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Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

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Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#71

Post by timo_f »

justaguyhere wrote: post #3

I'd happily pay for these: List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop") Same as the previous one, but in the non-profit space and not for making money. Specific problems that I can write code for, without having to worry about whether it is actually useful or not Stories/commen…

> List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")

Does anyone know if this exists?

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#73

Post by rayalez »

pjc50 wrote: post #58

I tell you what would be amazing: content aggregators (like HN) that charged and distributed money to the content providers. Unfortunately it's really hard to build a community if you charge.

Are you familiar with steemit? They're trying to do something like that, although the result is not as good as HN or even reddit.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#74

Post by bArray »

ac29 wrote: post #64
paulryanrogers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner? Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.

Blogs are already convenient to access anywhere, anytime and in a timely manner. Its called RSS. Not sure how $5/month would improve on that.

The content for that RSS feed has to come from somewhere though. RSS is cool, but it doesn't seem sustainable by itself.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#75

Post by justaguyhere »

subpixel wrote: post #60

I would pay $5/mo to use Twitter, but only if every other user paid the same amount and there were no ads.

I'm curious why Twitter isn't at least experimenting with this (or Facebook and others). Even if just 10M accounts paid $5 per month, it is 600M biz a year.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#76

Post by bArray »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #23
bArray wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, something feels impure about paying for knowledge, we should be pushing back on any kind of pay wall. That said, I'm really not sure what system should be put in place to pay for quality content.

Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner? Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.

>Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner?

I'm willing to put up with a considerable amount of inconvenience for open content, including advertising (as long as they are not tracking or using unknown scripts).

$5/month is also a lot of money to me, that currently covers: website, IRC, VPN and a game server. Most the people here may be on a better than average wage working within tech fields, so I imagine opinions to be skewed.

>Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.

I mentioned this originally and I'm not entirely aware of how to tackle this - but I think the overall cost to the user financially should be really low or nonexistent. That could mean an attention economy, mining coin on a specialized chip, or whatever other reasonable means. It should also be a choice where possible.

Another idea I thought of a while back would be to have people reading the content help share the load of hosting by acting as a peer. There's some not very well supported server sockets (last time I checked) coming for browsers that could make this possible, but equally with a well designed client. Potentially the more popular the content, the less it costs to run.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#77

Post by subpixel »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #61
subpixel wrote: post #60

I would pay $5/mo to use Twitter, but only if every other user paid the same amount and there were no ads.

I'm curious, what is it about Twitter that you'd pay for?

If it ceased to be free it would possibly maintain its utility and gain some civility b/c most of the people that constitute the political echo chamber would balk at paying.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#78

Post by scarface74 »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #42
lawrencewu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He makes $200k / year from his newsletter: http://www.niemanlab.org/reading/ben-thompsons-stratechery-i...

wow, that seems really not much for a publication focused on business strategy.

That was a few years ago when he said he had 2000 subscribers. He doesn't say how many he has now.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#79

Post by stephengillie »

DaveFr wrote: post #66
UncleEntity wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else. I'd double down on that, any site that has a free article limit (looking at you NY Times) I don't even bother with. Or any site that whines about running an ad blocker. True they need to make some cash to keep the lights on but I have never in my life bought something from seeing an online advertisement and don't really appreciate being tracked…

What are you willing to give for the information you receive?

When I ask myself this question, I find I'm not willing to pay for most blog articles, neither though advertising nor directly. When I follow through and forgo the information, I find other pursuits to fill the time, and these are usually more fulfilling. I feel more healthy after a morning of playing Minecraft or working on my Node app, than a morning of reading blogs and social media.

Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?

#80

Post by baobaba »

I stumbled upon https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/ recently and it's the first time I want to pay for a newsletter. I don't need to pass a coding interview, but I used to be a competition programmer in high school and love thinking of tricky coding problems to solve. The newsletter includes a detailed solution to each problem (the next day.) What a great idea.

I also used to pay for http://railscasts.com/ by Ryan Bates - back when it was a paid subscription. I paid for how succinct the information was organized, despite there being a tonne of other Ruby blogs out there.

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