6 ms·
The frustrating thing is that paywalls aren't really the problem. I'm more than happy to push a couple pennies your way to read a good article (probably more th
by anonporridge 4y ago
The frustrating thing is that paywalls aren't really the problem. I'm more than happy to push a couple pennies your way to read a good article (probably more than you'd make in ad revenue).
The real problem is account walls. Because a good micropayment system hasn't been adopted yet, every goddamn news outlet insists that I sign up for an account, give them my credit card, and commit to a monthly payment. There's too much good content on competing outlets and platforms to deal with all that paid account management. I'll read maybe half a dozen NYT articles a year, and similar from dozens of other outlets. Let me just pay for what I want to read without signing a long term contract.
This isn't just a problem with news outlets. Every kind of digital content is like this. I don't want a dozen different paid accounts on all the different streaming services. Let me pay a quarter for each show I watch and stop this "gym economics" crap of relying on the very low use customers to subsidize the high use customers.
- ghostpepper 4y agoWhat if it was $5 per NYT article instead of 5c to make the economics work? Would you still do it?
- julianlam 4y agoMay I ask what the purpose of this thought experiment is? It seems pointless to me, given you could purchase a copy of the entire NYT of that day for about the same, it would seem rather onerous to charge that much for a single digital view.
- sgerenser 4y agoYeah $5 is way too high. Unfortunately we have proof that 5c is too low, though. Blendle tried to make it work at (IIRC) something like 25c/article and apparently that wasn't enough (they still exist, but apparently their searching for a profitable business model). https://halcrawford.substack.com/p/micropayments-the-news-idea-that https://halcrawford.substack.com/p/micropayments-the-news-id...
- anonporridge 4y agoDepends on the quality. $5 is getting into full ebook territory, but I've spent that much on ebooks that turned out to be garbage plenty of times. I suppose if a singular NYT article dropped that took the effort and expense of writing a full book, and there was enough chatter about it to vouch for the quality, then sure, I would be fairly likely to pay that much, if and only if it was a one time exchange and did not require setting up a long term subscription relationship.