7 ms·

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloombe

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA Times $98 The Guardian £119 Washington Post ~$80 I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A news combiner or aggregator would charge me for every article I select. At the end of the month, he charges my account credit card for the sum of all the articles. He gathers up the money that all readers have paid for reading NYT articles, and remits it. The newspapers don't have to manage micro-payments, journalism is saved, everyone is happy. Blendle looks like they are trying to do this, but they've been in Beta since 2016.

ericmay 7y ago
> Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? Isn't that what products like Apple News are?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Apple News+ isn't exactly the same thing. It's more targeted at magazines, and doesn't have most of the relevant newspapers on board. But there are other issues: 1. It's run by Apple, which takes a hefty cut, and is thus oriented towards whatever is in Apple's best interests. It should be run by a consortium of newspapers instead and work in their best interest. 2. It's only available on Apple devices, which I don't have. 3. It has an app-based model. That's not what I want. What I want is an SSO passport login that lets me into all of the publisher's pre-existing sites. I don't want an app or a new site or anything, I just want a login that works on the existing newspaper sites.
tguedes 7y ago
The issue is you're looking at the value from journalism wrong. If you were to actually pay the cost of producing 1 article, it would be significantly more than you would be willing to pay to read it. What you are paying for when you pay for journalism is not the value you perceive from reading the individual articles, but of supporting the entire organization's on-going production of journalism. You are a patron more than a customer. Pick the one you want to subscribe to and stick with it. I would recommend subscribing to your local newspaper if you're only going to pick one.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  That worked when local newspapers were mostly distributing articles from the associated press, with some local news mixed in. To be quite frank, I'd rather just have an associated press subscription that includes access to all newspapers who are part of the associated press.
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  But... thousands of people are paying to read that one article. The combined volume of all the people, who pay to read the same article, will pay for the cost of researching and writing the article.
  - Noos 7y ago
    ten thousand people pay ten cents to read an article. Yay, that's $1000! The aggregator takes his cut, so now it's $900. Taxes, $700. So about $18 per hour pay for a single reporter assuming it only takes 40 hours to write the article. And to be blunt, no one is going to pay more than ten cents. The spotify model does not work to support creation of new works; it only causes monetization of an older back catalog or "gift" works where people essentially give it away while working their day job.
pgrote 7y ago
>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. lol Renewals are a pain if they try to shift you to the vanilla rates; no one has email support and it requires a call. Anyway, I currently subscribe to NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Las Vegas Review Journal and The Guardian US Edition. I would subscribe to the NY Post if they allowed it. Former WSJ subscriber, but they do not offer long time subscriber discounts. Bloomberg is too expensive. My main complaint is only a few allow yearly subscriptions.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  > For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. The New York Times has nationwide printing and delivery in a lot of cities, so that's actually not that surprising. My parents had it delivered when I was growing up, and that was hundreds of miles from NYC. There's very few other papers that this is true of.
  - pgrote 7y ago
    Good point. It just seemed odd to me they would subsidize a print edition, but I guess it was for the advertising. We never opened the blue bag except to recycle the paper.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      You've got it exactly right. A print edition is worth a lot more to them in advertising revenue than the digital edition, so it costs less to the customer, even when you factor in the additional cost of printing and distribution. All those local advertising circulars are biiiiig business.
CydeWeys 7y ago
This is a reasonable suggestion. I too hit paywalls on all those papers several times per month and more, but not remotely enough to be worth paying a full subscription to almost any of them save the NYT (which I do have a shared family subscription to). A newspaper passport that allows some form of limited access to all of them, like a multi-resort annual ski passport, would be pretty useful. I would expect said passport to cost in the range of $100-200 per year (though they'd want to bill it at something like $15 per month to avoid sticker shock), and allow me to read a good number of articles from each newspaper, but maybe not an unlimited amount. And the funds from the passport could be distributed proportionally to members based on which papers you actually read most frequently, like how a ski mountain passport works.
wccrawford 7y ago
I suspect that most people, like me, don't want to be "nickel and dimed" for their news. There are very few articles that I want to read bad enough to pay $1 for. Almost as few for $.50. For $50/yr, that means I could read 1 NYT article per week, or I could have the yearly subscription. If I care about that newspaper at all, the subscription makes a lot more sense. The others are more like 2/wk instead, but still, if I'm only reading 2 articles per week from them, that seems really low. But even if the price per article made economic sense, there's psychology to worry about. I can't find them at the moment, but I've read articles detailing that people will pick the 'unlimited' option over the cheaper per-piece option even when they know they'd pay less in the long run on the per-piece. So while you might prefer to buy each article, that's generally not how people work.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
