Subscription to a random entity I've never heard of before, for one article? Hell no.

50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggressive ads or tracked by 900 different companies? I'd be more than willing.

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afavour a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before.

Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

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oersted a day ago | parent | next [-]

I do agree with the spirit of your point, but there's an easy counterargument:

How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?

There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.

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nemomarx a day ago | parent [-]

I think you could argue that a subscription model is basically trying to make you not think about that. Look at gyms and how they want you to forget to come in a little bit and not evaluate it month by month

Asking up front has the issue that you then have to think about money every time you open an article - a lot of friction

	▲	rkomorn a day ago \| parent [-]
		But I think that's the problem: people don't look at subscriptions for news the same way as they look at a gym, for example. People understand you gotta pay to go to the gym. News, on the other hand, you can get for free (give or take ads and tracking). The gym question is "am I gonna use this?" The news question is "do I need this?" or "is this sufficiently better than the alternatives to justify the cost?" Edit: and to touch on the "per-article" aspect, odds are that people might spend let's say ~$2/month with a publisher through article reads, but not $5/month for a subscription.

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rkomorn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder how many of the people who say they'd pay 50c would actually pay 50c if they could.

I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.

At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.

Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.

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righthand a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access.

No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.

Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.

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afavour a day ago | parent | next [-]

> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles

But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.

> Implement a legitimate system

By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".

It's not like things haven't been tried.

- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)

- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

- Axate: https://www.axate.com

- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/

All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.

	▲	righthand a day ago \| parent [-]
		Then don’t put the more expensive articles as accessible for $0.50. Keep them behind the subscription. Users with subscriptions are the only ones who really want to read longer articles anyways.

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rkomorn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Implement a legitimate system and people will use it.

This sounds like no true Scotsman.

I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.

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righthand a day ago | parent [-]

If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?

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rkomorn a day ago | parent [-]

I guess.

Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?

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righthand a day ago | parent [-]

But the solution to not wanting to subscribe is to pay the $0.50 or leave. Before it was: find a way around paywall or leave. The OP maybe wants free things only?

	▲	warkdarrior a day ago \| parent [-]
		When it comes to digital stuff, everything wants free things only.

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ta1243 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

10 years ago a couple of sites I occasionally viewed used "agate", which is now called Axate.

https://www.axate.com/

It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times.

Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.

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Workaccount2 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The reality is that most people just want stuff free.

They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.

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rkomorn a day ago | parent [-]

There's also a very real factor that we now consume from dozens if not hundreds of sources per month.

The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.

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nemomarx a day ago | parent [-]

It opens up room for bundling maybe? People want to pay one subscription for everything whenever possible, like Netflix originally vs now. If you could pay 10 a month for a major newspaper + YouTube + some other tech sites that could be pretty attractive. (or whatever combinations - news and sports, porn and tech, IDK)

	▲	rkomorn a day ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe. I don't know how fantastic Apple's combined subscriptions are doing. Their news one is already priced higher than that (but I guess you get a lot of news sources).

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rkomorn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I had hoped that Brave's BAT would get some kind of traction for similar use cases but it seems to be quickly going nowhere.