Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet?
And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird!
Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.
It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.
Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.
It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.
I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
• Advertisers want subscribers because that's a proxy for wealth and often, locality.
• Only quite rich people are willing to pay for an ad-free newspaper. The Spectator is one example of such a thing in the UK (subscription only, no ads).
• A lot of subscriptions are driven by a desire for opinion and opinionated takes, often by a single star writer, not news and certainly not neutrally written news.
Extremely slanted opinion sells like hotcakes and subsidizes all the rest, but the market for drive-by micropayments for opinion is very small. This opinion-subscription-bias amongst readers is why Substack works and also the Guardian (the Guardian is 90% just opinion pretending to be unbiased news).
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
For example I typically don't read or watch MSM. But with the recent Middle East conflict the most up-to-date information is through mainstream channels.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
I mean you would be "paying" just as much to facey even if the scheme wasn't in place.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
My read is thats because the aggregators wanted to be blind middle men.
These days you need to curate. I would almost pay just to remove the bottomless pit of pseudoscience from my feed.
Right, all those different writers can band together, perhaps get an editor to curate the best and make sure there's no major blunders…
But isn't that just a news organisation?
Give me 5 or 6 sources of news, maybe in packages, curated for the best reporting on a day to day basis and I would pay 5 bucks a month for that.
That sort of emulates my current pattern which is Guardian for the bulk of my input, but flitting back and forth between BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC and others to pick up highlights or specific stories not carried, or carried briefly by guardian.
Throw it on a scrollable feed and I might even drop facey and masto.
I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.
But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Because a lot of HN voters and commenters just read the headlines and not the articles.
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
Much the same if you ask me.
There's really no comparison anymore.
Any "valuable" news/sports/politics/stocks is all freely available from dozens of competing sources.
What's left is Opinions, Reviews and Editorials, which are freely available from thousands of free competitors.
the idea that anyone would blindly microtransact ("pay $0.02 to read my clickbait article ChatGPT wrote for me!") is one waiting for all free content to go away first.
Ya, I'd pay $0.25 or $0.50 on a whim for any random article. For good articles I'd pay more, but the problem is that you don't know if it's going to be good information or some clickbait crap until you read it, so it has to be priced with that risk in mind.
But maybe I'm unique, I currently have paid subscriptions to a few online publications because I believe it's important to pay for news with money instead of clicks (if you want the news provider to be incentivized to generate quality news instead of clickthroughs).
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
It could also indicate that the news "industry" has been utterly decimated and destroyed and defunded over the past 50 years and they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies because they are desperately hanging on as it is and have all sorts of data showing them that they will never have the business they had 50 years ago no matter what because the simple reality is that humans prefer listening to a moronic talking head not ask hard questions over actual journalism anyway.
which is exactly what "doesn't work" means - not enough revenue from microtransations compared to another avenue (such as subscription + adverts).
> they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies
i suppose that's possible as well - but some news outlets do have sufficient revenue to experiment, and they either hadnt, or have and found it wanting.
> not ask hard questions over actual journalism
that has nothing to do with the funding model. You're conflating separate concerns - one being a business concern, and one being a civic concern.
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.
Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.
The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.
This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.
But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
My girlfriend works in the beauty industry on the product side. Even more important that having a good product, is having a good marketing campaign. Products live and die by their advertising. And believe it or not, lots of people click on ads.
Step back and evaluate the situation considering your thoughts on the whole population, people in general, not looking at it from your perspective with people you associate with.
You have to account for the massive amount of money google and the rest of the advertising industry makes. It's NOT companies lighting money on fire irrationally, and it does have to be paid for.
So it feels free because we all pay for it already. There's no agency. Adding micropayments or ad-free premium services aren't alternatives, they are an additional cost.
No, the downside is constantly being monitored. It doesn't matter whether there's actual real-life consequences. It makes me feel watched and change my behaviour. If someone follows you on the street and writes everything you do and look at down, you would mind too even if he doesn't do anything with that info.
