4 ms·

I think one interesting model missing is the cross publisher subscription model. Think Netflix for Journalism. I send in 10 dollars a month for access to a bu

by aero142 13y ago

I think one interesting model missing is the cross publisher subscription model. Think Netflix for Journalism. I send in 10 dollars a month for access to a bunch of different Journalism sites. The publishers get paid a bulk rate for access for the subscriber base. If you're not a member, you get more adds of hit the paywall on those sites. The problem is that it's a very difficult business to start and run and has less money in it than the Movie and TV industry.

robryan 13y ago
That could work, you could also attach discovery services to it, something like the front page you see here on hacker news. It likely won't be enough to end problems for publishers but could at least open up a revenue stream that doesn't exist.
jacques_chester 13y ago
It so happens I am working on something like this, but I am not the first. Kachingle have tried and not really caught fire (partly because of their ... um ... commercial eccentricities), Contenture tried and gave up. I call it "microsubscription" as it combines elements of subscription and micropayments. Persons wishing to hear more are invited to email me.
nwzpaperman 13y ago
Rupert Murdoch dumped about $30 million into project Alesia and shut it down due to no scalable way to allocate/share revenues. Aka the cross-publisher deals couldn't be made. Music and video are different in that the monetary values are greater than individual monetary values of news articles. It's easy to win damages on a/v DMCA violations, but not so on articles from a bundled periodical.
Perceval 13y ago
Apple could do this. They already have 400 million credit cards linked to iTunes accounts. Instead of subscribing to an individual newspaper/magazine in their shitty Newsstand app, you could instead subscribe to the news and have access to all of the news. You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. They could have a premium section - kinda like cable companies offer high end channels separately (e.g. HBO) – where you could subscribe to specialized market/business news (e.g. market portions of WSJ and FT and Bloomberg, etc). The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. And also to get basically all the major newspapers and magazines to sign on to the scheme. It would probably be more difficult to achieve than negotiating with the music labels for their catalogs. But the longer they keep bleeding cash, the easier the negotiations will get.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. This is the model Kachingle have tried and Contenture tried. And a few others, actually. Nobody's made it stick yet. Apart from Apple I could see PayPal, Google and Facebook trying to make it work. The problem is that no major media source is going to trust a different major corporaton with their livelihoods in any all-or-nothing scheme. So there's room for a smaller player to grow into the role. Which is what I've been working on. > The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. Actually, no it's not. It's possible to do this reliably without forcing everyone through a paywall. I know, because I developed a technology to do exactly this. It allows publishers to selectively allow users through based on a general aggregate scheme alongside their own paywall schemes. Or they can be open to the web and collect from members only.

by aero142 13y ago

robryan 13y ago

That could work, you could also attach discovery services to it, something like the front page you see here on hacker news. It likely won't be enough to end problems for publishers but could at least open up a revenue stream that doesn't exist.

jacques_chester 13y ago

It so happens I am working on something like this, but I am not the first. Kachingle have tried and not really caught fire (partly because of their ... um ... commercial eccentricities), Contenture tried and gave up. I call it "microsubscription" as it combines elements of subscription and micropayments. Persons wishing to hear more are invited to email me.

nwzpaperman 13y ago

Rupert Murdoch dumped about $30 million into project Alesia and shut it down due to no scalable way to allocate/share revenues. Aka the cross-publisher deals couldn't be made. Music and video are different in that the monetary values are greater than individual monetary values of news articles. It's easy to win damages on a/v DMCA violations, but not so on articles from a bundled periodical.

Perceval 13y ago

Apple could do this. They already have 400 million credit cards linked to iTunes accounts. Instead of subscribing to an individual newspaper/magazine in their shitty Newsstand app, you could instead subscribe to the news and have access to all of the news. You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. They could have a premium section - kinda like cable companies offer high end channels separately (e.g. HBO) – where you could subscribe to specialized market/business news (e.g. market portions of WSJ and FT and Bloomberg, etc). The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. And also to get basically all the major newspapers and magazines to sign on to the scheme. It would probably be more difficult to achieve than negotiating with the music labels for their catalogs. But the longer they keep bleeding cash, the easier the negotiations will get.

jacques_chester 13y ago
> You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. This is the model Kachingle have tried and Contenture tried. And a few others, actually. Nobody's made it stick yet. Apart from Apple I could see PayPal, Google and Facebook trying to make it work. The problem is that no major media source is going to trust a different major corporaton with their livelihoods in any all-or-nothing scheme. So there's room for a smaller player to grow into the role. Which is what I've been working on. > The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. Actually, no it's not. It's possible to do this reliably without forcing everyone through a paywall. I know, because I developed a technology to do exactly this. It allows publishers to selectively allow users through based on a general aggregate scheme alongside their own paywall schemes. Or they can be open to the web and collect from members only.