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Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

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Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#51

Post by subpixel »

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.

That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.

It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.

You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.

This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#52

Post by cyberax »

eli wrote: post #23
jawns wrote: post #2

No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way. We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model. You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content. What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model. I'm…

I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar. Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.) Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they…

Scroll was successful. It provided more income than ads to participating companies. So it was hastily acquired and killed by Twitter.

Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#54

Post by onyx228 »

hibikir wrote: post #27
sanswork wrote: post #3

Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation…

I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I…

I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.

My suggestion was as follows:

Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"

The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.

I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#55

Post by groestl »

gnatman wrote: post #34
mcteamster wrote: post #15

The difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is infinite. But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?

OK but the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is also 1 cent.

And your data.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#57

Post by Edman274 »

post-it wrote: post #18
sanswork wrote: post #3

Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation…

I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system. In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe. Of cour…

Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#58

Post by makestuff »

subpixel wrote: post #51

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you sub…

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.

I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.

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