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Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesse

Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesses (make money from attention/clicks), personalities (make money from attention), influencers (make money from attention), academics (no money). If you have an audience many of them would pay. You could charge the top 10% of content producers/businesses for better tools they would use and ask for all the time (moderation, blocking, shadowbanning etc), and also sell the public data of a popular service like this (for sentiment analysis, trending topics etc), and have a very healthy business model. There is no need for advertising, it is actively harmful, and it results in misaligned incentives, but if you try to make it reader funded it would IMO fail too - several services have, I think I saw one on HN a few months ago, but the now defunct app dot net is the most prominent example.

eitland 8y ago
> Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. You guys on HN keep saying this. I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately. I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read. Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?
- massysett 8y ago
  Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay. Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.
  - grey-area 8y ago
    Yes, sorry Social Media readers will not pay, because as you say the content they are consuming is mostly snippets of thought and links elsewhere, it's not the sort of service you'd subscribe to, but it is the sort of service lots of people like to use. I do think there is a segment of users who would pay though - those who use the platform to broadcast and want to have a bit more control over their feeds/profile/comments.

eitland 8y ago

> Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. You guys on HN keep saying this. I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately. I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read. Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?

massysett 8y ago
Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay. Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Yes, sorry Social Media readers will not pay, because as you say the content they are consuming is mostly snippets of thought and links elsewhere, it's not the sort of service you'd subscribe to, but it is the sort of service lots of people like to use. I do think there is a segment of users who would pay though - those who use the platform to broadcast and want to have a bit more control over their feeds/profile/comments.