11 ms·

But at what cost? WashPo, NYT, Bloomberg, even Medium!, are paywalled to the point of exclusion of the vast potential audience they could have. Axios,NPR, BBC,

But at what cost? WashPo, NYT, Bloomberg, even Medium!, are paywalled to the point of exclusion of the vast potential audience they could have. Axios,NPR, BBC, and The Guardian, have not succumbed yet. I hope they do not.

bradleyankrom 7y ago
I really, really wish some kind of micropayment system had taken root by now. I don’t want to buy a full-blown subscription to the NYT, but the home page experience on mobile is truly awful today. Experience is similar on plenty of other news sites, too.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  How do you even begin to put a price on individual articles though? Should you charge the same for a long form article that took months to research as the latest commentary on The Voice? Do you charge the same to a wealthy CEO as you do to a kid in highschool from an underprivileged background?
  - nine_k 7y ago
    Set some minimum price, like 10¢, and allow to pay more if you feel like it. Maybe have tiers: free tier for some content, "normal tier" for most content, "premium tier" for hot and impactful content. If at least 3 large national news outlets (say, WaPo, NYT, FT) would offer per-article paid access through the same system, I'd start paying.
    - johnmarcus 7y ago
      I suspect the reason we don't see this is because subscribers probably consume less than they pay for. To say it another way, many subscribers currently paying $10/mo for NYT do not consume 100 articles in the month, on average. If those subscribers switch to pay-as-you go it would be a net loss, even though the audience may have technically expanded. In economic terms, i believe this related to The Law of Diminishing Utility. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility... e.g. - a consumer will pay $10 to consume the first 30 articles in a month, but the 31-100 articles have a diminishing utility (so much time in the day to read). If they paid per article from the start, overall they would pay less. If we were to say 1 article per day from NYT is interesting, a person would consume 30 articles in a month, paying $3. The NYT would need to triple their pay-as-you-go readership to break even. In reality, it's rare that a pricing change as such would accomplish a 3x gain in readship. So, the status quo continues. Just for the record, I'm not judging your idea, just adding to the conversation of why it hasn't likely happened. There is probably room for a competitor to offer that sort of pricing, but it likely wouldn't work favorable for every organization, from a shareholders perspective.
      - mirimir 7y ago
        Yeah, but here's the thing. I realize that. And there are too many sites that I'd want to read, even just from HN links. So the per site subscription model is just unworkable. So from me, they get nothing now. But with a system for transparent nominal payments, where payments under few cents were OKed by default, they'd get at least something. I doubt that I'm unique. But maybe I'm unusual enough that the scheme would never work.
        YarickR2 7y ago
        You are not unique, and this market is so very ready for pay per article and nanotransactions.
  - vrc 7y ago
    This is the crucial issue, but I think price discrimination by user-persona is way more downstream. Even assuming there's a sufficient population willing to pay, I believe the challenge is, how does the publisher value its content v. the user in terms of willingness to pay. And how does the user value content before they've been charged v. after they've been charged. And as you stated, how does content value vary within a publisher's content catalog. Viewability and ad slots (crudely stated) was the way that ads tried to solve the latter, but would users feel similarly? Especially since this created loads of paginated content such as "top 10 lists".
- TylerE 7y ago
  If you think clickbait is bad NOW...
  - joegahona 7y ago
    Which is why the system would have to be based on something other than landing on the article. Article length factored in with even making it to the bottom of the article would be better than just arriving on the page.
- vrc 7y ago
  I was the lead for a large tech company's efforts in this area for a few years (not anymore, so take my comments with a grain of salt). I spoke to many of the major publishers globally as well as some niche site aggregators, aggregated local news players, etc. The challenges were manifold. They are linked between what publishers are succeeding with and what users want. On the publisher side: Large players were already making good money off of subscriptions and so micropayments would undercut that. They often didn't want to co-brand/co-market in any bundle or even under the same product umbrella with most other major players for brand/other reasons (owning the relationship with the customer was very important and they didn't want to be disintermediated anymore), and they often didn't want to be associated with medium to small publishers because they felt that was free-riding and diluting their brand. But most importantly, they were confident, as can be seen in articles like these, that ultimately, they could go it alone and therefore should. As for small to mid-sized publishers -- the problem really was that there wasn't enough meat on the bone in terms of willing-to-pay-traffic to warrant a service provider building a business around it. I think there could be a viable, non-venture product to be built if you can find the right bundles of niche pubs to band together. On the consumer side: Enough people are slowly willing to pay the high fees for the big sites to not be worth investing in lower tier options. Not enough people are willing to pay enough for smaller sites to be worth their while. Many people logically say they are willing to pay a small fee for sites; for example, let's say publishers were charging $0.01 - $0.05/pageview -- you'd logically say that's reasonable amount to pay, you'd be shocked how few people will opt for that, and how many folks who do opt for that feel a sense of sticker shock when they see the bill. Other issues: Actually charging consumers on a micro-level is a huge pain if you charge in currency, and from what I've seen now having worked in crypto, it will take a while before that model makes sense to the average consumer. Happy to discuss more.
  - inapis 7y ago
