6 ms·

How would you pay for individual articles? Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Will y

How would you pay for individual articles? Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles? From this standpoint, I understand that subscriptions are for sites - they have editors, policies and a reputation to maintain and you buy into that with a single purchase. Or rather not, as the article argues... and I argue that per-article micropayments may not be the way out.

dheera 6y ago
Mine bitcoin in the browser as the user is reading the article?
dwohnitmok 6y ago
For the problem of reader regret with upfront payments (which would be the number one problem with clickbait) I could imagine a time-limited "payment loss." That is within, say, a day of having paid for an article, the reader can decide that the author/publication should not be paid for the article. This is not a refund; the reader does not get the money back. But the author doesn't get the money either. The money goes into a "black hole." There are several ways of implementing a black hole such as a central fund that is evenly distributed back to all publications participating in the payment system in proportion to their current payout levels, but the important point is that neither the article creator nor the reader nor the payment handler sees that money. That way readers don't get free articles via spurious refunds, but get the psychological satisfaction they're not rewarding clickbait, article creators are disincentivized from putting out clickbait, and the payment handler isn't incentivized to facilitate clickbait.
- toyg 6y ago
  It's a nice idea but 90% of the audience would simply not get it. "What do you mean I can't have my money back ?!?" A quick survey of the comments-section of newspapers will show you very quickly how unsophisticated the general public is.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    Yeah. In the case of the general public I think the bigger problem is people just don't want to pay for stuff a la carte. That's what ultimately triggered Blendle's pivot away from microtransactions to subscriptions despite excellent content and a slick UI. Maybe among those people who are willing to pay a la carte you might have people more willing to accept something like this?
- spartas 6y ago
  The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system". This presents an opportunity for low-effort publications to crank out oodles of articles in the hopes of getting people to either pay for articles or get paid out by the fund. Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website).
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    > The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system". That was a throwaway implementation of a "black hole," there are many others. Although in this particular case that failure mode is handled by proportionality. If they don't make a lot of money they won't get a lot of money (if they make no money they get no money). It's still gameable to some extent by paying for your own articles, but that becomes a bet that you will globally have more disgruntled readers choosing to withhold payment than the cut taken by the payment facilitator, which is a risky bet. There's no risk-free moneymaking opportunity that I see here. > Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website). The point would be that it isn't a subscription and that everything is a la carte so there is no convoluted cancellation process. There's no reason (and no real incentive) for the payment facilitator to make any of this hard to use, unless the number of users who decide to withhold payment is truly gargantuan. Blendle demonstrates that it would be even easier than contacting your credit card issuer (although Blendle used refunds). The real nail in the coffin is that people in general don't want to pay a la carte and businesses like subscriptions better anyways since the revenue stream is much more stable and, as in the case of the NYT, there's quite a bit of friction for a user to stop paying. A do-nothing default of "I get money from users" vs a do-nothing default of no money is too juicy to pass up. I think payments a la carte for articles will really only work for individual, part-time writers, who don't have the infrastructure in place to demand a subscription or otherwise don't like subscriptions.
notatoad 6y ago
the way blendle works (worked? i heard it was shutting down) is to charge you when you click the link, and the at the bottom of the article offer you a one-click refund if you didn't like it. it seemed like a great way to do it, but ultimately i found i never used their site because it was slow and confusing to navigate.
- isolli 6y ago
  It would be a shame if it closed. But I entirely agree with you: searching for content is very limited! There should be a proper search function, by keyword, with the ability to filter by publication. For instance I once read part 1 of a very interesting investigation, but I could never find part 2 in Blendle (even though I could easily find it on the web). Also, a way to copy-paste a URL in the app and thus pay for an article one has already found is a must-have, in my opinion.
- flas9sd 6y ago
  blendle (NL) was aquired by a french publisher very recently. I'm not intimate with the numbers, but the founder wrote in dutch on medium.com about their model multiple times. The Webapp interface to browse the daily crop of Newspapers is actually pretty great, I use it on a handheld. The problem with pay-per-article is the overhead in thinking about "do I want to read this?", but from a consumer perspective it's likely that you spend the same amount on articles of multiple publications than a subscription to one of them, but you're constantly made aware of the costs, as with a subscription, it's a remote thought.
  - ansible 6y ago
    I didn't find the decision to pay-to-read an article on Blendle all that burdensome. My issues with Blendle were mostly with how it was implemented in practice. 1. Time lag. Someone links a NYT article on Reddit. Ooops! can't read it yet. Have to wait for the print edition to come out, and then it is up on Blendle. 2. Linking. See above. I can't just go to a NYT (or other site), and click on a "pay with Blendle" icon. I could have lived with the above limitations, but discovery was also poor. 3. No digital index. For magazines and newspapers, you look at a low-resolution scan of the printed version. Then you can click on an article to get a summary pop-up to pay for it. I don't want to browse a digital analogue of a paper magazine! Show me a complete list of the articles with the summaries in a scrollable list, and let me pick from them to purchase access. These limitations are all no doubt part of the licensing deal with the publishers, but it is so annoying. As a consumer, I am just not going to spend $1000 USD per year on a bunch of different newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I have a lower amount I'm willing to spend in total. But I am willing to spend.
imron 6y ago
Build payments in to the browser like what brave is trying to do. Then I don’t have to subscribe to a hundred different sites, and sites can have a consistent way to charge small amounts per article without worrying about micro transaction costs.
Waterfall 6y ago
You never read an article behind a Paywall that showed a first portion asking you to subscribe?
_pmf_ 6y ago
> If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Why not do what all European countries mandates for all other online purchases: allow refunds. If you regularly have users refunding most stuff they buy: stop doing business with them.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Yep, it's the same problem we've had for a decade. Microtransactions are far from frinctionless (sign up, enter a credit card). News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system, where you refill it when it gets low.
- toyg 6y ago
  > News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system Yes. Although it carries a bit of risk - what happens when VISA does to you what they did to Wikileaks? - some consolidation of backend services is inevitable. > where you refill it when it gets low Eff no. "Top-up" schemes are annoying as hell, from a consumer perspective. It makes more sense to run some sort of exchange, where you register a credit card once and then don't actually trigger payment until it's economically convenient to do so (e.g. when you've "spent" $5 or $10, so card fees won't kill your margins). The exchange takes up some risk (effectively fronting $4.99 per user), but the inconvenience for consumers is very low and there is no friction. I think this would be very popular.

