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I was looking (for research purposes only/for a friend/by mistake/I was bored) at the model used by the porn industry nowadays. I've never paid for porn, and I believe most people haven't either, but they have an incredibly efficient model. Instead of going for 1 shady website with some porn videos, you can signup for a porn network (brazzers, RealityKings, etc) that contains multiple smaller website as well. So for one flat monthly price you get multiple sites, each with a different theme to their porn content.

The free sites (pornhub, redtube and alikes) around use a different model though, where they make money from a side business of real time video chat, where you can tip the model with coins you buy in bulk, like a mobile game where you buy in-game currency.

I couldn't avoid making a comparison to the publisher business. Porn is just so much more efficient and advanced.

I would probably never pay a $5 subscription for WSJ, NYT or WaPo. But a $20 that gives me access to any news site online or even a $15 that gives me access to a good set of them now that's something I can wrap my head around.

It's always weird to compare "mainstream" businesses to the porn industry, but they've shown themselves to consistently be ahead of the curve with technology.

Turn off your ad blocker, porn hub and redtube are still absolutely plastered in ads, invasive ads that get past the firefox popop blocker. I even had one the other day that stopped me from closing the firefox window it opened in.

What you said is pretty much what I thought too. So i tried to validate if that is possible. From a customers side: yes. From a publishers side: No.

I went and talked to quite a lot CEOs in the news business. What i found is: the publishers don't care about their users. All they care about is not to cooperating with other publishers. That means, if you have a service that automatically gives each publisher a bit of money when you read their article. No publisher will join.

Wow, that is insanely broken. The publishers don't actually care about the people who read their articles.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but that's incredibly depressing.

Isn't this true of any industry that isn't "commodified"? That is to say, if there's still a narrative where a publisher can outperform other publishers, why would a publisher bind their future to other publishers?

IE, isn't this the same reason facebook doesn't partner with Google+ et al?

That makes me feel even less guilty about using adblockers and news aggregators primarily. They are stuck in the past, and the less we validate them in that and reinforce them in the opinion that this works, the better. We do need publishers, but we don't need publishers that are stuck on hating their users and each other. So maybe if enough people won't cooperate with their business model, somebody with money will get the message and disrupt them. I feel somewhat bad about it because innocent people may lose jobs on the way, but change is obviously needed, and it doesn't look like it will happen without disruption.

"I'll predict that within the next few years, the major publishers will come together and form their own subscription company with a revenue share"

That's like saying all the hotel companies should come together and form a company to compete with Expedia and Orbitz. But the hotel companies did exactly that, when they formed a joint venture to run RoomKey.com. And the team at RoomKey built some amazing technology. But the various hotel companies, who jointly owned the joint venture, fell to fighting and they starved RoomKey.com of money and independence. So RoomKey.com could have transformed the space for booking hotels, but RoomKey was sabotaged by its owners. Which turns out to be a very common story for joint ventures -- each partner has its own internal politics, and when they form a joint venture the result is complete dysfunction.

The moral of the story is: never underestimate the short-term greed and stupidity of big companies, and their ability to sabotage their own self-interest.

So don't expect the major publishers to have much success launching their own subscription service.

RoomKey is also late and has extremely limited pricing options by existing contracts. Obviously, customers want the lowest price, but (as I understand it) RoomKey can't show the lowest price! How does RoomKey expect to gain market share with an unknown service that has higher prices?

One example of the joint venture model working in the content space is Hulu, owned by:

NBCUniversal (30%) Fox Entertainment Group (30%) Disney–ABC Television Group (30%) Turner Broadcasting System (10%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

It might be interesting to compare the partnership agreements vis-a-vis Hulu and RoomKey to find where the weakness was in RoomKey, whether it was just "Huh, people turned out to like this Internet project, we better start micromanaging it," or if it was something more structural.

The problem is pricing psychology. Netflix feels like a good deal because it is a ton of content for 10 bucks. Spotify feels like a good deal because individual songs are 1 buck, yes, but mostly because 10 bucks is worth not having to listen to the annoying ads.

Most internet content is just plain free. So people value it that way.

You can probably get people to subscribe to a WSJ/NYT/Local Paper subscription. But people probably won't pay for anything but the highest quality stuff they've long been conditioned to pay for. "Vox? Sorry but, I'd pay for blogs"

A microsubscription system (my own madeup name for the genre) needn't have 100% to be successful.

There were free newspapers before the internet, alongside the cover-priced ones. Bundling content is a proved business model at this point, except on the open web.

There's also an issue of trust. I had an NYT subscription. NYT has always (more than) leaned left, but never in such a biased manner as in recent past. Their coverage (or lack of it) of Bernie's campaign for example.