    There’s decision fatigue on parts of consumers too. Should i pay for this now or not? If the publisher demands payment after the fact, then they barely have any leverage in the transaction. If before, there’ll be a lot of hemming and hawing (like the app store). In addition people balk at the subscription price compared to netflix. They forget that there’s still a price floor to production and a publishers audience is smaller (and maybe geographically restricted) while netflix has massive economies of scale and can amortize its cost over the entire population. I’m seeing this kind of pricing disparity everywhere (the app store, publishing and what not). I don’t know what’s the solution. Bigger companies have distorted pricing expectations of consumers, especially when so many services/apps are available for free supported with ads.
- sapientiae3 7y ago
  So far, this is the best attempt I’ve seen to solve the problem: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
- amoorthy 7y ago
  The economics of these micropayment models are not in the interest of publishers. This post I wrote called "Why isn't there a Netflix for News" may be helpful: https://blog.thefactual.com/why-isnt-there-a-netflix-for-news https://blog.thefactual.com/why-isnt-there-a-netflix-for-new....
  - qchris 7y ago
    Just a quick heads-up, the page name for the article you linked looks like it got improperly formatted and is unintentionally just a string of HTML from the page source.
  - lapnitnelav 7y ago
    One of the real value of Netflix (/ Spotify) is that while you are committed to spending X amount of $/£/... per month, you get to potentially share that account with other people. I think having the ability to subscribe to multiple publishers with a flat fee that you can spread across multiple people would go a long way. Either with your family / friends or with some random on the internet, deciding on a bundle and pooling that money so that publishers get their $$ and you get multiple sources of content.
- Phanyxx 7y ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure this micropayments for articles will ever take off. I tried a service recently that is trying to make that monetisation method a reality, and every time I clicked on an article, I'd have to do that mental calculation – "Hmm, is this going to be worth that 10-25¢?" Even though they allow you to get an instantanous refund if the article didn't bring you value, you're still thinking about your media consumption from a much more cold and calculated angle. I'm not saying a model like Spotify or Netflix is better for the media industry, but it's a model people prefer for a reason. You set up that recurring payment once, and just go forth and enjoy content.
  - pseingatl 7y ago
    Micropayments would work if you charge mills, and not cents. You wouldn't even bother worrying about spending, say, 10 mills. But given the Internet's numbers, these add up, and quickly.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > Micropayments would work if you charge mills, and not cents. You wouldn't even bother worrying about spending, say, 10 mills. Your example is incoherent. 10 mills is a payment in cents. The only reason to call it "10 mills" is that you're hoping people won't understand what you mean.
      - theelous3 7y ago
        It's not "incoherent" to argue that the price should be less than one cent. Hmmming and hawing about 10-25c per article wouldn't happen at 0.1 cent per article, or some other subcent amount.
        thaumasiotes 7y ago
        He's not arguing that the price should be less than one cent. 10 mills is one cent. He's arguing that "micropayments would work if you charged mills and not cents, and that's why you should charge a cent".
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  There is https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/ but it's brand new.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Personally, the issue I would have with a pay-per-read model is predictability and the additional cognitive load. If I pay $10/month for a subscription to a publication, I can budget that out for the entire year and then not think about it. Whether I read 5 articles a month or 100 articles in a month, I don't have to care how much I read. Maybe a pay-per-read model would be a net savings for me, but it'd have to be a significant savings because now I have to track how much I've read in order to stay in my budget. It's yet another cost to track and think about. Within reason, I'd rather pay the premium to have one less thing to think about.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    This also avoids the issue of having to decide whether an article is worth it or not. If implemented incorrectly, it would make devolve into clickbait titles. One way to fix this would be to have a preview of each article available for free, or at least the first ~N paragraphs.
    - tacheiordache 7y ago
      A micropayemnts system would take that into considerarion and you’d loose a few cents or less if you read an article that was worthless.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
wmf 7y ago
If they go out of business they reach no audience. Ad-based clickbait for the masses, paywalled real news for the elites?
- Phanyxx 7y ago
  That's basically where we're headed. Financial Times vs Business Insider.
mirimir 7y ago
OK, so how about a general content equivalent to Sci-Hub? Back in the day, when the issue was sites requiring registration, bugmenot.com appeared. And now we have archive.today and other sites. But they only archive when someone requests. So why not have a site that does whatever Sci-Hub does to access content, but does it for arbitrary URLs?
shdgduakwjd 7y ago
I'm not sold. Yes, but at the same time AP News and Reuters are free and widely accessible. For people who want 'just the facts' journalism it's there. All WaPo, NYT, and Bloomberg add is spin, hip op-eds/opinion articles, and occasionally a scoop that'll be widely available within 12 hours elsewhere anyway. Whoever the losers are here, it's not the consumers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zweep 7y ago
You used to have to pay money for the NYT pre-internet too. There was an anomaly in the middle but NYT reporting costs big bucks and someone’s gotta pay for that shit, either the reader or the advertiser.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Newspapers have always been a pay service...
jp555 7y ago
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." - Nassim Taleb I stopped consuming almost all mainstream media in 2016, and I'm WAY happier for it. Maybe there's a lot of benefits to most News being behind paywalls?

