5 ms·

I doubt it's feasible, but I've always been hoping for some payment service that would allow me to pay by the article across all news sites. My problem with pa

I doubt it's feasible, but I've always been hoping for some payment service that would allow me to pay by the article across all news sites. My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes subscription just to finish reading one article. I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal.

Flockster 5y ago
I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the articles/media you consumed. It was quite popular in the german podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.
alyandon 5y ago
I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version. That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
- dunnevens 5y ago
  Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or magazine in Kindle format. You can get today’s New York Times for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it’s one option. Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
  - alyandon 5y ago
    Thanks - I wasn't even aware that was an option.
biddit 5y ago
This is the model that helped the music industry come out of the Napster era. $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.
- rchaud 5y ago
  $1 songs are about as dead today as $2.99 ringtones. I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days. Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use. So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.
nightski 5y ago
Meh I'd imagine this would just lead to even more clickbait to try and get you to pay the $0.10 for an article that actually isn't worth the time to read it.
mtts 5y ago
A company called Blendle tried this in the Netherlands. It didn’t work. Turns out you do not want to have to think after every headline and teaser whether you want to pay to read the full article.
- notatoad 5y ago
  The beauty of blendle was that you didn't have to think after every headline whether to pay to read the full article. They prominently had a refund option at the end of every article, so you could decide after you read the article whether it was worth the money or not. What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the article through the blendle website, and their website sucked.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    Even with the refund it caused mental load I didn't like.
  - mtts 5y ago
    Why would a newspaper send money to Blendle for a someone clicking a link directly to their own site?
    - detaro 5y ago
      to make money from the transaction?
    - notatoad 5y ago
      if they want to offer me a first-party micropayment i would also be open to that. but my point is i'm not going to buy a $10-15/mo subscription to some regional newspaper in the middle of nowhere just because i clicked a link on twitter or hacker news to the one article they publish this decade that might interest me. i would be willing to pay to read an article, but newspapers are leaving money on the table by only offering a monthly subscription option which is obviously unsuitable for social media traffic.
Aaronmacaron 5y ago
This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you have a subscription with a news site instead of paying for articles individually you might not read articles you would have read otherwise. I often find myself enjoying articles much more than I would have anticipated just considering the title. If a per-article business model will become the norm the clickbait-problem will undoubtedly get worse. Deeper and less catchy articles will fade from media outlets which hurts the industry as a whole. That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism. Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?
  - _delirium 5y ago
    Apple News+ is trying to build that, one subscription for $10/month. This is the current list of who they include: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
    - baggy_trough 5y ago
xeromal 5y ago
I was part of a google program that did just that. In fact, they tried it twice but I don't even remember the name. You loaded an account with some cash and it would deduct micropayments from various news sites. I loved it but they killed it pretty quickly. Edit: Found the name. https://contributor.google.com https://contributor.google.com
realityking 5y ago
Laterpay (https://www2.laterpay.net/ https://www2.laterpay.net/) has or used to have a service do allow publishers to sell individual articles. Interestingly, you‘d only pay after you had consumed 5€ worth of content which was a nice on-ramp. Spiegel here in Germany used to use. Unfortunately it didn‘t meet their revenue expectations and they went to a subscription.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door, articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who couldn't otherwise get subscriptions would take.

Flockster 5y ago

I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the articles/media you consumed. It was quite popular in the german podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.

alyandon 5y ago

I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version. That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.

dunnevens 5y ago
Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or magazine in Kindle format. You can get today’s New York Times for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it’s one option. Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
- alyandon 5y ago
  Thanks - I wasn't even aware that was an option.

biddit 5y ago

This is the model that helped the music industry come out of the Napster era. $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.

rchaud 5y ago
$1 songs are about as dead today as $2.99 ringtones. I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days. Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use. So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.

nightski 5y ago

Meh I'd imagine this would just lead to even more clickbait to try and get you to pay the $0.10 for an article that actually isn't worth the time to read it.

mtts 5y ago

A company called Blendle tried this in the Netherlands. It didn’t work. Turns out you do not want to have to think after every headline and teaser whether you want to pay to read the full article.

notatoad 5y ago
The beauty of blendle was that you didn't have to think after every headline whether to pay to read the full article. They prominently had a refund option at the end of every article, so you could decide after you read the article whether it was worth the money or not. What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the article through the blendle website, and their website sucked.
- phreeza 5y ago
  Even with the refund it caused mental load I didn't like.
- mtts 5y ago
  Why would a newspaper send money to Blendle for a someone clicking a link directly to their own site?
  - detaro 5y ago
    to make money from the transaction?
  - notatoad 5y ago
    if they want to offer me a first-party micropayment i would also be open to that. but my point is i'm not going to buy a $10-15/mo subscription to some regional newspaper in the middle of nowhere just because i clicked a link on twitter or hacker news to the one article they publish this decade that might interest me. i would be willing to pay to read an article, but newspapers are leaving money on the table by only offering a monthly subscription option which is obviously unsuitable for social media traffic.

Aaronmacaron 5y ago

This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you have a subscription with a news site instead of paying for articles individually you might not read articles you would have read otherwise. I often find myself enjoying articles much more than I would have anticipated just considering the title. If a per-article business model will become the norm the clickbait-problem will undoubtedly get worse. Deeper and less catchy articles will fade from media outlets which hurts the industry as a whole. That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism. Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.

reducesuffering 5y ago
But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?
- _delirium 5y ago
  Apple News+ is trying to build that, one subscription for $10/month. This is the current list of who they include: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
  - baggy_trough 5y ago

xeromal 5y ago

I was part of a google program that did just that. In fact, they tried it twice but I don't even remember the name. You loaded an account with some cash and it would deduct micropayments from various news sites. I loved it but they killed it pretty quickly. Edit: Found the name. https://contributor.google.com https://contributor.google.com

realityking 5y ago

Laterpay (https://www2.laterpay.net/ https://www2.laterpay.net/) has or used to have a service do allow publishers to sell individual articles. Interestingly, you‘d only pay after you had consumed 5€ worth of content which was a nice on-ramp. Spiegel here in Germany used to use. Unfortunately it didn‘t meet their revenue expectations and they went to a subscription.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door, articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who couldn't otherwise get subscriptions would take.