7 ms·

I would like a model where I can pay per article on a website. I am not going to subscribe to Bloomberg because I can’t fit it in my budget, but from time to ti

by sylens 4y ago

I would like a model where I can pay per article on a website. I am not going to subscribe to Bloomberg because I can’t fit it in my budget, but from time to time I would like the ability to read a single article (either linked from here or from a colleague) and would be willing to pay a small fee. Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out

mg 4y ago
The problem with this seems to be the nonexistence of micropayments. As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. Which is a pitty, because $0.01 per page would be a CPM of $10 which is crazy high. For most publishers, that would be a big increase in their earnings.
- mstipetic 4y ago
  Why couldn't I load up my account with $10 or so every month, and have a centralized solution tally up all my consumption and distribute it to all publishers.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That solution would probably also charge a lot, like the credit card companies. Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.
  - briffle 4y ago
    honestly, I would probably subscribe to apple news if they did this. Or another similar tool I want to support good journalism, but I don't want to have multiple subscriptions to manage and deal with.
  - 5560675260 4y ago
    Brave browser does this. Unfortunately I don't think that they have great adoption.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      Last time I asked if they could offer this, they said no. Instead they were pushing their cryptocurrency scam while blocking site owners' advertising.
- sbarre 4y ago
  I feel like a few companies have tried this over the years.. The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites. Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher.. But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..
- g_p 4y ago
  For an org that has an enduring billing relationship with the customer (think the large tech companies and platform providers), they already are handling transaction aggregation internally to an extent - just not to the extent of micro-transactions (where they need to handle the edge case of a tiny single transaction in a day or week or month). If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Anything under 50c is ridiculously low. If some content is not worth even 50c, why would it be worth your time spent consuming it?
  - gpvos 4y ago
    $0.01 is too low, but $0.50 is way too high except for longer articles. I read so much on a day that paying 50c for every article would ruin me.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      If you need to read them for your job, that is just a business expense. If you read them for your leisure and they're not even worth 50c to you, then that sounds like you are wasting your time.
      - gpvos 4y ago
        For leisure / keeping up with the world (you know, democracy and such), and wow are you judgmental.
        carlosjobim 4y ago
        I am not judging you, I'm trying to understand why you want to spend your time on content that you yourself consider not even worth a pittance?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        mkr-hn 4y ago
        Their comment appears to be about ability to pay, not value.
- martin_a 4y ago
  Well, there was flattr, not sure what they're doing these days, though.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  > As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  There's a viable model: credits. You don't pay $0.01, you pay say $10 for 1,000 pages. Most web companies usually provide a lowest offering that's geared towards reasonably heavy users and provide nothing other than ads and the like for light users. Hence the ongoing war between blasting us with ads and sometimes malicious ads vs keeping from destroying our experience and risking getting infected by the latest 0-day.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  The thing that killed micropayments back in the early 2000s (when Scott McCloud was calling for them) was transaction costs. Putting a paywall on every click is a sales and user experience nightmare. Keep in mind that the reason why everyone uses subscription billing nowadays is that you never have to bug the user to ask for more money. You just ask once and get paid indefinitely. There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason. What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives. On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.
pmontra 4y ago
> Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out That would probably be a proprietary solution working only on iOS and Macs with Safari. How that solves the problem for Android devices and Windows/Linux computers, maybe also for Macs with a non Safari browser?
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  So what? Why should they care about Android or Linux users?
  - pdpi 4y ago
    The problem we're talking about here is pervasive, and needs a more or less universal solution, not something vendor-specific. So, while Apple has no reason to care about non-Apple users, we, as a society, should.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      Well if Apple does it for their users and future users, that is much better than nobody doing it.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
Apple is already paying a few publishers I think, but not at scale. Netflix, Amazon or Spotify could probably pull of a subscription model with their huge critical masses. But I dont think anyone with the critical mass for a micropayment model has any motivation to do it. Google, Apple are perfectly happy with the 30% app fee, the massive cut taken from YouTube and so on.
carlosjobim 4y ago
> and would be willing to pay a small fee. Current payment systems do not allow for lots of small fees, when credit card processors charge 25c and up per transactions. The only way that works that I can think of would be a browser that charges a fee of say $10 per month from users and then distributes that to the pages visited, based on usage. Brave browser seemed like a step in this direction, but turned out to be just another crypto scam.
