5 ms·

Some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three?

21 points by jedwhite 8y ago

happertiger 8y ago
None of this moves the needle on anything that matters to me. I don’t want to pay another subscription for yet another business that doesn’t offer material benefit. I love the long form, but I want specific benefits that matter more than as a matter of discourse. News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will. Ok. Why should I?
tomhoward 8y ago
There's a newish product out of Australia I just heard of called Inkl, that's seeking to solve this problem with a bundled subscription that includes the Economist, the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Independent, and a premium option that includes WSJ and Barrons. https://www.inkl.com/ https://www.inkl.com/ Don't know how well they're doing or how good the product actually is, but it seems like the right approach. I don't have any affiliation with the company, but am acquainted with a guy who's advising them on marketing/growth, which is how I heard about it.
ggm 8y ago
Nope. I pay one (the guardian) and I graze the rest because they're very expensive by comparison for at best no better and often worse content for me. I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. I don't want to live in a bubble but I can see my on bias is quite strong in this: maybe I just recognize editorial markup more clearly in what I pay for. I'd rather pay another European or Asian source than the exemplar rates in this article.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  Both sides are 90% opinion 10% fact. We can just see the opinions more clearly in the side we disagree with. Personally I'd much rather subscribe to a news source that just provided the facts, but I don't know of one. I used to read the independent and the telegraph in the UK for a slight-left and slight-right perspective, but they've both drifted further apart in recent years.
  - ggm 8y ago
    I still rate the ABC and SBS (Australian) and the BBC for foreign news. The BBC fell off it's pedestal over Scots independence and brexit pretty badly and the ABC has undergone too much Google-following change to infotainment. SBS is underfunded but has a huge following of ex-patriates who lie both sides of most other economies politics and I suspect keep them honest.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. That's a great practice. But even better to step beyond both "oppositional" sides, and check alternative sources that are not partisan of the two parties that alternate in power in each country.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    My concern about all these pay per view plans in this thread is that they will discourage cross pollination. We will be not just learning about other perspectives but paying for them.
esotericn 8y ago
I think it makes sense to distinguish between "news sites". Can the Financial Times, Economist, Bloomberg and trade publications survive on a paywall model? Probably - their readers likely consider them as operational expenses. But I don't see how the traditional newspapers can maintain their advantage going forward. If we develop a browser model that allows them to make money via micropayments, convince people to sign up for it, and they actually use it, some of them _might_ survive. I think there's a lot of mental gymnastics happening here though - ultimately I think they're gone unless outside funding keeps them alive (e.g. they essentially become propaganda).
AndrewDucker 8y ago
This is why I think the best way forward is for groups of news sites to come together with a single paid login to gain access to them, and then profit-share based on percentage of views each site gets. Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.
- krackers 8y ago
  Isn't this just cable bundles all over again?
  - phil_folrida 8y ago
    It is. Isn't it the idea behind Brave. Or maybe I didn't understood it, looking at browser's market share, looks like I was not the only one to not get it. We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.
- chki 8y ago
  That seems like a good idea, although it is maybe difficult to bring it into reality. Only thing I would change is not basing the percentage on the number of views because this will (just like ads) make an incentive for newspapers to promote clickbait. Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints. Then you have the problem of speedreaders like me vs slow-readers plus that it's still not tracking free.
    - 8y ago
harias 8y ago
I would really like to see Wikinews succeeding. HN community can help it succeed in tech if we start contributing.
- jmcgough 8y ago
  I just can't see wikinews doing serious investigative journalism, though, which is one of the major reasons that news corps like WaPo are worth supporting. A talented journalist can work on a major story for months (like in the Theranos bombshell), and you need to be paying someone a salary as well as money for flights/hotels. Wikinews is a nice idea, but the vast majority of its news is just wikipedia-style sourcing of other news organizations. The original research it does seems to be mostly Q&A interviews.
davedx 8y ago
I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean, and they both do great journalism that I want to support (IMO). I would definitely pay for a third if I thought it was worth it to me. I can imagine if I was in finance I’d pay for FT or something.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean, Well, not that different. Both are parts of the same echo bubble (the other-side analogue would be following e.g. Fox News and Daily Mail -- either bundles not only fail to get the other-side perspective, but miss tons of nuance not available to neither one or the other "mandatory" side of establishment sources).
- justincormack 8y ago
  The FT is a great general paper, I pay for it although I no longer work in finance. Probably the best UK paper.
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    I don’t work in finance exactly, but only pay for them. But I would rather pay per article over several websites instead anyway.
TorKlingberg 8y ago
Someone needs to make a "Netflix for news", where you pay one monthly subscription and get access to almost everything. Then distribute the money to the sites I visit, just like Netflix or Spotify. I see two challenges: * Getting news sites on board. The more "premium" sites may be unwilling to give away access for cheap, but in general news orgs are desperate for a reliable income stream. Maybe a 20/articles per month limit would be fine for some sites. * Unlike Netflix etc, it needs to work in more than one app: Each news sites own app, in the browser, and the mini-browsers inside social media apps. I don't want to type in passwords all the time just to read an article someone shared. Apple is in a great position to do this. They have the experience with iTunes/Apple Music, and they have the leverage to make one subscription work in all apps. I just hope they don't intentionally break it on Android or Windows.
CalRobert 8y ago
The Guardian talks about their experience here: https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-milestone https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-mi... It's interesting inasmuch as the Guardian is trying to be reader-supported without a paywall. You can be a "supporter" for €50 per year which, if I think of it as buying a reporter a pint once a month, is basically nothing. Of course, it's worth remembering that people on HN complain pretty loudly if a paywalled link is shared. Have we considered revisiting that policy given the vulnerabilities in primarily-advertiser-funded news sources?
z3t4 8y ago
We need a micro-payment system for the web! So that you can pay per article. Versus pulling up my credit card, using the banks second factor authorization, and meanwhile knowing that 75% of the transaction is banking fees. Paypal could have solved the problem, but instead choose short term profits and to sale out, instead of long term - changing the world.
alangibson 8y ago
For years I've been thinking about a kind of loose bundling service where subscriber would pay like 10 per month, but for no particular bundle of sites. The business would then go out to sites that users are consuming and basically say 'hey, we've got money for you'. They put some tracking code on their site and start getting paid based on how much the services users consume. It's sort of a push-based Patreon. Never did it because the idea never sat right with me.
cornedor 8y ago
Blendle is a great alternative, you can buy seperate articles for a few cents from a lot of different papers. It's a Dutch company, and they have almost all Dutch newspapers, but they also have American news papers https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/ https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/
- loganwedwards 8y ago
  I will second Blendle. I found it via HN recently and signed up. Being USA-based, I found that NYT and Economist are both available, which are value-adds for me. For example, I paid $0.19 to read a short NYT article, which seemed fair to me.
blablabla123 8y ago
Actually this has also something good. There is so much redundant news, sometimes the Reuters messages are just copy&pasted. IMHO the only reasonable development would be micro payments though. Being a heavy news reader, 3 or 4 is by far not enough - also I value my ability to choose where to read from myself. So a paid Google News or so wouldn't really work for me, actually their selection of articles got worse over the years.

