Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism | Hacker News Reader

Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism

cjr.org

14 pointswoldemariam24 comments

There's only one way this all goes.

People will donate/subscribe to journalism which claims it faces an existential threat. They will only subscribe to journalism they think is most antagonistic to the political entity they despise (as those are now the TOE for having political views now). They aren't subscribing for news, they are paying to shore up a vaguely legitimised view of their prejudices.

This will mean journalism will have to become more biased, more unsound, more toxic and more representative of the various political echo chambers on social media as they court donations.

I see no other way this evolves.

Absolutely. When it comes down to it, most people don't want to be informed, they want their ego to be comforted.

Advertising-driven news may be the root of the current partisanship pandemic, but replacing it with pay-per-view news is only going to make things worse. Instead of mostly watching *News but getting bits and piece from other sources, you'd have vast swaths of the population that subsist entirely on "news" from OANN or Daily Kos. Yikes.

By the looks of it, some countries are moving towards state sponsored journalism which serves as propaganda and also dissemination of narrative and when it’s not state sponsored the government imposes restrictions on press freedom (speech). We saw this with Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 and related coverage.

Indeed. All very worrying.

The opposition party in the UK proposed two things before the last election.

State controlled social network [1]

"Democratisation" of major media where the editorial policy is set by activists [2]

1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/23/corbyn-prop...

2. https://www.ft.com/content/555f2012-a6b5-11e8-926a-7342fe5e1...

Pretty much as evil as it gets in the modern age

I've started subscribing to journalists I like on Substack. I feel pretty good about giving a serious journalist $5 a month. No advertisers to please. Long form, highly researched articles. I don't know if it scales, but it's pretty great for me at the moment.

If an ad subsidized dead tree periodical can sell for < $5 why am I expected to pay $10-$20 for the same content online with lower distribution costs?

Market segmentation. You can pay more, and will, for the convenience.

Hooray for capitalism

I think article should free and the comment section should cost 5c to post.

Make bank.

Not the worst idea. The average person thinking their voice is relevant in every discussion is a major part of the problem.

I get taxed when I want to eat. What's wrong with taxing this stuff in that context?

Nick Szabo has an interesting take on it. Essentially when the mental cost of deciding if the article is worth paying for exceeds the actual price you'd pay you lose from the start.

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/micropayments-and-m...

I'll just say short sighted article, the main problems are news paper organizations who want to maximize profits no matter what and non operational payment processors who can't process real micropayments. One of the reasons why Bitcoin was made is "casual transactions" like news article access. Micropayments will come sooner or later.

I am an advocate of a journalism tax rebate. That way there can be government funding for Journalism that is not controled by a government.

You can donate to non-profit journalists:

https://100r.org/donors/

https://donate.propublica.org/

Bigger list:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?keyword_list=&bay...

It’s tax deductible, not a rebate, but it is something.

What an actual joke of an article. An overly academic way to say that "we don't want users to pick and choose what they pay for, we want them to spend extra money on unlocking all content, regardless of its subjective quality".

How about this... make the content free and put a tip jar. If you don't like that approach, don't be mad when people don't pay to unlock.

How about this... make the content free and put a tip jar.

That's basically my model (plus Patreon). I think if I had enough traffic, it could actually support me. I don't know how to get there from here and it's crazy making to keep struggling so much every month, but I'm slowly seeing more traffic and more money.

Congratulations to you!! I hope that your efforts continue to bring you everything you hope for.

For me, I think it is hard for me to monetize the content that I really enjoy producing. There's tangentially related things that would probably make a bit more money (native youtube ads, teaching, t shirts), but since I am fortunate enough to have a good day job, I am able to make the content available entirely for free, uninfluenced by profit motives.

Life is just a big navigation of trade-offs, it seems.

For a big part it is the social media game. Sites like phantom buster help you automate these activities so you can focus on your core business.

Why does no one talk about brave’s approach to micro payments. It makes micro payments effortless. One doesn’t even need to use their ad based model. Instead, just buy some of the BAT tokens and use them.

Is there some inherent flaw in there approach that it’s not more widely discussed.

I think the goal needs to be to remove the "micro" from micropayment schemes.

At some point, the overhead of managing and tracking payments takes up a major part of its value.

Federation is the potential counter-argument. Let me buy one USD20 per month subscription that covers a huge swath of media. Divide the revenue among publishers based on aggregate metrics.

Then you're dealing with only relatively large and infrequent transactions-- consumers paying $20 per month, the aggregator paying each publisher a monthly cut of $100 or $100,000-- something that doesn't require a completely new financial ecosystem to make viable.

Making it a fixed-dollar subscription helps with risk-aversion. If you're buying 200 other media products in the same subscription, you can avoid second-guessing "will I use this?" It avoids any client-side "I have to consciously specify what I want to back" friction like Patreon.

I think a Brave-style approach is better than an advertising-supported model just because Internet advertising is a scam for everyone involved. Unfortunately Brave doesn't solve the underlying problem of "views = $$$", which means journalism would have to continue to rely on being clickbait to survive.

It does make an effort to solve the problem. It currently uses a time based approach in which tokens are credited to a publisher based on time spent by the user reading the article.

Also there is a threshold of some seconds before any tokens are accounted for an article. So basically click baits won’t account for any tokens because the user might quickly close the article.

Information is value. google/facebook/etc managed to very slowly migrate that value to their books, without having to pay for it.

journalism just doesn't know how to adapt. One thing they don't get is "social" when it comes to news, individualization, and from games, they just don't get micropayments are often not for your core thing, so don't try to charge for articles. I think there's so many opportunities for them to reinvent their world and make money.

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