One good idea I've had (that anyone here is welcome to take, I'm not going to attempt it) is a sort of micro-payments model for news.
Like, for example, if I want to read an article from NYT, through some sort of browser extension, I pay them a small fee (let's say 5 cents) for access to that article with no ads. Each website can set their own 'fee' to read their articles, and at the end of the month I can 'settle' the bill with the extension. Either that, or I pay some flat fee to the service and they pay articles a flat fee, like Spotify.
If I had a nickel for every time I've been pitched an app/system like that over the past couple years, well, then I'd have plenty of money to pay for news subscriptions. It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem. The hardest parts will be money transmission and getting everyone to agree to your standards and processes (in a way that gets them paid and doesn't steer potential paying eyes off to a competitor because you want to build a platform or marketplace instead of an add-on payment tool). Of course with all the new things happening in fintech, this type of system is not that hard to build today.
Technology is a non-issue IMO. People don't want micropayments for the most part. Some people tolerated "midi-payments" for songs and mobile apps to some degree but even that has mostly migrated to subscriptions and "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
People don't want micropayments because even now in 2023 the entire payments industry seems to not be able to design a payment flow that doesn't suck. The UX on almost all payments is just terrible. Being gated behind login flows, awkward input forms, TOU acceptance dialogues, receipt and confirmation screens, and being bounced back and forth between the store and third-party systems is just an overall awful experience. I don't care how much something costs, if it takes me more time to pay for an article than it does to read it, I'm out. I still remember the very first time I used Google Pay on my Android in a physical store as it was such a magical experience. I actually stopped myself twice on the way out of the store to do a double-take at my receipt to confirm I had actually paid - it was that fast and easy. Micropayments need that magic and speed. If the only thing standing between me and an article I'm interested in is a FaceID auth, that's very acceptable. This flow can be done today, it's just that no one is willing to strip the process down to its most basic form. If you can solve that first step then there's only 99 more problems to go.
I think it's actually because people don't like spending money, even very small amounts, for things they have decided fall in the 'free' category. As previous poster said, it's a monkey problem, not a tech problem.
Yet, "free to play" games are ludicrously profitable. Surely a large part of that is addiction, but there also is a tech problem here. If paying for a newspaper article has lots of friction (sign up here, confirm email, credit card, 2 factor confirmation, now you have a subscription instead of just buying; cancelation only by carrier pigeon at midnight), then no way.
That is also why the Google and apple appstores can charge such large fees. Sure, buying on websites and sideloading are possible but much higher friction -> many customers simply won't bother.
I don't think so, the media has been pretty resistant to providing this kind of model. If they allow you to read a single article cheaply it would mean a lot of lost subscriptions and it isn't easy to price individual pieces of content.
It’s really the credit card fees that make it non-viable. That and it’s hard to charge someone $10 to read a $.99 article, and promise them they’ll have $9 in credits they can use in the future. That and network effects.
If I had the option to pay $1 each time NYT or other sources pay-walled me out, they’d have a lot of my money.
I'm pretty sure you're in the small minority. If people were clamoring for micropayments, there's a large fintech/startup world that would find a way to make it work. (And Apple sold/sells $0.99 apps.)
Probably 4-7 dollars before you read something not worth the dollar and give up.
Would you be willing to pay for all content? Reading the first few 2 pages here would cost 60 dollars. Should you be paying to read everyone's comments?
I topped up a multi site system back in 2018 with £3, something like 10p an article. PayPal I think, but fine sat online payment cost 10% fir that or 30p, still worth it for the publisher.
Alas not enough readers used the system and it shut down. People don’t want to pay.
> It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem.
Micro-transactions wouldn’t eliminate ads. How many years did people buy ad filled newspapers or magazines? How about paying for cable tv that channels show ads on in between tv show segments that also do in content ad placement? You’re just describing another source of revenue for websites, not the only one.
Paid users are better target for ads, so they cost more. Users are paying to self-select them for the costly, highly targeted ads, increasing income and reducing expenses. Win-Win
> I still say the web would be better than it is now, if microtransactions had been built into protocols ASAP.
No, for dog’s sake! Microtransactions are a cancer and come with perverse incentives leading to enshitification of everything they touch. They would not solve any issue with clickbait or sensationalism. Plus, I am not going to count pennies when I read news online or manage yet another pseudo-currency.
