
Some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three? - jedwhite
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/so-some-people-will-pay-for-a-subscription-to-a-news-site-how-about-two-three/
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tomhoward
There's a newish product out of Australia I just heard of called Inkl, that's
seeking to solve this problem with a bundled subscription that includes the
Economist, the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Independent, and a premium
option that includes WSJ and Barrons.

[https://www.inkl.com/](https://www.inkl.com/)

Don't know how well they're doing or how good the product actually is, but it
seems like the right approach.

I don't have any affiliation with the company, but am acquainted with a guy
who's advising them on marketing/growth, which is how I heard about it.

------
CalRobert
The Guardian talks about their experience here:

[https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-
mi...](https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-milestone)

It's interesting inasmuch as the Guardian is trying to be reader-supported
without a paywall. You can be a "supporter" for €50 per year which, if I think
of it as buying a reporter a pint once a month, is basically nothing.

Of course, it's worth remembering that people on HN complain pretty loudly if
a paywalled link is shared. Have we considered revisiting that policy given
the vulnerabilities in primarily-advertiser-funded news sources?

------
happertiger
None of this moves the needle on anything that matters to me. I don’t want to
pay another subscription for yet another business that doesn’t offer material
benefit. I love the long form, but I want specific benefits that matter more
than as a matter of discourse.

News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will.
Ok. Why should I?

------
esotericn
I think it makes sense to distinguish between "news sites".

Can the Financial Times, Economist, Bloomberg and trade publications survive
on a paywall model? Probably - their readers likely consider them as
operational expenses.

But I don't see how the traditional newspapers can maintain their advantage
going forward.

If we develop a browser model that allows them to make money via
micropayments, convince people to sign up for it, and they actually use it,
some of them _might_ survive.

I think there's a lot of mental gymnastics happening here though - ultimately
I think they're gone unless outside funding keeps them alive (e.g. they
essentially become propaganda).

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alangibson
For years I've been thinking about a kind of loose bundling service where
subscriber would pay like 10 per month, but for no particular bundle of sites.
The business would then go out to sites that users are consuming and basically
say 'hey, we've got money for you'. They put some tracking code on their site
and start getting paid based on how much the services users consume. It's sort
of a push-based Patreon.

Never did it because the idea never sat right with me.

------
TorKlingberg
Someone needs to make a "Netflix for news", where you pay one monthly
subscription and get access to almost everything. Then distribute the money to
the sites I visit, just like Netflix or Spotify.

I see two challenges:

* Getting news sites on board. The more "premium" sites may be unwilling to give away access for cheap, but in general news orgs are desperate for a reliable income stream. Maybe a 20/articles per month limit would be fine for some sites.

* Unlike Netflix etc, it needs to work in more than one app: Each news sites own app, in the browser, and the mini-browsers inside social media apps. I don't want to type in passwords all the time just to read an article someone shared.

Apple is in a great position to do this. They have the experience with
iTunes/Apple Music, and they have the leverage to make one subscription work
in all apps. I just hope they don't intentionally break it on Android or
Windows.

------
blablabla123
Actually this has also something good. There is so much redundant news,
sometimes the Reuters messages are just copy&pasted. IMHO the only reasonable
development would be micro payments though. Being a heavy news reader, 3 or 4
is by far not enough - also I value my ability to choose where to read from
myself. So a paid Google News or so wouldn't really work for me, actually
their selection of articles got worse over the years.

------
z3t4
We need a micro-payment system for the web! So that you can pay per article.
Versus pulling up my credit card, using the banks second factor authorization,
and meanwhile knowing that 75% of the transaction is banking fees. Paypal
could have solved the problem, but instead choose short term profits and to
sale out, instead of long term - changing the world.

------
cornedor
Blendle is a great alternative, you can buy seperate articles for a few cents
from a lot of different papers. It's a Dutch company, and they have almost all
Dutch newspapers, but they also have American news papers

[https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/](https://launch.blendle.com/publishers/)

~~~
loganwedwards
I will second Blendle. I found it via HN recently and signed up. Being USA-
based, I found that NYT and Economist are both available, which are value-adds
for me. For example, I paid $0.19 to read a short NYT article, which seemed
fair to me.

------
harias
I would really like to see Wikinews succeeding. HN community can help it
succeed in tech if we start contributing.

~~~
jmcgough
I just can't see wikinews doing serious investigative journalism, though,
which is one of the major reasons that news corps like WaPo are worth
supporting. A talented journalist can work on a major story for months (like
in the Theranos bombshell), and you need to be paying someone a salary as well
as money for flights/hotels.

Wikinews is a nice idea, but the vast majority of its news is just wikipedia-
style sourcing of other news organizations. The original research it does
seems to be mostly Q&A interviews.

------
davedx
I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use
one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different
perspectives from each side of the ocean, and they both do great journalism
that I want to support (IMO).

I would definitely pay for a third if I thought it was worth it to me. I can
imagine if I was in finance I’d pay for FT or something.

~~~
justincormack
The FT is a great general paper, I pay for it although I no longer work in
finance. Probably the best UK paper.

~~~
heavenlyblue
I don’t work in finance exactly, but only pay for them. But I would rather pay
per article over several websites instead anyway.

------
ggm
Nope. I pay one (the guardian) and I graze the rest because they're very
expensive by comparison for at best no better and often worse content for me.

I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch
press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion
masquerades as fact. I don't want to live in a bubble but I can see my on bias
is quite strong in this: maybe I just recognize editorial markup more clearly
in what I pay for.

I'd rather pay another European or Asian source than the exemplar rates in
this article.

~~~
coldtea
> _I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert
> Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion
> masquerades as fact._

That's a great practice. But even better to step beyond both "oppositional"
sides, and check alternative sources that are not partisan of the two parties
that alternate in power in each country.

~~~
humanrebar
My concern about all these pay per view plans in this thread is that they will
discourage cross pollination. We will be not just learning about other
perspectives but paying for them.

------
AndrewDucker
This is why I think the best way forward is for groups of news sites to come
together with a single paid login to gain access to them, and then profit-
share based on percentage of views each site gets.

Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent
and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox
News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the
occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.

~~~
yhoiseth
I think you may be onto something. But what about the incentives to click-bait
this creates?

When I pay for content, I want the creators' incentives to be aligned with
mine (high-quality content not designed to draw me in by appealing to my
lizard brain).

~~~
klausjensen
This is a very important point that cannot be emphasized enough.

My first developer-gig was working at a regional newspaper back in 98-99.

Back then, we talked about personalized experience, how we could tailor it to
the individual based on preferences.

I would come to the website and see a tailored mix of articles suited to my
need. Some based on my interests and preferences, but not too siloed off, so I
would still see the very important general news. It would be run by an
organization I trust to be reasonably objective.

That is the kind of news service I would pay to use TODAY. I would pay
10-20EUR/month for it.

Today, I don't think that product exists. If it does, I am not aware of it.

~~~
mywacaday
I think you loose something by having a personalised news experience. There is
something to be said for reading articles that might challenge your beliefs,
personalisation of news may not be the best path forward for society. I've
also found
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/) to
be an eye opener on what doesn't get reported on main stream news sites.