a... micropayments platform? Maybe regulated by a cryptocurrency or embedded blockchain based on eyeball tracking? That would analyze the articles you like and dynamically assemble articles that are related? That would collect "quality" ratings on the article based on how deep you scrolled into it? Outside all the tech wordsoup I just spouted, there is real potential in that. Maybe it needs to be couched in an independent rating group that advertisers somewhat trust (aka Nielsen in TV land), that could actually drive legitimate ad revenue/investment. It is strange, given that all newspapers are facing the same apocalypse now for a decade, and they (I think?) were subject to the same media consolidation that affected other channels.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  You don't need any of those buzzwords, you just need a multi-site SSO login that you pay more per year for than any one individual paper and that lets you into the paywall of all of those paywalls. It's a trivial technology problem; the hard part is in the business partnership building, specifically in getting the different newspapers to come to an agreement in how revenue from this subscription is going to be shared amongst them.
  - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
    All the mumbo jumbo is the revenue sharing part.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      You don't need mumbo jumbo to know how many articles a given logged-in account read in a month, though.
      - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
        You do if you don't want companies lying to get a bigger share.
iso1631 7y ago
They did - https://www.axate.com/ https://www.axate.com/ for example
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  Looks good -- you pay as you go. However, their publishers are unknowns, no big names. Nothing I'd be interested in.
adrr 7y ago
People pay $1200/yr for cable tv but don't want pay a couple hundred dollars a year for news. Thats the real problem, people don't value quality journalism.
- corebit 7y ago
  People always value quality, but don't view quality the same way.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thu2111 7y ago
  Most people get far more enjoyment out of general TV than the news. As for journalism being quality, well, I subscribe to a newspaper but sometimes I wonder why. For any claims of importance I'm always cross checking what they say and often they're lagging behind what I can find on blogs or other sources, or even just Reuters for that matter.
- zo1 7y ago
  I think it quite odd that no one wants to jump on this as a "market failure" that needs to be fixed with a government program or monopoly.
donohoe 7y ago
Its been tried many times. They usually fail. This one, Scroll, looks promising: https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  For a second I thought they were related to https://scroll.in https://scroll.in
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  Looks good, $5/mo., perfectly reasonable. I recognize some big names. However, no NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, etc.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    They need to have a higher tier at $15/month or something and get the big names onboard too. It's never gonna include Bloomberg too though; they're simply too expensive because they target the businessperson market. Bloomberg's digital subscription costs $35/month. WSJ likely wouldn't be in there for similar reasons, at $20/month.
- touristtam 7y ago
  Too US centric for my liking. Where are the like of Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung, El Pais, le Monde, or even just Al Jazeera? There are great articles in the US press, but if you do speak multiple languages and want a more nuanced point of view, you will find yourself turning to foreign press get those.
jrumbut 7y ago
The whole "competing for clicks" model seems to lead inescapably to a race to the bottom. I currently subscribe to the Boston Globe, but 90% of the articles I read from them is the sports section, but (I hope) less than 90% of my money is spent covering the Red Sox and Patriots. If it was pay by the article the incentives would be terrible. Some systems need not to be optimized to chase metrics, they need slack and produce value that is hard to measure. This is the kind of problem that the technology and business worlds have been uniquely incapable of solving.
claudiulodro 7y ago
This is similar to asking why there isn't a SaaS subscription service aggregating all of the SaaS products that lets you pay $1 to use any SaaS product for a day. It's not really sustainable to run a business by having people pay you smaller amounts and more sporadically. Microtransactions in that way don't generate enough revenue to pay for the up-front work required to create a story like the oxycontin one mentioned in a separate thread here. A story like that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work to create. It's not feasible to spend all that up-front work all for the possibility someone will maybe pay $1 to read it. How about this. If you read, say, 10 articles in a month from a publication, go ahead and purchase a subscription. Financially, it should cost you the same as your proposed microtransaction scheme, but it is much more sustainable for the business you're supporting.
mrlala 7y ago
>I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article That sounds... fucking terrible! I assure you that you are in the minority. The last thing in the world I want online is to have to think about every click costing money. Before you know it everything would try to move that way.. I'll be paying 5 cents for every HN thread because of "server load" or something. I don't know what the solution is.. ads are a stupid way to prop everything up.. but your suggestion is even worst in my opinion.

ericmay 7y ago

> Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? Isn't that what products like Apple News are?