Some kind of all-you-can-read aggregated subscription is much, much better: more reader-friendly, it comes with incentives to keep readers happy on the long term, and media don’t need to rely only on hit pieces. In fact, Apple News would be close to perfect if it weren’t siloed into its app. I’d sign up with a decent competitor in a heart beat.
> An all you can read aggregated source is pretty much micropayments with an extra step involved.
From the user’s perspective, it is one less step involved. We just have to pay x every months and not think about it. We don’t have to babysit yet another number going up or down on yet another account.
> It's not a business model media companies are typically too eager to be involved with in either case.
Yeah, and I imagine the value proposition is not great, from what we’ve seen in music streaming services. Still, for me it would be better than either paywalls or microtransactions.
We already have the Payment Request API, which is more than enough to handle this. My general view on the "process" mostly revolves around the UX from the customer's perspective. Someone needs to build a flow and say, this is how it works, take it or leave it.
That’s basically the model of Apple News Plus, although it’s Apple ecosystem-specific. Users pay 10$ a month to get access to selected publishers via the Apple News app and then Apple takes 50% of the subscription revenue and splits the rest with publishers based on the number of times an article is read[0]. I don’t think it got any significant traction though as I haven’t really heard anything about it since it was launched 4 years ago.
It seems hard to justify a 50% take rate for this kind of service. I guess 50% is better than nothing, but it's still kind of shit. If apple is trying to be an aggregator (ie. drive traffic) it makes more sense, but for most news services IMO they don't need an aggregator - they just need some kind of payment arrangement, presumably with a much lower take rate (on the order of 5% or somesuch)
Even the "Plus" articles are still crammed with ads by the publishers, which makes the experience categoricallly worse than just reading on the web with adblockers.
I see so many complaints here about adverts. How much extra would you pay to read news without any adverts? I guarantee that it isn't enough to offset lost revenue from adverts. This is the primary reason why online news has so many adverts.
In the U.K. sky charges its customers a subscription. They have adverts on top of that. Last time I read he financial report adverts accounted for 1/10th of subscription income
I.e instead of paying sky £30 a month and having 1/3rd of content adverts, you could pay £33 a month and have no adverts.
It’s similar with the underground in london. I pay £3 to take a journey and am plastered with adverts. Instead £3.30 and there would be no need for adverts
These companies don’t offer that as free experience though. With sky there are alternates (streaming, or if that falls to the advert curse then pirate bay), with the underground alas no alternatives.
The answers in this thread are essentially all under $1. There seems to be not much rationale behind these numbers besides "it should be cheaper," so the anchor point is probably $0.
Apple News Plus almost sort-of makes sense as part of a broader package that lumps a decent, though far from comprehensive news bundle in as part of a broader subscription offering. (Sort of like Prime though Prime doesn't have news, in that enough people just have to find one or two components they value.)
But, as you say, it really hasn't taken off. A few news pubs that apparently are doing OK aside, people are an endless font of excuses about why they won't pay (or they just don't) even though many people routinely subscribed to a newspaper and a bunch of magazines.
> people are an endless font of excuses about why they won't pay (or they just don't) even though many people routinely subscribed to a newspaper and a bunch of magazines.
That’s not really fair. Back when magazine subscriptions were a thing, you weren’t exposed as much to other magazines or newspapers you were not subscribed to, or if you were you could just read them. Cafés used to have newspapers, various places with waiting rooms used to have stacks of magazines and nobody tried to shame you for reading without paying.
As a matter or fact, I am subscribed to the Atlantic and 3 newspaper’s websites (in different languages), which is equivalent to what my parents did when I was a kid. But I am not going to get a subscription for the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times, or some random local news website every time someone links to a story there.
I don't really disagree you had your magazine and maybe newspaper subscriptions and otherwise you mostly went without other than occasionally going to the library, surfing in a waiting room, picking up a free newspaper, etc. If you didn't care enough about a publication to subscribe you mostly did without and you were generally fine with that because you were unaware that you were missing anything.
Is that NYT article my 5 cents paid for going to be written by a real well-paid journalist who wrote the story without AI and will that article have spent even a moment with an actual well-paid editor or will I get a long-form regurgitation of something from twitter or APnews?
