I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

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.

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.

I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article

That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.

It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...

> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.

Apple News+ is ~$13

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

The list of publications included

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere.

If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense.

And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.

>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.

It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of

- cable bundles

- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)

- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)

And somehow all of these models now coexist.

Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.

> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.

People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.

iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.

Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this means spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee.

Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.