There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.
Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.
If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.