A lot of articles on the internet today aren't worth the free click I'm giving them now. A micro-transaction system is only going to work if the content is better than what we're getting today. You need to find a company who is willing to invest in high-paid professional investigative journalism and editors before you can convince people to shell out pennies to read their news online. Spotify works because the content was desirable and worth the subscription fee first.
At the same time, you also can't paywall off the content for non-subscribers. People want to share and talk about great news stories and a service should let them the same way we can listen to just about any song on youtube without paying spotify a dime. At that point, you can offer what amounts to a tip jar and an ad free experience.
You are setting a very high bar here. What do you consider "high quality news source"? And what do you read / consume? And what do you think it should cost? I guarantee that you will not be paying enough for what you demand.
A lot of articles on the internet today aren't worth the free click I'm giving them now.
And yet, you continue to click them.
the same way we can listen to just about any song on youtube without paying spotify a dime
You do pay: You are the product because adverts are shown.
Considering some of the articles I've seen it wouldn't be hard to do better, but you'd probably have to do better than just not being the worst to get people to pull out their wallets.
> What do you consider "high quality news source"?
Since you asked, here's what I'd look for in a high quality news source:
Low in bias/high in facts: I want to be able trust a news source not to lie or mislead me. Unverified and speculative reporting should be minimized and clearly marked as such. In emerging situations it's better to wait for facts than to publish false or misleading headlines to "get ahead of the story". Multiple perspectives should be explored. No need to give equal weight to both sides of everything, but if there are two sides to something talk about both and explore their strengths and weaknesses. Don't ignore or bury stories that offend, challenge, or fail to promote the writer's or news org's ideological views.
Give enough context/sources for informed conclusions: I've seen far too many articles about someone's controversial statement without any mention at all of what the statements were or without context to them. Same with reporting on laws where the name or text of the law isn't included anywhere. I should have enough information to form an opinion and look for additional information and sources not included in the article. If something must be quoted from social media, quote it in the story instead of just linking to it. Anonymous sources shouldn't be the entire story, just a starting point or a supporting one around verified facts.
Clear separation between ads and content: This includes press releases disguised as news stories. Once while working for a company I was poking around on their network shares and found a video of a report from a local news broadcast that talked about new services we were offering in that area. I thought it was really cool that someone had saved it, but then I read the documents included in that folder and realized that the company had hired a production company, the reporter was an actor reading ad copy written by my company, and that they'd paid local stations to air the content with no indication to the viewer that it was an advertisement. Not cool.
Independent reporting without constraint or consideration to partners/advertisers that might be inconvenienced by the truth: No killed stories because of pressure from some external corporation or industry. No killed stories because it makes the network/news org itself or their friends/partners look bad either.
Transparency: Edits and corrections are great, but the text as originally reported should always remain available and any changes made after publication should be clear and timestamped. Old stories should remain searchable and available even after years/decades. Updates, and especially corrections, should be heavily promoted. Potential conflicts of interest should be avoided if possible and disclosed otherwise.
Ethics are nice: Balance the public's right to know with the privacy of everyday people. Protect the identity of children and those innocent until proven guilty. Don't do things like hound people who are grieving for quotes, or who have expressed that they wish to be left alone. Don't hack into a missing child's voicemail
Little excessive fluff: A bit of color is fine, but I don't care what the author had for breakfast and while it's great to have specific cases as examples, I don't need paragraphs of meandering text about their personal lives either. I want information not entertainment.
Quality writing and editing: That means the people doing the work should be paid well enough that they can more than comfortably support themselves doing it. Talented and skilled people should be attracted to do the job. Reporters or editors who fail to perform to a high standard should be sacked. There are tons of people who are genuinely passionate about journalism. This should be so easy.
> And what do you read / consume? And what do you think it should cost?
The news I consume is often terrible and disappointing and my consumption is not an endorsement of the source or a reflection of their quality. I don't know enough about the costs of journalism today to put a price on it. I'd say that they should charge just enough so that their expenses are covered and they make a very modest yet sustainable profit. A news org shouldn't be attempting to maximize wealth or push to extract every possible dime out of subscribers. That leads to things like accepting money to publish or not publish something, collecting and selling the personal data of subscribers, and filling news stories with ads.
> And yet, you continue to click them.
A starving man eats out of the bin, but that doesn't mean he likes it. I get what can and do my best.
> You do pay: You are the product because adverts are shown.