CydeWeys 7y ago
Apple News+ isn't exactly the same thing. It's more targeted at magazines, and doesn't have most of the relevant newspapers on board. But there are other issues: 1. It's run by Apple, which takes a hefty cut, and is thus oriented towards whatever is in Apple's best interests. It should be run by a consortium of newspapers instead and work in their best interest. 2. It's only available on Apple devices, which I don't have. 3. It has an app-based model. That's not what I want. What I want is an SSO passport login that lets me into all of the publisher's pre-existing sites. I don't want an app or a new site or anything, I just want a login that works on the existing newspaper sites.

tguedes 7y ago

The issue is you're looking at the value from journalism wrong. If you were to actually pay the cost of producing 1 article, it would be significantly more than you would be willing to pay to read it. What you are paying for when you pay for journalism is not the value you perceive from reading the individual articles, but of supporting the entire organization's on-going production of journalism. You are a patron more than a customer. Pick the one you want to subscribe to and stick with it. I would recommend subscribing to your local newspaper if you're only going to pick one.

gwbas1c 7y ago
That worked when local newspapers were mostly distributing articles from the associated press, with some local news mixed in. To be quite frank, I'd rather just have an associated press subscription that includes access to all newspapers who are part of the associated press.
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
But... thousands of people are paying to read that one article. The combined volume of all the people, who pay to read the same article, will pay for the cost of researching and writing the article.
- Noos 7y ago
  ten thousand people pay ten cents to read an article. Yay, that's $1000! The aggregator takes his cut, so now it's $900. Taxes, $700. So about $18 per hour pay for a single reporter assuming it only takes 40 hours to write the article. And to be blunt, no one is going to pay more than ten cents. The spotify model does not work to support creation of new works; it only causes monetization of an older back catalog or "gift" works where people essentially give it away while working their day job.

pgrote 7y ago

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. lol Renewals are a pain if they try to shift you to the vanilla rates; no one has email support and it requires a call. Anyway, I currently subscribe to NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Las Vegas Review Journal and The Guardian US Edition. I would subscribe to the NY Post if they allowed it. Former WSJ subscriber, but they do not offer long time subscriber discounts. Bloomberg is too expensive. My main complaint is only a few allow yearly subscriptions.

CydeWeys 7y ago
> For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. The New York Times has nationwide printing and delivery in a lot of cities, so that's actually not that surprising. My parents had it delivered when I was growing up, and that was hundreds of miles from NYC. There's very few other papers that this is true of.
- pgrote 7y ago
  Good point. It just seemed odd to me they would subsidize a print edition, but I guess it was for the advertising. We never opened the blue bag except to recycle the paper.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    You've got it exactly right. A print edition is worth a lot more to them in advertising revenue than the digital edition, so it costs less to the customer, even when you factor in the additional cost of printing and distribution. All those local advertising circulars are biiiiig business.

CydeWeys 7y ago

This is a reasonable suggestion. I too hit paywalls on all those papers several times per month and more, but not remotely enough to be worth paying a full subscription to almost any of them save the NYT (which I do have a shared family subscription to). A newspaper passport that allows some form of limited access to all of them, like a multi-resort annual ski passport, would be pretty useful. I would expect said passport to cost in the range of $100-200 per year (though they'd want to bill it at something like $15 per month to avoid sticker shock), and allow me to read a good number of articles from each newspaper, but maybe not an unlimited amount. And the funds from the passport could be distributed proportionally to members based on which papers you actually read most frequently, like how a ski mountain passport works.

wccrawford 7y ago

I suspect that most people, like me, don't want to be "nickel and dimed" for their news. There are very few articles that I want to read bad enough to pay $1 for. Almost as few for $.50. For $50/yr, that means I could read 1 NYT article per week, or I could have the yearly subscription. If I care about that newspaper at all, the subscription makes a lot more sense. The others are more like 2/wk instead, but still, if I'm only reading 2 articles per week from them, that seems really low. But even if the price per article made economic sense, there's psychology to worry about. I can't find them at the moment, but I've read articles detailing that people will pick the 'unlimited' option over the cheaper per-piece option even when they know they'd pay less in the long run on the per-piece. So while you might prefer to buy each article, that's generally not how people work.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

a... micropayments platform? Maybe regulated by a cryptocurrency or embedded blockchain based on eyeball tracking? That would analyze the articles you like and dynamically assemble articles that are related? That would collect "quality" ratings on the article based on how deep you scrolled into it? Outside all the tech wordsoup I just spouted, there is real potential in that. Maybe it needs to be couched in an independent rating group that advertisers somewhat trust (aka Nielsen in TV land), that could actually drive legitimate ad revenue/investment. It is strange, given that all newspapers are facing the same apocalypse now for a decade, and they (I think?) were subject to the same media consolidation that affected other channels.