And whether I'm "paying into the system" by buying stuff I didn't need, that's a really shady and wasteful business model we shouldn't encourage in these times of environmental disaster.
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
(Unless it improved in the last few years.)
Rather than ad-blockers we could have "junk content provider" blockers.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.
> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
Let's say that you could get 2 % of these people to pay you $10 per month. With a readership of 1M that would mean you'd get (1000000 * 0.1 * 0.02) * 10 * 12 = $240k per year.
Now let's move that over to blendle, let's say that the average reader reads 1.2 articles per month (since most people only look at 1 article). Let's be super generous here - with a much larger conversion rate - 10 % of everyone buying 1 article per month month on average comes up to a comparable amount 100000 * 12 * 0.23 = $276k per month. And we're being generous here, remember - blendle abandoned this model so it almost certainly isn't equal to the metered model I used in my estimation above even if more users are willing to pay.
Now if you bring down the payment to whatever you're proposing you get to $27.6k or even 2.76k per YEAR. The napkin math is clear that this isn't feasible.
Interestingly enough you'd pay less as a "heavy reader" if you read 10 articles per month (which is a super small % of users on an average medium) with blendle (10 * 0.23 = $2.3) than with a subscription costing $10. But making the users count articles likely isn't great psychology as compared to buy and read everything you want. Which likely is perceived as a higher value offer.
And probably would have consumed far more, because the volume would make up for it. That's my whole point. As someone who voraciously reads online stuff, I'd far prefer to pay 25x 2.3 cent than 2x 23 cents. Maybe I'm an outlier, but so I'd expect most article readers who care about truthfulness of the material to be.
What I am telling you that based on online readership patterns, people that read 25 and more articles per month don't make up for enough of a base to be worth monetizing at 2.3 cents per article. These are hard facts.
In this case the market evolution is the proof that micropayments are not feasible. Not one company succeeded running them, but you have plenty of news companies using subscriptions that scaled the approach and made significant revenues. These are lessons learned across hundreds of news sites. With all due respect, your opinion is just that - anecdotal.
After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?
It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.
I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.
But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.
What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
In other words:
- Neutral front page with informative titles and headings that are designed to inform, not make me click. Articles written from the ground up with the inverted pyramid[^2] in mind.
- Remove most "psuedo-events"[^3] based "reporting", and if not analyse them critically.
- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
- Do proper investigative journalism.
- Be conscious of the 5 filters outlined by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent and actively resist them.
In short, the news should live up to the narrative of being the fourth estate it claims legitimacy from, instead of being an entertainment product serving the lowest common denominator in terms of audience.
(This will of course never happen.)
[^1]: With the possible exception of being forced to pay for my nation's public broadcaster through taxes.
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
A huge part of the problem with news media is that what people want is completely divorced from what makes good journalism.
Good journalism requires that you continue to pay despite the fact that they haven't been able to to release a piece in a while because they are still knee deep in three different big things that still haven't played out. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay despite the fact that the big story this month is about how you are a bad person who belongs in jail for arguably defrauding half your customers. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay when the article is about how your entire world view is wrong.
But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
I actually wonder if tabloids have been hit as hard business wise as say the NYT has.
Ultimately not everyone wants that, and the audience that would would appreciate well researched and methodologically sound journalism are lacking in options at least partly because they aren't the biggest and thus most lucrative audience.
Nonetheless, even if there were outlets willing to serve such an audience, the problems which remain include "how do I know the money I pay for a subscription will actually fund good journalism instead of garbage". Especially garbage third parties pay to have fed to you.
It's less clear how to be readily transparent with that or to quantify it. How do I know reporters are seeing past their own biases? How do I know they will report on things which might impact their paycheck by making the owners of the company (or their owners in turn) look bad?
Also, once you've found such an outlet how can you finance funding several to try to cover over available blind spots and increase the benefits of horizontal reading?
Compulsion isn't desire. People are compulsively checking the news, Tiktok, Reddit etc. because thousands of smart engineers' full time job is to maximize how much time people spend consuming content. If you ask people if they want to spend 6+ hours doom scrolling every day, very few people would agree. Don't confound revealed preference with intrinsic desire. The former is just an assumption of an economic model.