dheera 6y ago

Mine bitcoin in the browser as the user is reading the article?

dwohnitmok 6y ago

For the problem of reader regret with upfront payments (which would be the number one problem with clickbait) I could imagine a time-limited "payment loss." That is within, say, a day of having paid for an article, the reader can decide that the author/publication should not be paid for the article. This is not a refund; the reader does not get the money back. But the author doesn't get the money either. The money goes into a "black hole." There are several ways of implementing a black hole such as a central fund that is evenly distributed back to all publications participating in the payment system in proportion to their current payout levels, but the important point is that neither the article creator nor the reader nor the payment handler sees that money. That way readers don't get free articles via spurious refunds, but get the psychological satisfaction they're not rewarding clickbait, article creators are disincentivized from putting out clickbait, and the payment handler isn't incentivized to facilitate clickbait.

toyg 6y ago
It's a nice idea but 90% of the audience would simply not get it. "What do you mean I can't have my money back ?!?" A quick survey of the comments-section of newspapers will show you very quickly how unsophisticated the general public is.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  Yeah. In the case of the general public I think the bigger problem is people just don't want to pay for stuff a la carte. That's what ultimately triggered Blendle's pivot away from microtransactions to subscriptions despite excellent content and a slick UI. Maybe among those people who are willing to pay a la carte you might have people more willing to accept something like this?
spartas 6y ago
The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system". This presents an opportunity for low-effort publications to crank out oodles of articles in the hopes of getting people to either pay for articles or get paid out by the fund. Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website).
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system". That was a throwaway implementation of a "black hole," there are many others. Although in this particular case that failure mode is handled by proportionality. If they don't make a lot of money they won't get a lot of money (if they make no money they get no money). It's still gameable to some extent by paying for your own articles, but that becomes a bet that you will globally have more disgruntled readers choosing to withhold payment than the cut taken by the payment facilitator, which is a risky bet. There's no risk-free moneymaking opportunity that I see here. > Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website). The point would be that it isn't a subscription and that everything is a la carte so there is no convoluted cancellation process. There's no reason (and no real incentive) for the payment facilitator to make any of this hard to use, unless the number of users who decide to withhold payment is truly gargantuan. Blendle demonstrates that it would be even easier than contacting your credit card issuer (although Blendle used refunds). The real nail in the coffin is that people in general don't want to pay a la carte and businesses like subscriptions better anyways since the revenue stream is much more stable and, as in the case of the NYT, there's quite a bit of friction for a user to stop paying. A do-nothing default of "I get money from users" vs a do-nothing default of no money is too juicy to pass up. I think payments a la carte for articles will really only work for individual, part-time writers, who don't have the infrastructure in place to demand a subscription or otherwise don't like subscriptions.