- burkaman 4y ago
  It doesn't have to be a subscription, you can have a "wallet" that users add to periodically in increments of $10 or something. Blendle was a service like this, you made a single smallish purchase to add money to your wallet and then slowly spent ~25 cents per article until you needed to top up again.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Yes, I think a system like this is the future. I also think whoever pulls it off successfully has to understand that they are not supposed to be editors or see their mission as trying to bundle established media, since the most interesting content creators right now are people way outside the "mainstream".
  - jefftk 4y ago
    There are a lot of issues with this, but a big one is that this has a dependency on cross-site tracking: Blendle or whoever needs to learn the sites you visit so they can decrement your wallet. And all the browsers are working on making cross-site tracking technologically impossible.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      That's not a problem. Implement a "Login with Blender" Single sign on for participating sites and you're done.
      - 4y ago
arp242 4y ago
I don't think a pay-per-article model really works; Blendle[1] tried this, and they ended up switching to a subscription model. Having to decide "do I want to pay for this article?" isn't really what I want; I also paid for some articles that I ended up finding seriously shallow/disappointing. Many publishers have also stopped publishing on Blendle over the years. I guess they decided it wasn't profitable for them (or not profitable enough). The platform is still around, but I expect it won't be in a few years. It's still around, but the offering is severely reduced compared to a few years ago; I don't expect it will be around in a few years. I do agree it's a problem; I don't really want to subscribe to one or two newspapers in particular, but rather get interesting stuff from HN and other sources from a wide variety of publications. It would be prohibitively expensive to subscribe, so, I subscribe to two publications and bypass the paywalls on the rest. I don't know what else to do beyond, I guess, just not read it at all... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  The basic problem here is few companies are willing to be cooperative. Look at the video market: We used to have a good solution: Netflix. However, a bunch of companies decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie and now we have a whole bunch of competing streaming services which basically got rid of the idea. It's not that Netflix wasn't a viable model, it was the companies being piggish. We see something of the sort with cable & satellite packages--companies who want to take a bigger piece of the pie and get upset when they get dropped or put into a separate package. The cost of entry into that market is so much higher that it hasn't totally fallen apart like the Netflix approach (yeah, Netflix is still out there--but the concept of being a one place for everything is gone. Too many companies want something exclusive to hope to lure you to them.)
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Bluntly: I really don't think you do. You think you do, but you don't. Imagine you hit that paywall, and it says "get a subscription or pay 0.50c to see this one article". You seriously want me to believe you're gonna go bust out your wallet and punch in your credit card details and pay a fraction of a dollar instead of just closing the window and moving on? Okay, how about we reduce the friction and do the Post.news thing: you buy tokens and then use them. Are you really gonna go buy ten or twenty bucks worth of tokens for the few times when you hit a paid article? Sorry, no. I don't buy it. Every time I see someone say this, it honestly just sounds like an attempt to justify busting down that paywall or refusing to subscribe. "Gee, I would have paid for this article, but I can't... oh well." Ala carte payment friction combined with uncertainty about the value of the content (what if I pay a quarter and the article turns out to be garbage?) reduces the value of content to zero for most people. There's a reason no one has been able to make it work.
michaelt 4y ago
You might be interested in Blendle [1], a website which offers a variety of publications on a pay-per-article basis where you can charge up a wallet in advance. They offer publications like Time, the Economist, and the Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately it's somewhat expensive - $0.25-$0.50 per article. And they don't have any sort of automated way to jump from a newspaper's paywall straight to the Blendle article - you've got to find it through Blendle. And there selection of publications is somewhat limited. But there are companies out there trying to deliver something kind of close to what you're talking about! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
pacifika 4y ago
Blendle did this
hedora 4y ago
Apple News+ already does this, except that you pay a flat monthly fee, and they distribute 50% of it to news organizations: https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-know-about-apple-news-plus/ https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-k... Apple News is apparently the #1 news app globally, but it has a free tier. Here are paid subscription trends: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-subscribers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-...
asdff 4y ago
It would be great if your internet bill was based on your bandwidth, a portion of which covers the hosts fees for you using their bandwidth at some rate set by the isp. In this model, the barrier to create content falls to zero before long as you get readership that is able to sustain its load on your site on its own without the need for shoveling in advertisements or tracking. You'd also incentivize the development of smaller webpages since they would consume less bandwidth and cost less for a user, so given two sites they'd chose the less bloated one over time.

