That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe.
Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"
Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.
So Twitter acquired and killed it.
But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?
The problem is that the horrendousness doesn’t drive people to pay, it drives them to social media.
And a big part of this is that local papers consider their online presence secondary to print. So paying will get you a physical newspaper and unlimited access to the worst site in the world
Information wants to be free.
I can think of many marketing formulas that would definitely work but since the game is not legwork but propaganda the industry should just die.
(this is a big part of my consumption, and is combined with scrolling HN/reddit headlines; often to paywalled sites, which leads me to mostly reading comment discussions on those two sites)
(edit: disclaimer after reading a few other comments: I use Android; so don't have personal experience with Apple News, which may in fact be significantly different/better product)
I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.
I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.
I would be willing to pay for content, but not for an aggregator.
Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.
I'm not suggesting that paying monthly fees or paywalls are a solution to the problem either.
The real solution is to stop reading the news IMO. Let these companies go out of business and get replaced by something better. If one must read the news, just use an aggregator and archive.is for bypassing paywalls.
It's almost certainly going to get enshittified eventually, but more than that, it purposely pushing a false "Left vs Right" narrative about news. That's part of the problem.
Also the way they summarize every story into just a few bullet points (which, if it isn't already written by AI, surely will be) IMO is actively downplaying important issues, in an attempt to defuse false energy in reporting of less important issues. Artificially downplaying serious stuff is as detrimental as artificially overplaying non-serious stuff.
The Google Pixel "news" feed has the same problem now that it does AI "summaries"
Like it's great that they aggregate a lot and show you articles from publications you wouldn't otherwise see, but I just cannot trust them in the future.
Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.
Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.
Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
The news is toxic propaganda, and nothing more. Nothing actionable.
Avoid at all costs.
A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.
If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.
not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly
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.
jawns•52m ago
We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.
You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.
What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.
I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.
I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.
But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
eithel•48m ago
nikole9696•37m ago
rlue•45m ago
Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
stetrain•44m ago
A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
cogman10•22m ago
The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.
I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
closewith•44m ago
carlosjobim•30m ago
eli•21m ago
But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
pier25•44m ago
Also, how's the deal between the distributor and the news outlets? Do you get paid according to views or is it a flat fee?
hinkley•40m ago
jawns•38m ago
hinkley•23m ago
carlosjobim•32m ago
That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
eli•23m ago
Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)
Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.
Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.
Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
cyberax•2m ago
Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.
parpfish•18m ago