4 ms·

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 lates

by 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".

by fyfy18 7y ago

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".