So with a subscription, I'm not really subscribing to a rigorous and diplomatic institution that is helping me develop into a more knowledgeable person, or indeed, filling any useful role in my life. Instead, I'd be subscribing to further some numpty's propaganda pieces. And that would make me feel gross.

Well substitute a more trusted source for you than NYT and we still have a problem to solve. I don't read NYT much, but Bernie was left of Hillary, FWIW- so I would have expected them to cover him more than her if they leaned heavily left. But whatevs; neither here nor there.

I pay for high bit rate and download in Spotify. Yes ads are definitely annoying but that alone wouldn't justify 10 bucks/month.

Regarding publishers, I'd happily pay 10 bucks/month for a bunch of publishers giving me a clean portal with focus on readability

Only payment model that makes sense to me on the long run. Whichever company manages to conquer this space will make a fortune, this might replace a ton of advertising money.

I'm surprised that no one has brought up Blendle?

https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

It's like some law: everytime there's a discussion about newspapers, subscriptions or paying for content, someone will bring up Blendle. You can fairly say by now that Blendle is the Hitler of newspaper discussions.

This was brought up by the top-voted post: I think Blendle has something going for it, but the individual articles are way too expensive (at least in Germany). Whenever I use Blendle I'm thinking: Do I really find that article worth 79 Cents? Three articles would be the whole paper - I don't want to read the whole paper on a computer screen anyway. With this economic considerations cascade going off anytime I'm using Blendle, I actually stopped using it completely.

I want a Spotify for newspapers.

Yes, the abonement payment is a great way to take the pain out of people's face. But most abo services have a long-a quitting period, like fitness centers usually have 6-12 months you need to pay after already deciding you don't want to anymore.

This is really bad and painful, and these service providers know that as well. But they still do it, so there must be a good reason for it.

I just suspect that abo is not the best way to make money because it also limits how much the user spends each month. For instance there may be a few months I don't spend a single cent on Steam (the computer game webshop/package manager), but when I spend, I spend a lot more than in a year of using Netflix. And even if I'm excited about Netflix, I can't give them more money (I have the biggest abo already).

Therefore I would say making money is not about the payment but about the sales process. It must be fun to buy and increase your excitement, then you'll buy more, maybe even unreasonable much. That's also why Kickstarter probably makes more money than Flattr. They enable and enforce good sales tactics with videos, picture driven articles and easily shared Kickstarter pages, while Flattr is only a button on another person's freely structured page. One increases excitement, the other doesn't.

I thought about subscriptions for publishing in the past, very tricky. Surely I don't want revenue share to go "per view", quality is only going down that way (it's exactly the same situation as with ads, with publications struggling to get eyeballs, continuing in the clickbait practices that are killing the good stuff).

On the other hand I never felt like clicking the flattr button. But as things are now I prefer to opt in after reading a good article than ending up on some actual fake news by mistake and knowing I contributed to make them rich.

That is without even talking about the problem (in my opinion) that even the more innocent subscriptions (music, tv, movies) have with stuff like geo restrictions and exclusives...

And to be clear, I use uBlock Origin because ABP's idea of trusted publishers would be stupid even if it was not a shakedown business

The solution here is to use a hybrid model.

Users subscribe for $20/month (and that is their cap). And each page they visit they get dinged $0.01 (etc) and they have no risk of going over their cap.

When they hit a page with ads, the publisher site hides ads if they get paid $0.01, but they display ads if the users account is down to zero for that month.

If I hit cap, it's not gunna force me to look at ads. It's gunna make me reinstall the ol adblocker.

I agree with all of this and have for years. I want to save the internet without having make people think about it.

About:

> If the WSJ and WaPo shared subscribers, the consumers would get double the content while the industry costs would stay the same. When consumers see additional value for their subscription dollars, they are more likely to sign up, increasing the number of potential customers.

The problem is paywalls. Both need paywalls to improve their revenue.

I have a protocol which covers both paywalled and unpaywalled sites. For the purposes of attracting ire, I applied for a US patent, which will hopefully land in the next month or two (I already hold an Australian one).

Then, I suppose, it will be time to ask rich people for money so I can make them richer.

Edit:

To expand a bit, consider that all the existing successful schemes are walled gardens. App stores are walled gardens, Netflix is a walled garden, Spotify is too.

But the web is, by its nature, an open garden.

What I developed, effectively speaking, allows users to support websites without paywalls, or to be passed through a paywall, without ever noticing the difference. All they'd notice is the absence of ads on participating websites.

So you reinvented Google Contributor?

Given that I thought of the basic model in 2008, based a dissertation on it in 2011 and filed for the patent in 2012, I am going to say no.

This lines up well with all the research into social vs financial norms and human biases surrounding things that are "free".