I'd pay money for a Netflix-like service for newspapers. I know it's probably not as good for the newspaper business as the old subscription model, but it's pretty much the only viable model that I can see working.
Subscription Hell
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Re: Subscription Hell
#12Or, stop consuming so much shit. It's OK to not have everything, you know?
It's a pity you're being downvoted as what you say really makes a lot of sense and everybody would do well if they followed this advice.
Re: Subscription Hell
#13You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
Was Bloomberg making $35 from ads from my 3 visits to their site per month? If not why do they ask me now for $35?
it's funny that bloomberg is now trying to charge for something that's basically content marketing for its terminals.
Re: Subscription Hell
#14Or, stop consuming so much shit. It's OK to not have everything, you know?
In agreement. I keep the site's I read to a minimum. Dose of world news, vc news, some gaming news, tech news. When I run out I browse hackaday. Maybe a total of 45 minutes if I'm really bored. The I have to start creating to entertain myself.
I purposely do not add new aggregator sites when bored. In fact my fallback (Fark) is woefully out of date. If I feel the urge to read that I immediately pick a side project and open it up.
We have way too many consumers in this world. Not enough producers.
Tho I do troll Craigslist for machinery when bored as well but hitting the limits on the amount of tooling my garage can hold.
Re: Subscription Hell
#15A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect subscriptions.
While something like Netflix/Spotify would be nice from a user/consumer perspective, there is both the difficulty of gathering everyone under one platform and the risks of having a single (or a few) number of brokers of news across the board.
Re: Subscription Hell
#16I'd pay money for a Netflix-like service for newspapers. I know it's probably not as good for the newspaper business as the old subscription model, but it's pretty much the only viable model that I can see working.
Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day.
We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pursuing it but hopefully others do.
Re: Subscription Hell
#17Maybe a pay per click business model where you get a monthly bill from your IP for your internet activity in websites that require payment is an alternative
Re: Subscription Hell
#18I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want.
The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles).
Now the pay per article model works so much better. You can charge me to read a single article but I pay nothing if I read nothing. This is the model that blendle.com uses and my experience was that even though their "per article" price was much higher than I originally thought reasonable (9 cents to 50 cents) I was paying basically $50 a month for subscriptions to the publications that I read (WSJ, Economist, NYT, WaPo, etc) and with Blendle I end up putting maybe $15 or $25 per month into my Blendle wallet. So its half as expensive for me and I still get to read, advertising free, any article in those publications. Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher. When you read a lemon you get your money back.
I win (save money) they win (they get paid for their journalism).
Re: Subscription Hell
#19Or, stop consuming so much shit. It's OK to not have everything, you know?
True, I save a lot of time when I can't read an article I clicked on because it's behind a paywall!
Re: Subscription Hell
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This site has employment ads for YC portfolio companies placed into the feed.
These ads don't feel intrusive to me.
Better yet, they don't have JS payloads with 0-days attached to them. Nor does HN engage in js miners.
I still hate adverts, but at least here its not a malware-fest. I still hate ads as they are parasitic in one of our most important resources: attention.