21 points by jedwhite 8y ago

None of this moves the needle on anything that matters to me. I don’t want to pay another subscription for yet another business that doesn’t offer material benefit. I love the long form, but I want specific benefits that matter more than as a matter of discourse. News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will. Ok. Why should I?

tomhoward 8y ago

There's a newish product out of Australia I just heard of called Inkl, that's seeking to solve this problem with a bundled subscription that includes the Economist, the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Independent, and a premium option that includes WSJ and Barrons. https://www.inkl.com/ https://www.inkl.com/ Don't know how well they're doing or how good the product actually is, but it seems like the right approach. I don't have any affiliation with the company, but am acquainted with a guy who's advising them on marketing/growth, which is how I heard about it.

ggm 8y ago

Nope. I pay one (the guardian) and I graze the rest because they're very expensive by comparison for at best no better and often worse content for me. I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. I don't want to live in a bubble but I can see my on bias is quite strong in this: maybe I just recognize editorial markup more clearly in what I pay for. I'd rather pay another European or Asian source than the exemplar rates in this article.

beaconstudios 8y ago
Both sides are 90% opinion 10% fact. We can just see the opinions more clearly in the side we disagree with. Personally I'd much rather subscribe to a news source that just provided the facts, but I don't know of one. I used to read the independent and the telegraph in the UK for a slight-left and slight-right perspective, but they've both drifted further apart in recent years.
- ggm 8y ago
  I still rate the ABC and SBS (Australian) and the BBC for foreign news. The BBC fell off it's pedestal over Scots independence and brexit pretty badly and the ABC has undergone too much Google-following change to infotainment. SBS is underfunded but has a huge following of ex-patriates who lie both sides of most other economies politics and I suspect keep them honest.
coldtea 8y ago
>I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. That's a great practice. But even better to step beyond both "oppositional" sides, and check alternative sources that are not partisan of the two parties that alternate in power in each country.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  My concern about all these pay per view plans in this thread is that they will discourage cross pollination. We will be not just learning about other perspectives but paying for them.

esotericn 8y ago

I think it makes sense to distinguish between "news sites". Can the Financial Times, Economist, Bloomberg and trade publications survive on a paywall model? Probably - their readers likely consider them as operational expenses. But I don't see how the traditional newspapers can maintain their advantage going forward. If we develop a browser model that allows them to make money via micropayments, convince people to sign up for it, and they actually use it, some of them _might_ survive. I think there's a lot of mental gymnastics happening here though - ultimately I think they're gone unless outside funding keeps them alive (e.g. they essentially become propaganda).