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
I was so not irritated by it at all that I was actually willing to resubscribe a deep discount.
I wonder if changes were made this year, because I’m generally pretty sensitive to that malarkey too
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
Let's not blame the players for the game rules being flawed.
The reason corporations are greedy isn't because they just love money, it's because you love money too and those corporations are taking your money. And just like them you care a lot about money too.
I'm continually upset that it took me 15 years to realize this.
My needs are met right now, I genuinely don't need any more money. I would take less even if it meant working at a place whose mission I vibe with more.
No amount of money would get me to build surveillance devices or slot machines or lie about how much I'm polluting.
I pay taxes and vote for candidates that would increase them to better provide for everyone.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
Maybe I should go back to paying [7 bucks](https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers) every time I want to sit down and read the news.
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
This is where crypto actually makes sense, as payment infrastructure. A browser wallet on modular extensions of Ethereum, like Base or Arbitrum, could handle sub-cent payments instantly. You could read three articles and be down 3 cents, no login required and no data trail. And if it's all built on open standards, you avoid the usual siloing problems you'd get with Apple or PayPal running the system, like a private company gaining control over a monopoly and abusing that position to extract economic rent.
Smart contracts could automate revenue splits between writers and outlets, basically a decentralized Spotify for news, but programmable. And crucially, if payments are peer-to-peer, the biggest regulatory burdens — the terribly thought out KYC/AML anti-privacy laws — don’t apply. Those laws target intermediaries, not end users. That’s critical for making anonymous micropayments viable at scale.
Most past micropayment models failed because the rails weren’t there. Now, thanks to upgrades to public blockchain technology, they are, or at least we're getting close.
News gathering, on the other hand, means riding a regional jet coach to a flyover state, talking to people you don't know, working for six months on a data project and sometimes putting your life on the line. [1]
The sad thing is that most clicks to The New York Times are for the editorial page where the likes of Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Charlie Blow blow it out their ass every day. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles
[2] It's not whether I agree with them or not but rather that it is all low effort and it sells because it plays to people's emotions. I can see things to agree with or disagree with with Klein's "Abundance Agenda" essay but it's the kind of thing a high-schooler could write as an essay.
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
Journalists an news organizations were supposed to be the ones keeping governments in check by digging up the skeletons of those who call themselves leaders today.
Instead a lot of the news is now clickbait and attention seeking and many news organizations are actually financed by governments (BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and so on...) thereby removing any hope of having an unbiased news source because you simply don't bit the hand that feeds you.
If I want to know facts, I'll buy a book about some specific topic/event 10 years after it happens, so that the whole picture can be understood instead of reading editorials and opinions about ongoing events that most likely will be invalidated by the end of the week.
So it is what it is. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
My local news paper is $17 a month for digital or $45 a month for print and digital for a paper that prints three day a week. I know news isnt cheap but... I just cant justify that for what is a pretty OKAY newspaper. They mostly repost national news and cover local elections or town issues. Oh and lots of ads or "Partner articles"
I'm glad they exist but if they went away, which I'm sure they will eventually, I wouldnt really miss it.
$10 a month could be reasonable. I know they must have done the numbers but I imagine there are a lot of people like me who want to support x news org but just cant justify the only very limited payment options that are offered.
At the same time, I would love to pay $2 (a half of a cup of coffee) or so for a quality article. Most people, as I understand, would rather waste their time and attention than pay anything.
But Brexit moved me from a slight "like" of the UK to a definite "dislike" and I've cut most of my ties with it.
The guardian suffered. I might have stayed if they'd made a Brexit-news-free front-page but that must have been a sensitive topic inside the UK. Sometimes their front page was half Brexit news and I was so sick of it.
No. Cryptocurrencies are never a solution to anything. Don't lie to yourself (or others).
now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.
now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?
internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
I know it's been tried before, as has been mentioned in this thread, but I thought I'd attack it with a few different angles - web based, no chrome extension, and thresholds to help verify the article is worth it.
