Maybe I should go back to paying [7 bucks](https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers) every time I want to sit down and read the news.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
Graphic (imgbb)
If it's going to be per-view, who is going to be fighting ad^H^H view fraud, and what would be their incentive to do so?
If this this going to be fixed amount per content creator, why won't every random person sign up to be one?
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
Let's not blame the players for the game rules being flawed.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
teeray•4h ago
yorwba•28m ago