Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Won’t Subscribe

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 362 posts

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#11

Post by jimnotgym »

tom_mellior wrote: post #5
greenyoda wrote: post #2

> “Hold on,” he says, “I’ve got an excellent publication, full of great journalism and delicious writing. I should be able to compete with those other things and maybe displace them!” That seems pretty easy: If you're trying to sell a subscription to someone, give them a free one-month trial subscription with no strings attached (no credit card required). If they like it, they might switch to your publication.

Without them requiring something like a credit card, it would be fairly easy for somewhat determined "attackers" to get an arbitrary number of free trials. At some point the Guardian (IIRC; may have been some other paper I read from time to time) had some sort of hilarious "we'll use cookies to enforce N free article views per month" policy. Of course this doesn't work well against people who know that they can delet…

The Guardian is free to read all of the time. The yellow boxes st the bottom ask you to subscribe but don't require it

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#12

Post by thewebcount »

I wonder if it could work with some sort of in-between model? Like pay $1.00 to access 10 articles in the next month (or whatever). This reduces the problem of no payment processor wanting to process $0.10 payments, and no reader wanting to pay $15-50 per month to read 1-3 articles from your newspaper.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#13

Post by ziml77 »

autarch wrote: post #6
tom_mellior wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without them requiring something like a credit card, it would be fairly easy for somewhat determined "attackers" to get an arbitrary number of free trials. At some point the Guardian (IIRC; may have been some other paper I read from time to time) had some sort of hilarious "we'll use cookies to enforce N free article views per month" policy. Of course this doesn't work well against people who know that they can delet…

There are still sites doing this. Bloomberg is one I can think of, since I've deleted my cookies (and other local storage) for that site more than once, with success.

I highly doubt Bloomberg cares enough. They make their money selling terminal subscriptions and data feeds for obscene amounts.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#14

Post by jimnotgym »

More thoughts.

I dabble with publications

1) I subscribe to the Guardian atm even though it is free to read

2) I tried to restart subscriptions with the Financial Times and Economist recently and gave up on both due to shitty behaviour, shitty terms, shitty UI. It is not all about price

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#17

Post by smichel17 »

thewebcount wrote: post #12

I wonder if it could work with some sort of in-between model? Like pay $1.00 to access 10 articles in the next month (or whatever). This reduces the problem of no payment processor wanting to process $0.10 payments, and no reader wanting to pay $15-50 per month to read 1-3 articles from your newspaper.

I think what you're proposing is essentially a retainer?

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#18

Post by sce »

An alternative subscription model that I've always liked is Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) which publishes all premium content openly after a week behind paywall. (In my mind I like to call it "Freshwall", ie. paying for fresh content.) News quickly gets old after all.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#19

Post by boplicity »

As a long-time publisher, there is only one primary metric that matters to me: loyal readers. I don't publish for the occasional visitor. I publish for the loyal readers that I have worked hard to cultivate, engage, and enrichen. The primary work is one of building a relationship with a loyal readership, based on consistency and quality.

Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; you're either part of our core audience, or we're filtering for whether you could be part of our core audience. Everyone else is secondary to the success of the business, as well as secondary to our core job, which is to serve our loyal readers, and, again, NOT our occasional readers, and certainly not the people who are likely to visit us just once and then never again.

The article suggests adding an additonal – and complex – revenue source: selling articles individually. This idea, of course, is not feasible, because it is such a huge distraction from the core business, and is potentially a distraction that has the potential to cause real harm to the core business. Successful publishing is extremely difficult. To actually be sustainable, you really can't let yourself be distracted from what matters.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#20

Post by dwohnitmok »

gombosg wrote: post #7

How would you pay for individual articles? Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles? From this standpoint…

For the problem of reader regret with upfront payments (which would be the number one problem with clickbait) I could imagine a time-limited "payment loss." That is within, say, a day of having paid for an article, the reader can decide that the author/publication should not be paid for the article. This is not a refund; the reader does not get the money back. But the author doesn't get the money either.

The money goes into a "black hole." There are several ways of implementing a black hole such as a central fund that is evenly distributed back to all publications participating in the payment system in proportion to their current payout levels, but the important point is that neither the article creator nor the reader nor the payment handler sees that money.

That way readers don't get free articles via spurious refunds, but get the psychological satisfaction they're not rewarding clickbait, article creators are disincentivized from putting out clickbait, and the payment handler isn't incentivized to facilitate clickbait.

Post reply on HN