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> So, says Mr Manager, “Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?”
by comex 6y ago
> So, says Mr Manager, “Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?”
> Why they’re wrong: Their arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.”
Didn’t it? Sure, maybe Tim Bray would have been willing to buy an article for $1 even though he wasn’t willing to subscribe. Maybe a lot of people would have. But if, out of every 100 people who buy the article for $1, a single one of them would have otherwise become a subscriber (if the micropayment option weren’t available), then the paper lost money on net.
To be fair, audience size isn’t constant between the two options. People who read for $1 might forward the article to others; it might end up going viral. But any amount of payment is a huge psychological barrier. I suspect that even in a world with a commonly-used micropayments system,
it would be near-impossible for an article to go viral if every person passing it along had to choose to pay $1 first.
And 100 times the revenue is just a staggering factor to overcome.
I think a multi-site fixed-price subscription model would have a much better chance of succeeding, even if it was priced to pay news sites, on average, that same $1 per article – simply because it would remove the psychological barrier. (Other comments have mentioned some subscriptions like this that already exist.) But I won’t get into that further, since it’s not what Tim Bray is proposing.
- onion2k 6y agoBut if, out of every 100 people who buy the article for $1, a single one of them would have otherwise become a subscriber (if the micropayment option weren’t available), then the paper lost money on net. I don't think Tim Bray is suggesting removing the subscription option. The point is that there could be a price for an individual article as well as the subscription option. If that 1 person would subscribe anyway then the lack of an individual article price is just leaving the other 99 payments on the table.
- richardwhiuk 6y agoNo, it might be undercutting the subscription as well. If nobody ever subscribes any more, and they just choose the articles which interest them and pay, the newspaper may decrease the amount of revenue it gets.
- onion2k 6y agoThat's an unknown though. Saying it might be undercutting subs is true, but it has no more or less validity than saying it wouldn't. It depends on the number of people who subscribe (could be 1 in 100, but it could be 1 in 10,000), and the number of people who'd pay for an article, and the optimum price they'd pay at, and so on.
- richardwhiuk 6y agoSure - it's all unknown. You can do market research and A/B testing to try and test the market though.
- toyg 6y ago> any amount of payment is a huge psychological barrier. We thought the same of mobile software. "People just won't pay for apps!" but it turns out they will, they just have to feel like they're getting a good deal.
- saagarjha 6y agoBut people don’t pay for apps.
- toyg 6y agoSomebody tell Apple then!
- vbsteven 6y agoI feel the situation with mobile app pricing is similar to what Tim describes for news publishers. Most apps seem to be free to download and use with limited functionality and then use scammy advertising tactics to get you to buy a subscription to unlock the full content.