notatoad 6y ago

the way blendle works (worked? i heard it was shutting down) is to charge you when you click the link, and the at the bottom of the article offer you a one-click refund if you didn't like it. it seemed like a great way to do it, but ultimately i found i never used their site because it was slow and confusing to navigate.

isolli 6y ago
It would be a shame if it closed. But I entirely agree with you: searching for content is very limited! There should be a proper search function, by keyword, with the ability to filter by publication. For instance I once read part 1 of a very interesting investigation, but I could never find part 2 in Blendle (even though I could easily find it on the web). Also, a way to copy-paste a URL in the app and thus pay for an article one has already found is a must-have, in my opinion.
flas9sd 6y ago
blendle (NL) was aquired by a french publisher very recently. I'm not intimate with the numbers, but the founder wrote in dutch on medium.com about their model multiple times. The Webapp interface to browse the daily crop of Newspapers is actually pretty great, I use it on a handheld. The problem with pay-per-article is the overhead in thinking about "do I want to read this?", but from a consumer perspective it's likely that you spend the same amount on articles of multiple publications than a subscription to one of them, but you're constantly made aware of the costs, as with a subscription, it's a remote thought.
- ansible 6y ago
  I didn't find the decision to pay-to-read an article on Blendle all that burdensome. My issues with Blendle were mostly with how it was implemented in practice. 1. Time lag. Someone links a NYT article on Reddit. Ooops! can't read it yet. Have to wait for the print edition to come out, and then it is up on Blendle. 2. Linking. See above. I can't just go to a NYT (or other site), and click on a "pay with Blendle" icon. I could have lived with the above limitations, but discovery was also poor. 3. No digital index. For magazines and newspapers, you look at a low-resolution scan of the printed version. Then you can click on an article to get a summary pop-up to pay for it. I don't want to browse a digital analogue of a paper magazine! Show me a complete list of the articles with the summaries in a scrollable list, and let me pick from them to purchase access. These limitations are all no doubt part of the licensing deal with the publishers, but it is so annoying. As a consumer, I am just not going to spend $1000 USD per year on a bunch of different newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I have a lower amount I'm willing to spend in total. But I am willing to spend.

imron 6y ago

Build payments in to the browser like what brave is trying to do. Then I don’t have to subscribe to a hundred different sites, and sites can have a consistent way to charge small amounts per article without worrying about micro transaction costs.

Waterfall 6y ago

You never read an article behind a Paywall that showed a first portion asking you to subscribe?

_pmf_ 6y ago

> If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Why not do what all European countries mandates for all other online purchases: allow refunds. If you regularly have users refunding most stuff they buy: stop doing business with them.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Yep, it's the same problem we've had for a decade. Microtransactions are far from frinctionless (sign up, enter a credit card). News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system, where you refill it when it gets low.

toyg 6y ago
> News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system Yes. Although it carries a bit of risk - what happens when VISA does to you what they did to Wikileaks? - some consolidation of backend services is inevitable. > where you refill it when it gets low Eff no. "Top-up" schemes are annoying as hell, from a consumer perspective. It makes more sense to run some sort of exchange, where you register a credit card once and then don't actually trigger payment until it's economically convenient to do so (e.g. when you've "spent" $5 or $10, so card fees won't kill your margins). The exchange takes up some risk (effectively fronting $4.99 per user), but the inconvenience for consumers is very low and there is no friction. I think this would be very popular.