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Good point. It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'. If I see an article in the NYT here for example I can't open it, and they wa

Good point. It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'. If I see an article in the NYT here for example I can't open it, and they want me to sign up for a subscription. Getting a monthly sub might make sense if I'd lived in NY and read it every day, but really for the 2-3 articles per month linked from elsewhere it really does not. It's a bit disingenious. Meanwhile it's not just the NYT I see links from but also the WaPo, atlantic, medium etc etc. I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to. It feels like they are stuck in their old business model without considering how to move forward.

Terr_ 3y ago
> It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'. I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround. In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work. (Also, I don't think cryptocurrencies will rescue it, they have their own problems.) > I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to. I'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets.
- rhelz 3y ago
  // in the late 90's ... // Yeah, it was well known even in the early days of the internet that this would be a problem. The pioneers were not entirely unsuccessful in developing methods for which people could get paid---we know who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are because of PayPal. It was far short of their original goals, but at least they were trying to solve the right problem.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    PayPal was not about micropayments though. And its transaction costs are higher than banks (at least European banks, not sure about US). They were never the solution. I have to admit I use them a lot now but it's mainly because my own bank has a really retarded SecureCode implementation that I need to use their ridiculously horrible app for. So I tend to ignore it and just use PayPal where I can simply use my Yubikey for auth.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas. This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it. The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars. What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax. Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious. This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain. But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround. > In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work. Yeah but something has to happen. It's just idiocy to think that users will subscribe to every publication they visit a handful of times per month. There must be some way to make this happen. > 'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets. In other words an industry-created problem

Terr_ 3y ago

> It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'. I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround. In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work. (Also, I don't think cryptocurrencies will rescue it, they have their own problems.) > I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to. I'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets.

rhelz 3y ago
// in the late 90's ... // Yeah, it was well known even in the early days of the internet that this would be a problem. The pioneers were not entirely unsuccessful in developing methods for which people could get paid---we know who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are because of PayPal. It was far short of their original goals, but at least they were trying to solve the right problem.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  PayPal was not about micropayments though. And its transaction costs are higher than banks (at least European banks, not sure about US). They were never the solution. I have to admit I use them a lot now but it's mainly because my own bank has a really retarded SecureCode implementation that I need to use their ridiculously horrible app for. So I tend to ignore it and just use PayPal where I can simply use my Yubikey for auth.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas. This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it. The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars. What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax. Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious. This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain. But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.
wkat4242 3y ago
> I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround. > In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work. Yeah but something has to happen. It's just idiocy to think that users will subscribe to every publication they visit a handful of times per month. There must be some way to make this happen. > 'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets. In other words an industry-created problem