Well, most people pay... I block ads. My point wasn't that nobody pays for music unless they pay spotify, just that if someone want to make "spotify for news" and offer unique and exclusive quality reporting they have to let people share it, and they should want to. It's free advertising. They should feel free to push ads on non-subscribers so long as the ads are clearly separated from content, clearly marked as ads, the ads have no influence over content, and the ads are hosted locally by the news org, not targeted to the user, and carefully vetted to be respectful to both the content and the user.
I don't think that's a very high bar. It's just basic journalistic integrity, not being greedy, and not exploiting subscribers (or potential subscribers). Is it actually sustainable in this day and age to offer high quality journalism to folks on the internet? I have no idea, but just once I'd like to see somebody try it.
This has been tried multiple times. Micropayments just don’t work well. People don’t want to create an account, break out their CC, and enter their info just for a 5c transaction. You also can’t even profitably charge a CC 5c, so you need to charge something like $5. Unlike music, most people can envision consuming $5 worth of news media unless they already have a strong preference for a publication like the NYT or WSJ.
Eg, consumers incur those credit card charges by topping up an online wallet. They “pay” 5 cents from that wallet itself. The news website only receives payment when the aggregated total paid to it hits a certain amount.
General epayment wallets are already widely (Grab in Singapore for instance), even with auto top up. There just isn’t one for news.
That solves the problem of profitably charging the card (maybe) but it doesn’t solve the issue of convincing people to sign up and pay for something that costs 5c.
There's flattr, but they never really took off (not many accept their payments).
Each flattr user sets how much they want to pay per month. Flattr collects the fees, and tracks which sites you visited (or which you click a button on). At the end of the month, they divide all the user's contributions between the sites visited in proportion to the numbers of visits (less a fee for themselves).
Google Contributor did that. Didn’t work. It never could amass a critical mass of major publishers to entice audiences, and the per-page fees for an ad free experience were too high when you look at consumption habits.
blendle [1] is still trying to make this work, and has been for years with minimal success in attracting publishers or readers. scroll [2] also tried something similar, with again minimal success in attracting either readers or publishers before being acquired by twitter and essentially shut down. every news site seems to be doing the math and deciding that the hope of $5-$10/mo is better than $0.15-$0.50 per read.
I really like the idea of Blendle. I signed up and paid for a few articles. I actually want to use it, and spend more there.
The issue has nothing to do with the cost, or quality--instead, it is just really hard to make it part of my browsing routine.
I realized I just don't sit down and read news anymore. I obviously get into articles throughout the day from links people share, but I never sit down and think--yeah, I want to read "the news" now.
loved using blendle, for about 2 years i regularly spent about 50 EUR/m on articles. then the honeymoon phase of blendle and the publishers was over and it became clear the model just wont work. for publishers an article (usually sold for between 99 cents and 2 euro) is more than a product to be sold, as the price doesnt cover all costs. they usually have only a handful of "flagship articles" with some kind of exclusive content. they need these to capture the audience into subscriptions. this regular audience can then also be sold ads and merchandise/other stuff.
for me as user it was essential that i had access to more than 80% of the best articles of all publications for sale. as most publishers came to see that publishing their flagship articles cannibalized them selling subscriptions and eliminated their secondary revenue streams they resorted to periodically publishing only some bait articles to lure audiences to their core offers. thus the incentives of all 3 (me as user, publishers, blendle) did not align and its usefullness as a product suffered.
some publishers tried to raise the price of their flagship articles to cover more of their costs, but who pays 4 EUR for a single article? so, the business model just doesnt work.
enjoyed it while it lasted though
People have been trying micro payment systems since the very early 2000s. Various internet comic book "publishing groups" had their own systems that allowed you to make sub-dollar payments to artists per comic strip daily out of a larger account. It's been tried my dude.
A few years ago, I had setup a publicly accessible Pihole and asked people to use my pihole as their DNS server. The idea was to pay websites a small fee every time someone looked up their IP using my pihole setup.
As a proof of concept, it worked fine but (a) i would need tons of money and (b) tons of misuse blocking to make this work.
Dropped the idea after a while though I think this could still work -
1. A group of friends set up a pihole and use that as their DNS
2. Transparently share usage with websites
3. Pay those websites a small per url fee per user
And not just that - if you only share your pihole’s IP with a small group of friends, do you really want to know when they ask your pihole to resolve some shady url?
