4 ms·

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuiti

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free. You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style. This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.

makestuff 8mo ago
Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150. I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
- bscphil 8mo ago
  This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support. (In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    Isn't that the YouTube premium model? You pay a fixed monthly fee, Google takes a cut and the rest is divided among the channels you watch. It's supposedly in proportion to the watch time you've allocated to each of them, but I'm not sure that's ever been confirmed.
    - JambalayaJimbo 8mo ago
      That’s the Spotify model.
      - BigGreenJorts 8mo ago
        I thought Spotify's model is all subscriptions go into one pool that gets divided by platform wide listen time. EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
- Gigachad 8mo ago
  It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them. Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
  - Paracompact 8mo ago
    How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill. I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following: (1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming paranoia that your data is going to be abused; (2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same amount of marginal extra content; (3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia. Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
    - 8organicbits 8mo ago
      Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
      - Paracompact 8mo ago
        > I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers. Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing. > Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.
Retric 8mo ago
Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.
StanislavPetrov 8mo ago
Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this means spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee. Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.
PantaloonFlames 8mo ago
It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of - cable bundles - aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV) - pay per view (Prime or YT TV) And somehow all of these models now coexist.
- Telemakhos 8mo ago
  Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0]. Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted. And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
linsomniac 8mo ago
>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them. It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it
- eli 8mo ago
  Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work. Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article. Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
- CrazyStat 8mo ago
  Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe. [1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micropayments-for-news-is-getting-out-of-the-micropayments-business/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...
1659447091 8mo ago
> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. Apple News+ is ~$13 https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ The list of publications included https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/
- ErikCorry 8mo ago
  $13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  Yup, this is both the solution and the problem. Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple. But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled. And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
- jasode 8mo ago
  >Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-articles-in-some-newspapers-in-applenews.2427980/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...
  - 1659447091 8mo ago
    I see that happen in the free Apple News, but had not seen it with the Apple News+ subscription. They may be confusing the 2, similar to how people confuse Apple TV: separately a device, an app, and a subscription service
bobro 8mo ago
>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.
- servo_sausage 8mo ago
  The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery... If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying. With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.
- subpixel 8mo ago
  In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.
scuff3d 8mo ago
I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere. If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense. And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.
- TheGRS 8mo ago
  We could make a loot box for news! Maybe you get today's WSJ, maybe you get a National Enquirer.
mmooss 8mo ago
> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings. People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace. iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
akoboldfrying 8mo ago
> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time). It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.

makestuff 8mo ago

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150. I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.

bscphil 8mo ago
This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support. (In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  Isn't that the YouTube premium model? You pay a fixed monthly fee, Google takes a cut and the rest is divided among the channels you watch. It's supposedly in proportion to the watch time you've allocated to each of them, but I'm not sure that's ever been confirmed.
  - JambalayaJimbo 8mo ago
    That’s the Spotify model.
    - BigGreenJorts 8mo ago
      I thought Spotify's model is all subscriptions go into one pool that gets divided by platform wide listen time. EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
Gigachad 8mo ago
It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them. Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
- Paracompact 8mo ago
  How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill. I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following: (1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming paranoia that your data is going to be abused; (2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same amount of marginal extra content; (3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia. Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
  - 8organicbits 8mo ago
    Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
    - Paracompact 8mo ago
      > I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers. Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing. > Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.

Retric 8mo ago

Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.

StanislavPetrov 8mo ago

Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this means spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee. Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.

PantaloonFlames 8mo ago

It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of - cable bundles - aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV) - pay per view (Prime or YT TV) And somehow all of these models now coexist.

Telemakhos 8mo ago
Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0]. Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted. And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...

linsomniac 8mo ago

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them. It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...

Forgeties79 8mo ago
Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it
eli 8mo ago
Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work. Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article. Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
CrazyStat 8mo ago
Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe. [1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micropayments-for-news-is-getting-out-of-the-micropayments-business/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

1659447091 8mo ago

> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. Apple News+ is ~$13 https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ The list of publications included https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

ErikCorry 8mo ago
$13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?
crazygringo 8mo ago
Yup, this is both the solution and the problem. Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple. But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled. And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
jasode 8mo ago
>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-articles-in-some-newspapers-in-applenews.2427980/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...
- 1659447091 8mo ago
  I see that happen in the free Apple News, but had not seen it with the Apple News+ subscription. They may be confusing the 2, similar to how people confuse Apple TV: separately a device, an app, and a subscription service

bobro 8mo ago

>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.

servo_sausage 8mo ago
The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery... If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying. With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.
subpixel 8mo ago
In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.

scuff3d 8mo ago

I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere. If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense. And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.

TheGRS 8mo ago
We could make a loot box for news! Maybe you get today's WSJ, maybe you get a National Enquirer.

mmooss 8mo ago

> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings. People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace. iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.

akoboldfrying 8mo ago

> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time). It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.