could that be worth per month? Like $10? I'm sure loads of people would be willing to pay that to support and get ad-free content from all the sites they read. There's just no easy way to do that.

lozenge 9y ago
There is one called Google Contributor.

sleavey 9y ago

I think charities also become less frugal when they have many monthly subscribers. If they know they are getting a large repeat income every month, they will hire a chief executive with a big salary, and generally become inefficient with doners' money. If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. I think the same is true for online news.

jdietrich 9y ago
>If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. They also have to repeatedly spend money on fundraising. Monthly donations are good for charities, just like monthly subscriptions are good for software businesses - they have a very high LTV if churn is properly controlled and make the finances of the organisation far more predictable.
- sleavey 9y ago
  Many still spend vast sums on fundraising even with healthy recurring donations - it just means they spend more on prime-time TV advertisements. Charities should not be trying to sell their services along side perfumes, car insurance and supermarket advertisements - single-use "things" - they should be going for the long term organic growth by fostering a great reputation for efficiency ("good done" per unit currency).
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    People selling perfume and car insurance clearly believe that prime-time advertising is cost-effective. Why shouldn't charities use the same media? If I give $1 to a charity, I'm more than happy for them to spend it on fundraising if they're getting $1.05 ROI. That's a fantastically effective use of my money, as long as the $1.05 gets used effectively to deliver on their charitable purpose. There's probably a good game-theoretic argument against fundraising activity if charitable donations are zero-sum, but I've yet to see any evidence that they are.

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

Human nature rears its head.. cant we optimize this, by breaking long articles up in thousand small ones. We are going to make soo much money. Hey, HN- Reader who suggested this, can you make a FlyWeigth implementation that treats every letter as a article?