3 ms·

The paywalls on all major news sites are driving me crazy. Not because they cost money (I am willing to pay), but because it's not practical to buy an online s

by cj 7y ago

The paywalls on all major news sites are driving me crazy. Not because they cost money (I am willing to pay), but because it's not practical to buy an online subscription to 10+ major news sites individually. Is there a service that lets you pay 1 monthly fee for a subscription to the top 10 major (paywalled) news sites?

jbigelow76 7y ago
The closest you'll get is Apple News but even that won't include the entirety of the NY Times or WaPo since those publications don't want to cede control of the customer relationship with their readers.
runwerks 7y ago
apple news + seems to fit some of that.
xfitm3 7y ago
Paying for news only rewards paywalls.
- jedberg 7y ago
  What's wrong with that? They work hard to bring you that news. They should be paid.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    The problem is that no news source is good enough to be anyone's only news source, and since most consumers don't have vendor relationship management software to keep them all straight, we can only keep track of a limited number of subscriptions, across all forms of media, regardless of what each costs in money. Individually subscribing to 10 different paywalled news sites is not going to happen among the general public. Paying exactly the same aggregate monthly price for all ten, via just one redistributor, is more tolerable, especially if the customer can individually select subscriptions without forced bundling. Subscribe by checking this box; unsubscribe by unchecking it. If I can sign up online, but have to cancel with at least one phone call guaranteed to last 30 minutes or more, I don't care if it's only $0.05 a month; I'm not buying it. It's not always the money cost. Sometimes it's the cognitive overhead or transaction friction. My use of the Internet lately seems to be governed more by the number of accounts I am willing to manage than by how much I am willing to pay, and the fragmentation is going to kill some of the sites that can't solve that problem. When the NYT is in full control of its own paywall, you get nonsense like described here: https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 [2014], where it's cheaper to buy the print version and just throw it away to get past the paywall, than to get the unlimited digital subscription. And this is likely fueled by a dark pattern: in order to get a price for print delivery, you have to call a phone number during NYC business hours, whereas you can just click to get an offer for all-digital access. It's only $8/4 weeks right now, which seems like a good money value, but I'm just not in the mood to worry about yet another website login.
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    Journalism started dying with the abolishment of fcc fairness doctrine. The landscape of media today is abysmal, most reporting orgs are thinly masqueraded op-ed machines. They pander to their audience. The truth is what matters, not what people think about it. If trust can be restored I will pay. I will not pay for bullshit.
jedberg 7y ago
The way that Visa got started was that a bunch of big banks decided that it was ridiculous for their customers to get credit from all the banks, and so they agreed to federate on their own. Maybe the news orgs need to do the same thing. Create a federated login system with a single payment and then divvy up the funds in some fair way.
dang 7y ago
I know it's annoying, but please don't take HN threads on this off-topic tangent. The situation sucks, but we all know how it sucks, all these discussions are the same, and the rule here has been settled for years: if there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- cj 7y ago
  > Users usually post workarounds in the thread. Yea.. the purpose of this comment was to ask if there's a way to pay for these paywalls to permanently bypass them. And there were some useful replies: I haven't looked into Apple News Plus before. Thanks for the reply, jbigelow76 and runwerks And sorry Daniel. I guess I should have posted an Ask HN instead.

by cj 7y ago

jbigelow76 7y ago

The closest you'll get is Apple News but even that won't include the entirety of the NY Times or WaPo since those publications don't want to cede control of the customer relationship with their readers.

runwerks 7y ago

apple news + seems to fit some of that.

xfitm3 7y ago

Paying for news only rewards paywalls.

jedberg 7y ago
What's wrong with that? They work hard to bring you that news. They should be paid.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  The problem is that no news source is good enough to be anyone's only news source, and since most consumers don't have vendor relationship management software to keep them all straight, we can only keep track of a limited number of subscriptions, across all forms of media, regardless of what each costs in money. Individually subscribing to 10 different paywalled news sites is not going to happen among the general public. Paying exactly the same aggregate monthly price for all ten, via just one redistributor, is more tolerable, especially if the customer can individually select subscriptions without forced bundling. Subscribe by checking this box; unsubscribe by unchecking it. If I can sign up online, but have to cancel with at least one phone call guaranteed to last 30 minutes or more, I don't care if it's only $0.05 a month; I'm not buying it. It's not always the money cost. Sometimes it's the cognitive overhead or transaction friction. My use of the Internet lately seems to be governed more by the number of accounts I am willing to manage than by how much I am willing to pay, and the fragmentation is going to kill some of the sites that can't solve that problem. When the NYT is in full control of its own paywall, you get nonsense like described here: https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 [2014], where it's cheaper to buy the print version and just throw it away to get past the paywall, than to get the unlimited digital subscription. And this is likely fueled by a dark pattern: in order to get a price for print delivery, you have to call a phone number during NYC business hours, whereas you can just click to get an offer for all-digital access. It's only $8/4 weeks right now, which seems like a good money value, but I'm just not in the mood to worry about yet another website login.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  Journalism started dying with the abolishment of fcc fairness doctrine. The landscape of media today is abysmal, most reporting orgs are thinly masqueraded op-ed machines. They pander to their audience. The truth is what matters, not what people think about it. If trust can be restored I will pay. I will not pay for bullshit.

jedberg 7y ago

The way that Visa got started was that a bunch of big banks decided that it was ridiculous for their customers to get credit from all the banks, and so they agreed to federate on their own. Maybe the news orgs need to do the same thing. Create a federated login system with a single payment and then divvy up the funds in some fair way.

dang 7y ago

I know it's annoying, but please don't take HN threads on this off-topic tangent. The situation sucks, but we all know how it sucks, all these discussions are the same, and the rule here has been settled for years: if there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

cj 7y ago
> Users usually post workarounds in the thread. Yea.. the purpose of this comment was to ask if there's a way to pay for these paywalls to permanently bypass them. And there were some useful replies: I haven't looked into Apple News Plus before. Thanks for the reply, jbigelow76 and runwerks And sorry Daniel. I guess I should have posted an Ask HN instead.