CydeWeys 7y ago
You don't need any of those buzzwords, you just need a multi-site SSO login that you pay more per year for than any one individual paper and that lets you into the paywall of all of those paywalls. It's a trivial technology problem; the hard part is in the business partnership building, specifically in getting the different newspapers to come to an agreement in how revenue from this subscription is going to be shared amongst them.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  All the mumbo jumbo is the revenue sharing part.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    You don't need mumbo jumbo to know how many articles a given logged-in account read in a month, though.
    - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      You do if you don't want companies lying to get a bigger share.

iso1631 7y ago

They did - https://www.axate.com/ https://www.axate.com/ for example

GnarfGnarf 7y ago
Looks good -- you pay as you go. However, their publishers are unknowns, no big names. Nothing I'd be interested in.

adrr 7y ago

People pay $1200/yr for cable tv but don't want pay a couple hundred dollars a year for news. Thats the real problem, people don't value quality journalism.

corebit 7y ago
People always value quality, but don't view quality the same way.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thu2111 7y ago
Most people get far more enjoyment out of general TV than the news. As for journalism being quality, well, I subscribe to a newspaper but sometimes I wonder why. For any claims of importance I'm always cross checking what they say and often they're lagging behind what I can find on blogs or other sources, or even just Reuters for that matter.
zo1 7y ago
I think it quite odd that no one wants to jump on this as a "market failure" that needs to be fixed with a government program or monopoly.

donohoe 7y ago

Its been tried many times. They usually fail. This one, Scroll, looks promising: https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/

selimthegrim 7y ago
For a second I thought they were related to https://scroll.in https://scroll.in
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
Looks good, $5/mo., perfectly reasonable. I recognize some big names. However, no NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, etc.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  They need to have a higher tier at $15/month or something and get the big names onboard too. It's never gonna include Bloomberg too though; they're simply too expensive because they target the businessperson market. Bloomberg's digital subscription costs $35/month. WSJ likely wouldn't be in there for similar reasons, at $20/month.
touristtam 7y ago
Too US centric for my liking. Where are the like of Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung, El Pais, le Monde, or even just Al Jazeera? There are great articles in the US press, but if you do speak multiple languages and want a more nuanced point of view, you will find yourself turning to foreign press get those.

jrumbut 7y ago

The whole "competing for clicks" model seems to lead inescapably to a race to the bottom. I currently subscribe to the Boston Globe, but 90% of the articles I read from them is the sports section, but (I hope) less than 90% of my money is spent covering the Red Sox and Patriots. If it was pay by the article the incentives would be terrible. Some systems need not to be optimized to chase metrics, they need slack and produce value that is hard to measure. This is the kind of problem that the technology and business worlds have been uniquely incapable of solving.

claudiulodro 7y ago

This is similar to asking why there isn't a SaaS subscription service aggregating all of the SaaS products that lets you pay $1 to use any SaaS product for a day. It's not really sustainable to run a business by having people pay you smaller amounts and more sporadically. Microtransactions in that way don't generate enough revenue to pay for the up-front work required to create a story like the oxycontin one mentioned in a separate thread here. A story like that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work to create. It's not feasible to spend all that up-front work all for the possibility someone will maybe pay $1 to read it. How about this. If you read, say, 10 articles in a month from a publication, go ahead and purchase a subscription. Financially, it should cost you the same as your proposed microtransaction scheme, but it is much more sustainable for the business you're supporting.

mrlala 7y ago

>I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article That sounds... fucking terrible! I assure you that you are in the minority. The last thing in the world I want online is to have to think about every click costing money. Before you know it everything would try to move that way.. I'll be paying 5 cents for every HN thread because of "server load" or something. I don't know what the solution is.. ads are a stupid way to prop everything up.. but your suggestion is even worst in my opinion.