Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news.

Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details.

Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads.

Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article.

I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch.

But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible.

It's a sad state of affairs, really.

Then, if I'm reading it so often that it would be more cost effective to just subscribe they can start pinging me about it.

What do you think happens now?

Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs.

The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying:

> I'm fine with paying for that article

Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for.

It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build.

Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way!

This sounds ridiculous because it is.

And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them.

It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes.

> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.

I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article.

Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends.

Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free.

Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.

Go read "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey to understand what effective organizing is.