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

81–90 of 362 posts

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#81

Post by faeyanpiraat »

jimkleiber wrote: post #75
notimetorelax wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were printed newspaper I could go and get one for a few bucks. Digital has nothing to offer of that kind. As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?

Hmm, what if they offered a one-week or one-month access pass that didn't auto-renew. Would you be interested in something like that?

That would be really annoying for loyal readers.

Imagine this loop: Purchase 2 week pass, read bunch of articles, some time passes, wants to read new article, oh well my pass expired..

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#82

Post by scrollaway »

jmnicolas wrote: post #79

In France the state is funding massively the mainstream press since it's not economically viable. As you can imagine it has done wonders for plurality of opinions and journalists feeling free to criticize the government ...

I'm french, I've lived in France, the UK, Greece, Sweden and Belgium. Of all those countries by far France has the most self-criticizing, cynical and sarcastic press of all. We're really good at making fun of ourselves and especially criticizing our own government.

What on earth makes you write your comment?

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#83

Post by michaelbrooks »

ketamine__ wrote: post #42
dijit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the micropayments future. The thing holding it back is some kind of central authority that can process micropayments with significantly less friction and overheads. Even better if people can accrue credit in some way that isn’t just paying fiat currency in, because we live as a privileged class to have disposable income that is essentially in escrow.

Brave browser is doing exactly what you described.

I think Brave and Coil will hopefully lead the way to decentralised micropayments. They just need to become more popular to the every day reader.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#84

Post by [deleted] »

jmnicolas wrote: post #79

In France the state is funding massively the mainstream press since it's not economically viable. As you can imagine it has done wonders for plurality of opinions and journalists feeling free to criticize the government ...

[deleted]

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#85

Post by matthewmacleod »

boplicity wrote: post #19

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…

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.

You say this as if it were objectively true, but it rings exceptionally hollow to me. This seems like a minor inconvenience at best, and something which could easily provided by a third-party service with no upfront cost beyond integration.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#86

Post by toyg »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #81
jimkleiber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, what if they offered a one-week or one-month access pass that didn't auto-renew. Would you be interested in something like that?

That would be really annoying for loyal readers. Imagine this loop: Purchase 2 week pass, read bunch of articles, some time passes, wants to read new article, oh well my pass expired..

It doesn't have to be a XOR.

I know of at least one minor newspaper that sells that kind of pass (1-month non-renewing sub) as well as other subscriptions: https://ilmanifesto.it/tariffe/

It's Italian but the table is easy enough to decipher. "Mese" is a month. "Digitale" is digital (duh). "Coupon" is a scheme where they send you vouchers to redeem the newspaper in shops, and is extremely popular among their readership. "Postale" is the classic system through the post (which can be slow in Italy, hence the voucher scheme). "Sostenitore" is basically a supporter donation.

Sadly they still make less than 10% of their revenue from digital, despite a first-class website and iOS app and Android app. Their revenue from paper is fairly solid and they've now streamlined enough that they could probably survive on that, but they still do yearly donation drives.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#87

Post by toyg »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #20
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 go…

It's a nice idea but 90% of the audience would simply not get it. "What do you mean I can't have my money back ?!?"

A quick survey of the comments-section of newspapers will show you very quickly how unsophisticated the general public is.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#88

Post by kbenson »

mikelward wrote: post #10

> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more. Exactly. Same thing is happening with cable unbundling. Few people want to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, ESPN+, Disney+, Peacock, and YouTube TV/Sli…

This all really started with a-la carte subscriptions, which were a good thing, even if it only partially solved the problem and was implemented without much granularity by the cable providers (there used to be so many channels that most people just never cared about). Then with the internet, there started to be less need for a provider to bundle everything, so services started popping up everywhere.

Really, this is one of those areas that it would be wonderful if there was some standard by which content providers could expose their content and the metadata for it, and if you had an account with access it would be added to some aggregator for you. Sort of like what you get with Apple and Roku, with search ability through apps/channels, but in a more normalized fashion. Being able to add a discovery URL and access credentials and have a system automatically add content would be wonderful as a consumer, but the incentive just isn't there with the providers because there's always some big exclusive access deal, or a deal across multiple providers, so I'm inefficiently paying for the same movie on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. I want a world where I can add Netflix and Amazon Prime credentials to Hulu, and access all the content through Hulu, or Hulu and Amazon Prime credentials and watch everything in Netflix, or just add them all to Roku and have it add all the content to an interface there for me to use.

Amazon is actually getting closest to this in functionality, if not in spirit, by allowing you to subscribe to lots of other services through it and they show up there. Of course, you have to pay Amazon for them, and you are stuck using Amazon to view them, so it's not really equivalent at all.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#89

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #82
jmnicolas wrote: post #79

In France the state is funding massively the mainstream press since it's not economically viable. As you can imagine it has done wonders for plurality of opinions and journalists feeling free to criticize the government ...

I'm french, I've lived in France, the UK, Greece, Sweden and Belgium. Of all those countries by far France has the most self-criticizing, cynical and sarcastic press of all. We're really good at making fun of ourselves and especially criticizing our own government. What on earth makes you write your comment?

[deleted]

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#90

Post by toyg »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #72
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…

Yep, it's the same problem we've had for a decade. Microtransactions are far from frinctionless (sign up, enter a credit card). News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system, where you refill it when it gets low.

> News sites need to band together and use a consolidated billing system

Yes. Although it carries a bit of risk - what happens when VISA does to you what they did to Wikileaks? - some consolidation of backend services is inevitable.

> where you refill it when it gets low

Eff no. "Top-up" schemes are annoying as hell, from a consumer perspective.

It makes more sense to run some sort of exchange, where you register a credit card once and then don't actually trigger payment until it's economically convenient to do so (e.g. when you've "spent" $5 or $10, so card fees won't kill your margins). The exchange takes up some risk (effectively fronting $4.99 per user), but the inconvenience for consumers is very low and there is no friction. I think this would be very popular.

Post reply on HN