by sylens 4y ago

mg 4y ago

The problem with this seems to be the nonexistence of micropayments. As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. Which is a pitty, because $0.01 per page would be a CPM of $10 which is crazy high. For most publishers, that would be a big increase in their earnings.

mstipetic 4y ago
Why couldn't I load up my account with $10 or so every month, and have a centralized solution tally up all my consumption and distribute it to all publishers.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  That solution would probably also charge a lot, like the credit card companies. Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.
- briffle 4y ago
  honestly, I would probably subscribe to apple news if they did this. Or another similar tool I want to support good journalism, but I don't want to have multiple subscriptions to manage and deal with.
- 5560675260 4y ago
  Brave browser does this. Unfortunately I don't think that they have great adoption.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Last time I asked if they could offer this, they said no. Instead they were pushing their cryptocurrency scam while blocking site owners' advertising.
sbarre 4y ago
I feel like a few companies have tried this over the years.. The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites. Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher.. But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..
g_p 4y ago
For an org that has an enduring billing relationship with the customer (think the large tech companies and platform providers), they already are handling transaction aggregation internally to an extent - just not to the extent of micro-transactions (where they need to handle the edge case of a tiny single transaction in a day or week or month). If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).
carlosjobim 4y ago
Anything under 50c is ridiculously low. If some content is not worth even 50c, why would it be worth your time spent consuming it?
- gpvos 4y ago
  $0.01 is too low, but $0.50 is way too high except for longer articles. I read so much on a day that paying 50c for every article would ruin me.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    If you need to read them for your job, that is just a business expense. If you read them for your leisure and they're not even worth 50c to you, then that sounds like you are wasting your time.
    - gpvos 4y ago
      For leisure / keeping up with the world (you know, democracy and such), and wow are you judgmental.
      - carlosjobim 4y ago
        I am not judging you, I'm trying to understand why you want to spend your time on content that you yourself consider not even worth a pittance?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        mkr-hn 4y ago
        Their comment appears to be about ability to pay, not value.
martin_a 4y ago
Well, there was flattr, not sure what they're doing these days, though.
mandmandam 4y ago
> As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
There's a viable model: credits. You don't pay $0.01, you pay say $10 for 1,000 pages. Most web companies usually provide a lowest offering that's geared towards reasonably heavy users and provide nothing other than ads and the like for light users. Hence the ongoing war between blasting us with ads and sometimes malicious ads vs keeping from destroying our experience and risking getting infected by the latest 0-day.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The thing that killed micropayments back in the early 2000s (when Scott McCloud was calling for them) was transaction costs. Putting a paywall on every click is a sales and user experience nightmare. Keep in mind that the reason why everyone uses subscription billing nowadays is that you never have to bug the user to ask for more money. You just ask once and get paid indefinitely. There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason. What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives. On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.

pmontra 4y ago

> Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out That would probably be a proprietary solution working only on iOS and Macs with Safari. How that solves the problem for Android devices and Windows/Linux computers, maybe also for Macs with a non Safari browser?

carlosjobim 4y ago
So what? Why should they care about Android or Linux users?
- pdpi 4y ago
  The problem we're talking about here is pervasive, and needs a more or less universal solution, not something vendor-specific. So, while Apple has no reason to care about non-Apple users, we, as a society, should.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Well if Apple does it for their users and future users, that is much better than nobody doing it.

brucethemoose2 4y ago

Apple is already paying a few publishers I think, but not at scale. Netflix, Amazon or Spotify could probably pull of a subscription model with their huge critical masses. But I dont think anyone with the critical mass for a micropayment model has any motivation to do it. Google, Apple are perfectly happy with the 30% app fee, the massive cut taken from YouTube and so on.

carlosjobim 4y ago

> and would be willing to pay a small fee. Current payment systems do not allow for lots of small fees, when credit card processors charge 25c and up per transactions. The only way that works that I can think of would be a browser that charges a fee of say $10 per month from users and then distributes that to the pages visited, based on usage. Brave browser seemed like a step in this direction, but turned out to be just another crypto scam.

