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Comment by loandbehold | Hacker News Reader

If there was a way to pay small fee to read just one article, say $1 article, I would pay. Someone needs to come up with micropayment system that works for news media. Another alternative that may work is a single subscription that gives you access to all major publications, similar to what Spotify did for music. Did anyone try building a startup like that? Would it be possible to get major publications on board for that kind of system?

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The problem is that some people would prefer to pay with a subscription, and others with micropayments. If two vendors compete between these options, the result is a natural price war with a price of zero.

Given that subscriptions are generally more profitable for the provider, we should expect subscriptions to dominate over micropayments.

This argument is from https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf and is one of the few economic analyses from the dawn of the web age that has proven truly prescient. To quote another of Odlyzko's papers from several years later, "Micropayments are the payment method of the future, and always will be."

Yes! Check out axate.com. It's a tool that publishers can add to their site, which enables them to charge per article or per day/week as well as offer subscriptions or ask for voluntary contributions.

Apple news does this. And it has the backing of a big company that keeps gaining outlets rather than losing it like the other option linked. I can't find a single one that I read that isn't on it. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

> If there was a way to pay small fee to read just one article, say $1 article

Most articles aren't even worth a penny to read. There's just so much garbage out there.

Take a look at this.

https://blendle.com/

I think Blendle is slowly dying. There are less and less news orgs publishing through them, so it seems like it isn’t a viable model either, which is a shame.

I've never heard of this. Have you used it?

It's been my primary source for long-form news articles for >5 years now.

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