9 ms·

It's unfortunate - the issue is in the age of the internet people read news from many different sources. Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unle

• dilippkumar 3y ago
  > Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader. I used to subscribe to The Information. They had really high quality content consistently. But then they got greedy and introduced an even more expensive plan and moved a bunch of features to that more expensive plan, and what’s left in the lower tier (but still hundreds of $$) subscription is kinda crap. I’m not sure I want to renew my subscription this year.
  • ryanSrich 3y ago
    I noticed a decrease in the quality of their content as well. I did the entry level deal back when they offered 3 months for a $1 (I think that was the price - you used to be able to find it in Jessica’s Twitter bio). I got hooked and bought an annual subscription. But after they jacked the price up, and also started writing content that felt a bit too opinionated I bailed.
  • whakim 3y ago
    I used to work at The Information. The owners are extremely wealthy, and were constantly pushing to charge more, more, more. The recent subscription changes didn't surprise me in the slightest.
• HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  One good idea I've had (that anyone here is welcome to take, I'm not going to attempt it) is a sort of micro-payments model for news. Like, for example, if I want to read an article from NYT, through some sort of browser extension, I pay them a small fee (let's say 5 cents) for access to that article with no ads. Each website can set their own 'fee' to read their articles, and at the end of the month I can 'settle' the bill with the extension. Either that, or I pay some flat fee to the service and they pay articles a flat fee, like Spotify.
  • MicropenisMike 3y ago
    Similar but not exactly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
  • chrsstrm 3y ago
    If I had a nickel for every time I've been pitched an app/system like that over the past couple years, well, then I'd have plenty of money to pay for news subscriptions. It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem. The hardest parts will be money transmission and getting everyone to agree to your standards and processes (in a way that gets them paid and doesn't steer potential paying eyes off to a competitor because you want to build a platform or marketplace instead of an add-on payment tool). Of course with all the new things happening in fintech, this type of system is not that hard to build today.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      Technology is a non-issue IMO. People don't want micropayments for the most part. Some people tolerated "midi-payments" for songs and mobile apps to some degree but even that has mostly migrated to subscriptions and "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
      • ncallaway 3y ago
        It’s really the credit card fees that make it non-viable. That and it’s hard to charge someone $10 to read a $.99 article, and promise them they’ll have $9 in credits they can use in the future. That and network effects. If I had the option to pay $1 each time NYT or other sources pay-walled me out, they’d have a lot of my money.
        • ghaff 3y ago
          I'm pretty sure you're in the small minority. If people were clamoring for micropayments, there's a large fintech/startup world that would find a way to make it work. (And Apple sold/sells $0.99 apps.)
• keepamovin 3y ago
  Probably hard to do deals with publishing companies. I thought of this back in 2015. Maybe i should revive it. At one point i thought there was one called bundle news or something.
• mc32 3y ago
  I think consumers would pay for access to X number of subscriptions for Y dollars per month. Probably the sticking point is the publishers wanting bigger shares. But yeah, bundling from a consumer perspective would be great —so long as they can select ala carte from a good catalogue of publishers.
• LVB 3y ago
  Isn’t this what Apple News+ is for $10/month, at least roughly? I do wish there were more options to choose what’s in the bundle though.
  • hedora 3y ago
    They pay the publishers based on what articles you read, so you get to choose what is in the bundle, but not the price of the bundle. The main problem with the model is that it encourages clickbait titles. The secondary problem is that many people that want to support independent journalism also dislike walled gardens.
• silverbax88 3y ago
  There is/was one, Blendle, and it was great. It's still around but the last time I checked it wasn't clear if they were still getting updated content.
• j16sdiz 3y ago
  You meant, like music streaming? Artist don't make a living from music streaming.. They get money from live shows, swags and other performance. Steaming typically make less than 10% of what they need. I am not sure this model would work for news.
  • gramie 3y ago
    The problem is that musicians (except, again, from the top-tier ones) aren't making money from live shows either. Tours are being cancelled because they end up costing the artists money.
    • hattmall 3y ago
      Friend of mine is a big name artist. He has to pay his record label everytime he performs his songs. For big tours he gets exactly one dollar of each ticket. He can make money off of other stuff though depending on how the show is setup he can get money from alcohol and merchandise sales. He's done smaller sets of shows where they charge him 30-50k to perform even if the record label had no part whatsoever in putting the shows together. Like if he wants to play at a local bar where we grew up he has to pay them.
      • doubleg72 3y ago
        Sounds like a horrible contract your friend signed. I too have a similar friend who plays many local gigs when in town.
    • jimt1234 3y ago
      It's even worse, as the musical acts (once again, excluding Taylor Swift) that are able to survive/thrive from live shows are generally DJs or other low-overhead acts. DJs and other low-overhead acts go on the road with basically just an iPod. Exaggerated, but the point is that traditional bands can't compete, there's too much overhead (lots of equipment to travel with and maintain, more people to feed and manage, etc.)