burkaman 4y ago
It doesn't have to be a subscription, you can have a "wallet" that users add to periodically in increments of $10 or something. Blendle was a service like this, you made a single smallish purchase to add money to your wallet and then slowly spent ~25 cents per article until you needed to top up again.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Yes, I think a system like this is the future. I also think whoever pulls it off successfully has to understand that they are not supposed to be editors or see their mission as trying to bundle established media, since the most interesting content creators right now are people way outside the "mainstream".
- jefftk 4y ago
  There are a lot of issues with this, but a big one is that this has a dependency on cross-site tracking: Blendle or whoever needs to learn the sites you visit so they can decrement your wallet. And all the browsers are working on making cross-site tracking technologically impossible.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's not a problem. Implement a "Login with Blender" Single sign on for participating sites and you're done.
    - 4y ago

arp242 4y ago

I don't think a pay-per-article model really works; Blendle[1] tried this, and they ended up switching to a subscription model. Having to decide "do I want to pay for this article?" isn't really what I want; I also paid for some articles that I ended up finding seriously shallow/disappointing. Many publishers have also stopped publishing on Blendle over the years. I guess they decided it wasn't profitable for them (or not profitable enough). The platform is still around, but I expect it won't be in a few years. It's still around, but the offering is severely reduced compared to a few years ago; I don't expect it will be around in a few years. I do agree it's a problem; I don't really want to subscribe to one or two newspapers in particular, but rather get interesting stuff from HN and other sources from a wide variety of publications. It would be prohibitively expensive to subscribe, so, I subscribe to two publications and bypass the paywalls on the rest. I don't know what else to do beyond, I guess, just not read it at all... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

LorenPechtel 4y ago
The basic problem here is few companies are willing to be cooperative. Look at the video market: We used to have a good solution: Netflix. However, a bunch of companies decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie and now we have a whole bunch of competing streaming services which basically got rid of the idea. It's not that Netflix wasn't a viable model, it was the companies being piggish. We see something of the sort with cable & satellite packages--companies who want to take a bigger piece of the pie and get upset when they get dropped or put into a separate package. The cost of entry into that market is so much higher that it hasn't totally fallen apart like the Netflix approach (yeah, Netflix is still out there--but the concept of being a one place for everything is gone. Too many companies want something exclusive to hope to lure you to them.)

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

Bluntly: I really don't think you do. You think you do, but you don't. Imagine you hit that paywall, and it says "get a subscription or pay 0.50c to see this one article". You seriously want me to believe you're gonna go bust out your wallet and punch in your credit card details and pay a fraction of a dollar instead of just closing the window and moving on? Okay, how about we reduce the friction and do the Post.news thing: you buy tokens and then use them. Are you really gonna go buy ten or twenty bucks worth of tokens for the few times when you hit a paid article? Sorry, no. I don't buy it. Every time I see someone say this, it honestly just sounds like an attempt to justify busting down that paywall or refusing to subscribe. "Gee, I would have paid for this article, but I can't... oh well." Ala carte payment friction combined with uncertainty about the value of the content (what if I pay a quarter and the article turns out to be garbage?) reduces the value of content to zero for most people. There's a reason no one has been able to make it work.

michaelt 4y ago

You might be interested in Blendle [1], a website which offers a variety of publications on a pay-per-article basis where you can charge up a wallet in advance. They offer publications like Time, the Economist, and the Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately it's somewhat expensive - $0.25-$0.50 per article. And they don't have any sort of automated way to jump from a newspaper's paywall straight to the Blendle article - you've got to find it through Blendle. And there selection of publications is somewhat limited. But there are companies out there trying to deliver something kind of close to what you're talking about! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

pacifika 4y ago

Blendle did this

hedora 4y ago

Apple News+ already does this, except that you pay a flat monthly fee, and they distribute 50% of it to news organizations: https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-know-about-apple-news-plus/ https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-k... Apple News is apparently the #1 news app globally, but it has a free tier. Here are paid subscription trends: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-subscribers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-...

asdff 4y ago

It would be great if your internet bill was based on your bandwidth, a portion of which covers the hosts fees for you using their bandwidth at some rate set by the isp. In this model, the barrier to create content falls to zero before long as you get readership that is able to sustain its load on your site on its own without the need for shoveling in advertisements or tracking. You'd also incentivize the development of smaller webpages since they would consume less bandwidth and cost less for a user, so given two sites they'd chose the less bloated one over time.