bradleyankrom 7y ago

I really, really wish some kind of micropayment system had taken root by now. I don’t want to buy a full-blown subscription to the NYT, but the home page experience on mobile is truly awful today. Experience is similar on plenty of other news sites, too.

fyfy18 7y ago
How do you even begin to put a price on individual articles though? Should you charge the same for a long form article that took months to research as the latest commentary on The Voice? Do you charge the same to a wealthy CEO as you do to a kid in highschool from an underprivileged background?
- nine_k 7y ago
  Set some minimum price, like 10¢, and allow to pay more if you feel like it. Maybe have tiers: free tier for some content, "normal tier" for most content, "premium tier" for hot and impactful content. If at least 3 large national news outlets (say, WaPo, NYT, FT) would offer per-article paid access through the same system, I'd start paying.
  - johnmarcus 7y ago
    I suspect the reason we don't see this is because subscribers probably consume less than they pay for. To say it another way, many subscribers currently paying $10/mo for NYT do not consume 100 articles in the month, on average. If those subscribers switch to pay-as-you go it would be a net loss, even though the audience may have technically expanded. In economic terms, i believe this related to The Law of Diminishing Utility. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility... e.g. - a consumer will pay $10 to consume the first 30 articles in a month, but the 31-100 articles have a diminishing utility (so much time in the day to read). If they paid per article from the start, overall they would pay less. If we were to say 1 article per day from NYT is interesting, a person would consume 30 articles in a month, paying $3. The NYT would need to triple their pay-as-you-go readership to break even. In reality, it's rare that a pricing change as such would accomplish a 3x gain in readship. So, the status quo continues. Just for the record, I'm not judging your idea, just adding to the conversation of why it hasn't likely happened. There is probably room for a competitor to offer that sort of pricing, but it likely wouldn't work favorable for every organization, from a shareholders perspective.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Yeah, but here's the thing. I realize that. And there are too many sites that I'd want to read, even just from HN links. So the per site subscription model is just unworkable. So from me, they get nothing now. But with a system for transparent nominal payments, where payments under few cents were OKed by default, they'd get at least something. I doubt that I'm unique. But maybe I'm unusual enough that the scheme would never work.
      - YarickR2 7y ago
        You are not unique, and this market is so very ready for pay per article and nanotransactions.
- vrc 7y ago
  This is the crucial issue, but I think price discrimination by user-persona is way more downstream. Even assuming there's a sufficient population willing to pay, I believe the challenge is, how does the publisher value its content v. the user in terms of willingness to pay. And how does the user value content before they've been charged v. after they've been charged. And as you stated, how does content value vary within a publisher's content catalog. Viewability and ad slots (crudely stated) was the way that ads tried to solve the latter, but would users feel similarly? Especially since this created loads of paginated content such as "top 10 lists".
TylerE 7y ago
If you think clickbait is bad NOW...
- joegahona 7y ago
  Which is why the system would have to be based on something other than landing on the article. Article length factored in with even making it to the bottom of the article would be better than just arriving on the page.
vrc 7y ago
I was the lead for a large tech company's efforts in this area for a few years (not anymore, so take my comments with a grain of salt). I spoke to many of the major publishers globally as well as some niche site aggregators, aggregated local news players, etc. The challenges were manifold. They are linked between what publishers are succeeding with and what users want. On the publisher side: Large players were already making good money off of subscriptions and so micropayments would undercut that. They often didn't want to co-brand/co-market in any bundle or even under the same product umbrella with most other major players for brand/other reasons (owning the relationship with the customer was very important and they didn't want to be disintermediated anymore), and they often didn't want to be associated with medium to small publishers because they felt that was free-riding and diluting their brand. But most importantly, they were confident, as can be seen in articles like these, that ultimately, they could go it alone and therefore should. As for small to mid-sized publishers -- the problem really was that there wasn't enough meat on the bone in terms of willing-to-pay-traffic to warrant a service provider building a business around it. I think there could be a viable, non-venture product to be built if you can find the right bundles of niche pubs to band together. On the consumer side: Enough people are slowly willing to pay the high fees for the big sites to not be worth investing in lower tier options. Not enough people are willing to pay enough for smaller sites to be worth their while. Many people logically say they are willing to pay a small fee for sites; for example, let's say publishers were charging $0.01 - $0.05/pageview -- you'd logically say that's reasonable amount to pay, you'd be shocked how few people will opt for that, and how many folks who do opt for that feel a sense of sticker shock when they see the bill. Other issues: Actually charging consumers on a micro-level is a huge pain if you charge in currency, and from what I've seen now having worked in crypto, it will take a while before that model makes sense to the average consumer. Happy to discuss more.