      • 3y ago
• ghaff 3y ago
  Literally all you can eat is probably more than most people would pay given that it wouldn't be that hard to hit $1000/year with a large handful of top news sources plus some specialty providers. NYT/New Yorker/Economist/Atlantic/some more political mags/some recreational sports/etc. And as has been discussed for more than a couple decades, people mostly aren't willing to pay the mental transaction costs for micropayments at a sustainable level. Some of it is probably the news/magazine businesses' fault in that they opened up the floodgates for free content during dot-com. But people wouldn't have liked the alternative either which was probably draconian paywalls and lawsuits over unauthorized content access.
• donohoe 3y ago
  There have been - many. The economics never work out. Here was just one example: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-scroll-subscription-service-news-revue-newsletter https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-sc...
• loganwedwards 3y ago
  Have you tried Blendle? It semi solves this problem with a “pay per article” model, usually around $.50 each.
• jjtheblunt 3y ago
  There was exactly that service as an iphone app about ten years ago, though i can’t recall the name. Edit: another comment named it as blendle.
• wheels 3y ago
  It's been tried, a lot. What's perhaps curious is that some major media conglomerate hasn't pushed it -- a Hulu for journalism or something. There's enough consolidation in media that I find that somewhat surprising. I'd be happier to pay for a bundle subscription than individual things. I subscribe to the Washington Post, and regularly donate to The Guardian, but for everywhere else, a full subscription just doesn't make sense for the 1-2 articles I may read a month.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    The owners just want the journalists gone. Rather, the want them licking their hands. Mission accomplished. The proletariate was getting uppity.
    • Y_Y 3y ago
      Is "licking their hands" an idiom? It's not familiar to me and useless Google only finds dog behaviour articles.
• fovc 3y ago
  Here to plug blendl again!
• gsatic 3y ago
  Thats cause no one talks about Collective Attention available (Demand). Thats not increasing. In fact its getting overloaded and disintegrating from the info tsunami. The UN report on the Attention Economy says only .5% of content produced is consumed. What a useless and mindless achievement of the content creator class. Instead of talking about that there is never ending jabber about supporting Content Creation (Supply). Cuz People love receiving attention much more than they are capable of doling it out (Goldharber's Attention Inequality). On top of that Broadcast tools have become cheap, distribution has become cheap, content creators a dim a dozen. So its a system with runaway Supply. Now mostly mistaking meeting sudden random huge spikes in Demand for success. So dont ask your kids to get into content creation, unless they have infinite Trump like self promoting energies.
• barbariangrunge 3y ago
  I wanted to build that once. The "cable" of the internet. One subscription, hundreds of websites, plus opportunities for each site to cross promote a little, via deals on ads or a quota of free ads within the network maybe. Plus heavy curation, to make sure every site in the network is high quality. But it's 99% b2b networking and sales, trying to get websites on board and then negotiating contracts, and it sounded pretty unpleasant for a technical person to pursue. I don't know why there aren't dozens of these. I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform, and aggregation is unappealing to them. But there's a lot of money just waiting for whoever does it, and it should benefit writers a fair bit too--they'll actually be able to get paid under this scheme; and a $10/month subscription might actually be worthwhile, instead of getting only a single website as it is today
  • yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
    > I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform, But this is not about distribution platform. It's about the payment platform. They can all distribute in any way they like, as long as there is only one payment aggrgator.
    • stevenwliao 3y ago
      Every newspaper already has a payment platform. The only value add is distribution.
      • yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
        [flagged]
• taylorfinley 3y ago
  I have this hair-brained vision of a world where all of the content is available on all the platforms that want to distribute it. In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API. Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like. In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!
  • jonahbenton 3y ago
    You may know this, but if not, fantasies like this in the digital world date back to Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson (who is still alive!). The unfortunate reality is that they are based on a different networking physics, whose primary purpose is to enforce Intellectual Property. Such a physics in practice is unusable. "Worse is better" dominates both in media as well as in engineering.
    • thinkmassive 3y ago
      It already exists: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture I’m not sure if lsat.tech is having issues, looks like the protocol was recently renamed L402: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l402 https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
  • palata 3y ago
• stev-0 3y ago
  This is what blendle.com does. I expected them to be a bigger success than are, retrospectively as well. I guess that’s why I’m not an entrepreneur. :)
• lisper 3y ago
  This exists. It's called Blendle. But it's not available in the U.S., only Europe.
  • midasuni 3y ago
    I used agate in the past, but not enough people are willing to pay, and not enough publishers are willing to bother trying something beyond adverts Those that do and are clearly aren’t enough to be sustainable https://web.archive.org/web/20180128171037/http://agate.one/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180128171037/http://agate.one/
  • MagnumOpus 3y ago
    I used it for a bit a few years ago, but the articles cost way too much - on the order of magnitude of 50c per article rather than 5c. Every publisher overvalues their own work and guarantees that it will be read by 100x fewer people than otherwise.
• ayewo 3y ago
  > I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news .. Apple News?