AndrewDucker 8y ago

This is why I think the best way forward is for groups of news sites to come together with a single paid login to gain access to them, and then profit-share based on percentage of views each site gets. Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.

krackers 8y ago
Isn't this just cable bundles all over again?
- phil_folrida 8y ago
  It is. Isn't it the idea behind Brave. Or maybe I didn't understood it, looking at browser's market share, looks like I was not the only one to not get it. We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.
chki 8y ago
That seems like a good idea, although it is maybe difficult to bring it into reality. Only thing I would change is not basing the percentage on the number of views because this will (just like ads) make an incentive for newspapers to promote clickbait. Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints. Then you have the problem of speedreaders like me vs slow-readers plus that it's still not tracking free.
  - 8y ago

harias 8y ago

I would really like to see Wikinews succeeding. HN community can help it succeed in tech if we start contributing.

jmcgough 8y ago
I just can't see wikinews doing serious investigative journalism, though, which is one of the major reasons that news corps like WaPo are worth supporting. A talented journalist can work on a major story for months (like in the Theranos bombshell), and you need to be paying someone a salary as well as money for flights/hotels. Wikinews is a nice idea, but the vast majority of its news is just wikipedia-style sourcing of other news organizations. The original research it does seems to be mostly Q&A interviews.

davedx 8y ago

I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean, and they both do great journalism that I want to support (IMO). I would definitely pay for a third if I thought it was worth it to me. I can imagine if I was in finance I’d pay for FT or something.

coldtea 8y ago
>I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean, Well, not that different. Both are parts of the same echo bubble (the other-side analogue would be following e.g. Fox News and Daily Mail -- either bundles not only fail to get the other-side perspective, but miss tons of nuance not available to neither one or the other "mandatory" side of establishment sources).
justincormack 8y ago
The FT is a great general paper, I pay for it although I no longer work in finance. Probably the best UK paper.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  I don’t work in finance exactly, but only pay for them. But I would rather pay per article over several websites instead anyway.

TorKlingberg 8y ago

Someone needs to make a "Netflix for news", where you pay one monthly subscription and get access to almost everything. Then distribute the money to the sites I visit, just like Netflix or Spotify. I see two challenges: * Getting news sites on board. The more "premium" sites may be unwilling to give away access for cheap, but in general news orgs are desperate for a reliable income stream. Maybe a 20/articles per month limit would be fine for some sites. * Unlike Netflix etc, it needs to work in more than one app: Each news sites own app, in the browser, and the mini-browsers inside social media apps. I don't want to type in passwords all the time just to read an article someone shared. Apple is in a great position to do this. They have the experience with iTunes/Apple Music, and they have the leverage to make one subscription work in all apps. I just hope they don't intentionally break it on Android or Windows.

CalRobert 8y ago

The Guardian talks about their experience here: https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-milestone https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-mi... It's interesting inasmuch as the Guardian is trying to be reader-supported without a paywall. You can be a "supporter" for €50 per year which, if I think of it as buying a reporter a pint once a month, is basically nothing. Of course, it's worth remembering that people on HN complain pretty loudly if a paywalled link is shared. Have we considered revisiting that policy given the vulnerabilities in primarily-advertiser-funded news sources?

z3t4 8y ago

We need a micro-payment system for the web! So that you can pay per article. Versus pulling up my credit card, using the banks second factor authorization, and meanwhile knowing that 75% of the transaction is banking fees. Paypal could have solved the problem, but instead choose short term profits and to sale out, instead of long term - changing the world.

alangibson 8y ago

For years I've been thinking about a kind of loose bundling service where subscriber would pay like 10 per month, but for no particular bundle of sites. The business would then go out to sites that users are consuming and basically say 'hey, we've got money for you'. They put some tracking code on their site and start getting paid based on how much the services users consume. It's sort of a push-based Patreon. Never did it because the idea never sat right with me.

cornedor 8y ago

Blendle is a great alternative, you can buy seperate articles for a few cents from a lot of different papers. It's a Dutch company, and they have almost all Dutch newspapers, but they also have American news papers https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/ https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/

loganwedwards 8y ago
I will second Blendle. I found it via HN recently and signed up. Being USA-based, I found that NYT and Economist are both available, which are value-adds for me. For example, I paid $0.19 to read a short NYT article, which seemed fair to me.

blablabla123 8y ago

Actually this has also something good. There is so much redundant news, sometimes the Reuters messages are just copy&pasted. IMHO the only reasonable development would be micro payments though. Being a heavy news reader, 3 or 4 is by far not enough - also I value my ability to choose where to read from myself. So a paid Google News or so wouldn't really work for me, actually their selection of articles got worse over the years.