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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Ars Technica has an article that's not paywalled:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/tesla-model-s-wa...

Yes, and you pay in the form of giving away your data to advertisers.

To be sure, WaPo also sells data to their advertisers. At the same time, WaPo has broader coverage and probably needs a larger newsroom as a result. Ars Technica is a subsidiary of Conde Nast, and Conde Nast as a whole has paywalled publications (like New Yorker).

In general, I think it's perfectly fine to promote paywalled content on HN so long as the content itself is good. We have to fund quality reporting/writing, and HN can serve as a curation mechanism to surface "content worth paying for".

Some people just want to see the information without whipping out their credit card, not get into a huge red herring about which economic model we should support.

But I am not going to pay for one article that I happen to come across on HN.

I tend to see 1-2 articles a month I want to read from WaPo, but it's about $50/year for a subscription. And many of those articles aren't much more than what other sites have (because they're not deep investigative features).

I'm not interested in paying about $3.33/article.

When they do big investigations I'd be happy to to pay $1 or $2 to read it.

This? No.

I agree. The quality of the journalism from many paid website is not very deep, and then I'm taking a risk with buying into a particular political slant or ideology. I really like Bloomberg's reporting lately. They've been writing deep, well researched longform pieces, and leaving the political ideology out.

There's enough good stuff coming out of the New York Times (and I like the Crossword) that I looked into subscribing to them.

At $50 a year or so I would be quite happy to. But it turns out it's a couple hundred. That price is just way too high for the frequency I want to read their content.

So instead if one of these places does really good journalism I end up writing a summary of it on another site.

Now that Apple Pay on the web exists I've been hoping more places would allow access to a single article for one dollar, but it hasn't happened (I assume do the transaction fees).

Ya know I'll walk back that comment slightly and say that I have seriously given thought to sub to WSJ.

They're in the right ballpark for pricing compared to NYT, I just don't think I'd get enough use out of it.

You might want to try subscribing to WaPo through Apple News or Google News Stand. They have monthly quotas on # of articles you can ready.

While the principle of "per article" pricing is appealing, it won't probably work in practice: generating content worth paying for is not like spinning up servers because the cost of production occurs upfront _and_ have non-zero marginal cost.

I'm not surprised the pay-per-article thing has never taken off.

I've never used Apple news, I'm kind of hesitant to. I already track the sites I care about through RSS and see many of the same things through Twitter first. I don't really want to start using a third thing that overlaps with the other two.

This is why I use Brave. It blocks all advertising and silly paywall scripts.

While this comment is off-topic or meta, I think this is an important point about how to view paywalls. If paywalled articles are being shared and voted for, that's a signal to how valuable the content behind the paywall is. If paywalled articles are always replaced, we will not have this signal.

I don't know. I posted the basically the same article from Ars Technica. But I'm guessing this one got posted first and got more traction so it hit the front page, where it got even more traction.

Once the article is on the front page people posting the same thing from other sources are never going to get voted up.

I think this is more of a first mover advantage thing. This is based on a government report, it's not a deep investigative piece.

Ok, I agree with you on the specific, but my point was directed at the general case where there is some value added by one article over another.

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