Check it out here - https://paperwall.io
Especially considering the nature of this thread, I'd love feedback and what you'd like to see out of a solution like this.
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
https://kagi.com/settings?p=custom_bangs
Redirect: "https://archive.is/newest/%s"
Bang: a
[X] URL Encode
// Yes, I'm aware I could do a bookmarklet or whatever, but the Kagi solution works across all my digital addictions and only has to be configured once.
Most of my news comes from aggregators, where every day I click through to many sites that I may have never visited before, and may never visit again. Even sites I will come back to, I might read 3 or 4 articles a month. That's not worth $15/month to me. Even if it was something more reasonable like $2/month (for that quantity of articles), I'm not going to subscribe to a news source (or lots of sources) when I don't actually visit their sites directly; it's like roulette through the aggregators.
If I hit a paywall, I'll mostly just close the tab. Occasionally I'll see if it's on archive.is, if it's a topic I'm really interested in, but if I'm clicking through from something like Google News, odds are there's another site without a paywall that is discussing the same thing.
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
But meanwhile was under impression that digital subscriptions at key players were rising rapidly in the last 3-4 years. Data points like NYT digital subscriptions having banner years up like 1M subscribers over last year, and sub sports site The Athletic turning a profit for the first time since acquisition in 2022.
And what about sources closer to home here like The Verge introducing paid options recently? How's that working out?
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
Graphic (imgbb)
If it's going to be per-view, who is going to be fighting ad^H^H view fraud, and what would be their incentive to do so?
If this this going to be fixed amount per content creator, why won't every random person sign up to be one?
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
Is there a HTML snippet/button that each site must embed? If so, it'll be gamed/frauded like crazy, kinda like with ads today. Except unlike ads, there is no incentive to keep fraud away, so all the credits will likely go to people who know how to game the system.
Or is there a page hosted by your ISP where you allocate where the credits go? If so, which fraction of ISP subscribers will be visiting it? And if they do visit it, what are the chances they'll still remember the name of that freelance writer or artist, and not just pick a well-know/popular brand instead?
Or some sort of (again, ISP-provided) browser/browser plugin? If so, how many people would install it? I certainly would not trust _anything_ my ISP provides.
Of course then PayService will have surge pricing turned on. And that will be fun. But still - viable?
Now - most newsrooms have been gutted, once-great magazines like Scientific American are sick parodies of their former selves, supposedly top-tier news sites are full of click-bait drivel, they monetize your personal information every way they can, and cancelling your subscription may require lawyer. I pay $0/year.
I donate and reccomend others do as well.
It has been pretty effective.
I pay for sites I read daily, that really mean something to me. Not the ones i get i linked to twice a month.
A weird, provocative headline creates misinformation.
Of the people who try to access the article, only 12% actually read it (1% who pay, and 11% who bypass the paywall). Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
And those are only the ppl that tries to read the news, the majority of ppl doesn't even bother trying to open the news link.
How is the number '53%', calclated?
Whilst I'm here...
If the 53% got the information [they looked for], and it thereafter WASN'T 'misinformation', would that be considered a good, or a bad, thing?
There are two groups:
1. The ones who go after the news (a minority).
2. The ones who don’t even bother reading the article (the vast majority).
From group 1, we have those numbers.
Yes, potentially those 53% could read the news in full in another place and avoid falling for the misinformation.
So, out of the people who read, I know for a fact that 12% — plus some chunk of the 53% — might be able to clarify the misinformation.
The numbers still stack up for the people who fall for misinformation in headlines.
On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
As a bonus, it's much easier to see where I've been spending so much money than running through my bank transactions and doing my own tally against their unhelpful categories and mismatched business names. And of course, the spending limits do as much to protect me from myself as it does surprise charges and price increases. It's been an invaluable tool for me, and I heartily recommend it.
And if it is a problem with the news or people are simply unwilling to sift through the haystack, why should we expect people to pay for that privilege?