- inapis 7y ago
  There’s decision fatigue on parts of consumers too. Should i pay for this now or not? If the publisher demands payment after the fact, then they barely have any leverage in the transaction. If before, there’ll be a lot of hemming and hawing (like the app store). In addition people balk at the subscription price compared to netflix. They forget that there’s still a price floor to production and a publishers audience is smaller (and maybe geographically restricted) while netflix has massive economies of scale and can amortize its cost over the entire population. I’m seeing this kind of pricing disparity everywhere (the app store, publishing and what not). I don’t know what’s the solution. Bigger companies have distorted pricing expectations of consumers, especially when so many services/apps are available for free supported with ads.
sapientiae3 7y ago
So far, this is the best attempt I’ve seen to solve the problem: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
amoorthy 7y ago
The economics of these micropayment models are not in the interest of publishers. This post I wrote called "Why isn't there a Netflix for News" may be helpful: https://blog.thefactual.com/why-isnt-there-a-netflix-for-news https://blog.thefactual.com/why-isnt-there-a-netflix-for-new....
- qchris 7y ago
  Just a quick heads-up, the page name for the article you linked looks like it got improperly formatted and is unintentionally just a string of HTML from the page source.
- lapnitnelav 7y ago
  One of the real value of Netflix (/ Spotify) is that while you are committed to spending X amount of $/£/... per month, you get to potentially share that account with other people. I think having the ability to subscribe to multiple publishers with a flat fee that you can spread across multiple people would go a long way. Either with your family / friends or with some random on the internet, deciding on a bundle and pooling that money so that publishers get their $$ and you get multiple sources of content.
Phanyxx 7y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure this micropayments for articles will ever take off. I tried a service recently that is trying to make that monetisation method a reality, and every time I clicked on an article, I'd have to do that mental calculation – "Hmm, is this going to be worth that 10-25¢?" Even though they allow you to get an instantanous refund if the article didn't bring you value, you're still thinking about your media consumption from a much more cold and calculated angle. I'm not saying a model like Spotify or Netflix is better for the media industry, but it's a model people prefer for a reason. You set up that recurring payment once, and just go forth and enjoy content.
- pseingatl 7y ago
  Micropayments would work if you charge mills, and not cents. You wouldn't even bother worrying about spending, say, 10 mills. But given the Internet's numbers, these add up, and quickly.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Micropayments would work if you charge mills, and not cents. You wouldn't even bother worrying about spending, say, 10 mills. Your example is incoherent. 10 mills is a payment in cents. The only reason to call it "10 mills" is that you're hoping people won't understand what you mean.
    - theelous3 7y ago
      It's not "incoherent" to argue that the price should be less than one cent. Hmmming and hawing about 10-25c per article wouldn't happen at 0.1 cent per article, or some other subcent amount.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        He's not arguing that the price should be less than one cent. 10 mills is one cent. He's arguing that "micropayments would work if you charged mills and not cents, and that's why you should charge a cent".
ForHackernews 7y ago
There is https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/ but it's brand new.
nkrisc 7y ago
Personally, the issue I would have with a pay-per-read model is predictability and the additional cognitive load. If I pay $10/month for a subscription to a publication, I can budget that out for the entire year and then not think about it. Whether I read 5 articles a month or 100 articles in a month, I don't have to care how much I read. Maybe a pay-per-read model would be a net savings for me, but it'd have to be a significant savings because now I have to track how much I've read in order to stay in my budget. It's yet another cost to track and think about. Within reason, I'd rather pay the premium to have one less thing to think about.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  This also avoids the issue of having to decide whether an article is worth it or not. If implemented incorrectly, it would make devolve into clickbait titles. One way to fix this would be to have a preview of each article available for free, or at least the first ~N paragraphs.
  - tacheiordache 7y ago
    A micropayemnts system would take that into considerarion and you’d loose a few cents or less if you read an article that was worthless.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

