

Ask HN: What content do you pay for online? - AndrewWarner

This morning alexandros asked if HN readers would pay $5 to use HN. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467825)<p>That made me wonder if any of you pay for ANY content.<p>Here's the content I pay for:
Netflix
Audible
iTunes
======
floozyspeak
I think netflix, audible and itunes are different in that they provide
tangible "taste-able" content in that you get real something out of it.

The bigger question here is does anyone pay for news, informational content?

My answer would be no. I only pay to have my content managed- backpackit,
flickr, animoto

~~~
AndrewWarner
Like you, I tend to pay for tools. Version Tracker, Animoto, Flickr.

I wonder if anyone pays for any content, news or otherwise.

------
robw
I paid $5 for a MetaFilter account - good intentions, then never used it. That
was about 3 years ago.

Other stuff - last.fm, flickr (although its not the content that they charge
for), emusic. I wonder if the BBC iPlayer counts? There's a TV license after
all.

In terms of news/informational content, I have a subscribtion to New Scientist
(dead-tree format), which gives me access to their online archives. But I
didn't pay specifically for those archives. I was also a paid-up member of
Daring Fireball when John Gruber first went full-time with it. But again, that
was to get a shirt more than the content itself.

As moxy says, you can get pretty much anything free if you look hard enough.
Seems in my case I'm buying a physical item with 'free' content attached,
rather than the content itself.

------
moxy
I do not regularly pay for any online service. Why? Because there are an
enormity of free and open source alternatives. Granted, some "free
alternatives" aren't _entirely_ legal, however they're alternatives
nonetheless, just with an associated risk.

For movies and music, I use torrents. For applications, I go open source or
free -- I can hardly think of any non-entertainment media whose function
couldn't be replicated by a readily available free alternative. For storage,
there are plenty of sites which offer gigabytes of online storage, gratis.

------
robfitz
casual games mostly.. peggle, world of goo, etc.

if hacker news is content, then basecamp & fixx probably also count (team &
product news, respectively).

apart from that, i would pay for some TED talks, for high quality game reviews
(<http://tinyurl.com/cn5guu>), and for most of Andrew Chen's blog
(<http://andrewchenblog.com/>).

------
pclark
I paid for Last.FM & Flickr.

I don't pay for content it's just one source. Show me a _very good_ news
aggregator and I'd be tempted.

------
mikebo
Netflix, iTunes, amazon mp3, flickr

------
apage43
amazon mp3, lastfm; that's about it here.

