5 ms·

Subscription to a random entity I've never heard of before, for one article? Hell no. 50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggres

Subscription to a random entity I've never heard of before, for one article? Hell no. 50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggressive ads or tracked by 900 different companies? I'd be more than willing.

ta1243 1y ago
10 years ago a couple of sites I occasionally viewed used "agate", which is now called Axate. https://www.axate.com/ https://www.axate.com/ It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times. Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  I had hoped that Brave's BAT would get some kind of traction for similar use cases but it seems to be quickly going nowhere.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  The reality is that most people just want stuff free. They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    There's also a very real factor that we now consume from dozens if not hundreds of sources per month. The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      It opens up room for bundling maybe? People want to pay one subscription for everything whenever possible, like Netflix originally vs now. If you could pay 10 a month for a major newspaper + YouTube + some other tech sites that could be pretty attractive. (or whatever combinations - news and sports, porn and tech, IDK)
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        Maybe. I don't know how fantastic Apple's combined subscriptions are doing. Their news one is already priced higher than that (but I guess you get a lot of news sources).
    - ta1243 1y ago
      Hence platforms like axate, which make micropayments trivial. Want to read that NYT article? Fine, pay the 30 cents and read it. Want to read all the NYT articles? Subscribe for $20 a week. If Youtube wasn't owned by an advert company you could have the same -- creators could have a "pay 50c to watch this 30 minute video without adverts". I believe (haven't had youtube adverts for years) that the ad rates for western viewers are under 1 cent per view, with 1 advert every 5 minutes, so a 30 minute video would be 6 adverts or 5 cents. Youtube even has the funding built in via the "tip" mechanism.
afavour 1y ago
It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before. Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism: https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-by-article.php https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
- righthand 1y ago
  You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    > Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. This sounds like no true Scotsman. I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.
    - righthand 1y ago
      If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        I guess. Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?

ta1243 1y ago

10 years ago a couple of sites I occasionally viewed used "agate", which is now called Axate. https://www.axate.com/ https://www.axate.com/ It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times. Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.

rkomorn 1y ago
I had hoped that Brave's BAT would get some kind of traction for similar use cases but it seems to be quickly going nowhere.
Workaccount2 1y ago
The reality is that most people just want stuff free. They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  There's also a very real factor that we now consume from dozens if not hundreds of sources per month. The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    It opens up room for bundling maybe? People want to pay one subscription for everything whenever possible, like Netflix originally vs now. If you could pay 10 a month for a major newspaper + YouTube + some other tech sites that could be pretty attractive. (or whatever combinations - news and sports, porn and tech, IDK)
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      Maybe. I don't know how fantastic Apple's combined subscriptions are doing. Their news one is already priced higher than that (but I guess you get a lot of news sources).
  - ta1243 1y ago
    Hence platforms like axate, which make micropayments trivial. Want to read that NYT article? Fine, pay the 30 cents and read it. Want to read all the NYT articles? Subscribe for $20 a week. If Youtube wasn't owned by an advert company you could have the same -- creators could have a "pay 50c to watch this 30 minute video without adverts". I believe (haven't had youtube adverts for years) that the ad rates for western viewers are under 1 cent per view, with 1 advert every 5 minutes, so a 30 minute video would be 6 adverts or 5 cents. Youtube even has the funding built in via the "tip" mechanism.

afavour 1y ago

It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before. Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism: https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-by-article.php https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

righthand 1y ago
You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  > Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. This sounds like no true Scotsman. I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.
  - righthand 1y ago
    If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I guess. Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?