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

111–120 of 362 posts

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#111

Post by saagarjha »

toyg wrote: post #92
comex wrote: post #61

> So, says Mr Manager, “Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?” > Why they’re wrong: Their arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.” Didn’t it? Sure, maybe Tim Bray would have been willing to buy an article for $1 even though he wasn’t willing to subscribe. Maybe a lot of people would h…

> any amount of payment is a huge psychological barrier. We thought the same of mobile software. "People just won't pay for apps!" but it turns out they will, they just have to feel like they're getting a good deal.

But people don’t pay for apps.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#112

Post by ricardobeat »

Bring back traditional advertising. No user profiling, no retargeting, no data collection. Pay for exposure and not clicks. Problem solved. Micropayments is a red herring.

Print newspapers use to cost what, 50c a piece? And that included an absolutely massive printing, sales and distribution infrastructure. It is preposterous that digital publishing would cost more.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#113

Post by bbarn »

jdc wrote: post #97
bbarn wrote: post #95

Media is one of the most complicated problems we face in this age. We have on one side a desire for information to be free, and on the other side a desire to profit for one's labor. The middle ground between that is to attract people to give you some of their money for your labor, which changes the nature of the published works. Now your published works must not only be informative, but exciting, and more so than any…

Where does advertising fit into this viewpoint?

As I said, journalism sponsored by entities that may want to sway you. That can be anything from simple advertising, to state-controlled media.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#114

Post by jeremiahlee »

I think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring.

Consumers establish a wallet provider and install a browser extension (for now, until the standard is formally adopted). When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content.

Content creators can then do things like grant access/remove the paywall, not load/remove ads, or offer bonus features.

Today, GQ, Wired, and ~1,000 other sites are experimenting with the Web Monetization API. The only wallet provider right now is Coil, but the protocol is well defined and ready for other players.

References: - https://webmonetization.org/ - https://coil.com/ - https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#115

Post by jmnicolas »

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?

It's a long time since I saw any meaningful criticism of the government (emphasis on meaningful).

They all cheered the supposed victory of Macron getting funds from the EU. None of them told us that it would cost us more than what we would receive (since we're a net contributor to the EU budget).

Did you see any real criticism of the COVID crisis management in the press?

Edit: you want some real, French style, nasty criticism go read a few articles from this blog: http://h16free.com/

The guy knows how to write and isn't holding his punches. That's what I would expect from free journalists.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#116

Post by toyg »

foxrider wrote: post #102
jdc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does advertising fit into this viewpoint?

It used to be an ideal choice, but as article correctly mentions - we killed it. First some websites got way too greedy with annoying and harmful ads, then the adblockers cut all ad revenue to maybe 1/3 of what it was and then Google and Facebook took over.

> we killed it

No, "we" didn't. Adblockers are a red herring, the masses don't use them.

The real problem is that the metrics and incentives of internet advertising are such that newspaper articles are simply not attractive enough to justify their (high) costs of production. You read a given newspaper article once a day. You check Facebook or Google multiple times per hour. The newspaper barely knows your name and age, maybe where you live; Facebook and Google know everything about you and your tastes. And of course, it costs almost nothing for FB or G to "produce" a page of content (in fact, they get it free from others!), whereas a newspaper has to pay a highly-educated worker. Where will advertisers spend their money, where will they get more bang for their buck?

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#117

Post by pjc50 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #101

I don't see a solution to the subscription vs micropayment problem, but I wonder if we can solve three problems with one solution. We have a problem where "who is a journalist?" is not defined. We have another problem that the advertising model of paying for journalism isn't going to work (as TFA points out), and readers need to start paying for their news. We have another problem that bad actors in our society are p…

> We have another problem that bad actors in our society are paying for misinformation to be spread in order to warp people's political perceptions.

> Define a journalist as someone who makes their entire living from selling articles

Where does https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... fit into this model?

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#118

Post by bryanrasmussen »

I think aside from pay per article and subscription (give me everything you have for the year) there could be a discounted give me 5 for 3 type offer for the people who think they will want to have a certain number of articles from X over the year but that is all, I would never pay $221 a year for the NY Times because I probably only want 2 articles a month but if you offered me an article for 2 dollars I might think - no, if I pay for this article 2 dollars then (2 * 12) * 2 is nearly 50 dollars a year, I want a deal to make me think it is worth it.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#119

Post by teraku »

ramanathanrv wrote: post #108

This is indeed a huge problem. In the current form, it quickly become unsustainable (in terms of both time and money) for customers to work with so many subscriptions. Maybe the end state is Netflix/Prime like platform for digital news wherein the platform can share the subscription revenue across all the participating media companies depending on the usage. The argument against that is - these platforms now control…

I think what would be much better is a redefinition of the publisher role: Most (big) news outlets already run a lot of their own infrastructure. Web servers, this whole paywall mess, etc etc.

What if they could just provide their articles through an API (which is also consumed by their own website) and aggregators can route these articles to their users. Aggregators would become publishers of sort.

Let me flesh it out a bit.

Scenario 1) I am a subscriber of news-site1.com. I have an account with their system. I can read all their articles on their website. At the same time I browse this news-aggregator1.com. They collect lots of links, and with the power of SSO/OAuth I can already read all news-site1.com articles directly on news-aggregator1.com (since they are consuming the API with my account). Additionally I have an account with news-aggregator1.com and pay them a fee, which allows me to read N articles from any outlet they have connected with.

Scenario 2) news-aggregator2.com does not offer a subscription base, but is connected to all the APIs of the news outlets. Their users can buy on an per-article bases from all connected news outlets and the articles are saved into the user's account.

Just two scenarios how this _could_ look like. The reasons I think this is not done is 1) you lose ad traffic, which is somewhat predictable, 2) you lose predictability/control in general 3) nobody has done something like that and made it work, so there is little confidence 4) they might just be right and it only appeals to a small audience

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#120

Post by toyg »

saagarjha wrote: post #111
toyg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any amount of payment is a huge psychological barrier. We thought the same of mobile software. "People just won't pay for apps!" but it turns out they will, they just have to feel like they're getting a good deal.

But people don’t pay for apps.

Somebody tell Apple then!
Post reply on HN