wmf 7y ago

If they go out of business they reach no audience. Ad-based clickbait for the masses, paywalled real news for the elites?

Phanyxx 7y ago
That's basically where we're headed. Financial Times vs Business Insider.

mirimir 7y ago

OK, so how about a general content equivalent to Sci-Hub? Back in the day, when the issue was sites requiring registration, bugmenot.com appeared. And now we have archive.today and other sites. But they only archive when someone requests. So why not have a site that does whatever Sci-Hub does to access content, but does it for arbitrary URLs?

shdgduakwjd 7y ago

I'm not sold. Yes, but at the same time AP News and Reuters are free and widely accessible. For people who want 'just the facts' journalism it's there. All WaPo, NYT, and Bloomberg add is spin, hip op-eds/opinion articles, and occasionally a scoop that'll be widely available within 12 hours elsewhere anyway. Whoever the losers are here, it's not the consumers.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zweep 7y ago

You used to have to pay money for the NYT pre-internet too. There was an anomaly in the middle but NYT reporting costs big bucks and someone’s gotta pay for that shit, either the reader or the advertiser.

52-6F-62 7y ago

Newspapers have always been a pay service...

jp555 7y ago

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." - Nassim Taleb I stopped consuming almost all mainstream media in 2016, and I'm WAY happier for it. Maybe there's a lot of benefits to most News being behind paywalls?