A similar thing happens in the podcasting space.
It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be that interested. Pricing schemes that increase the total reading cost on a log curve can be imagined.
Of course we dream of a micropayments system fluid enough that people start consuming 10-100x the content so the price per piece can go down accordingly, but that is unlikely since there isn’t that much free time. A first mover might accumulate a lot of new readers, but that would eventually even out.
If there were an extremely convenient way to pay a few pennies for access (a price low enough that I wouldn't think twice), they'd be making something, at least. I'm not about to go through the hassle and cost of subscribing for a month, to access a single article, and neither is anyone else here.
I understand that this 'one shot' model isn't necessarily representative of how their website is generally used, of course.
> a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them.
For a physical copy.
Disregarding current promotional prices, The Guardian charge £12/month for a digital subscription. New York Times is £8 for 4 weeks. Not sure how many articles the typical reader gets through though, or how that should inform our thinking here.
An online newspapers might make $3 per thousand views, plastering ads everywhere and maybe videos. That means they survive with way less than 1 penny per view. They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
> They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
But that's just what you proposed. $0.09 is over an order of magnitude greater than $0.003. That pricepoint would still be fine - far less than the price of a coffee.
I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)
It would be nice if there was somebody other than Google running the program.