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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

#71

Post by StanislavPetrov »

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…

Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this means spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee.

Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#72

Post by PantaloonFlames »

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…

It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of

- cable bundles

- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)

- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)

And somehow all of these models now coexist.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#73

Post by linsomniac »

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…

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article

That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.

It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#75

Post by Forgeties79 »

linsomniac wrote: post #73
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…

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them. It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content…

Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#76

Post by 1659447091 »

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…

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

Apple News+ is ~$13

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

The list of publications included

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#77

Post by salawat »

dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible.

The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.

It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#78

Post by BobaFloutist »

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…

Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).

As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#79

Post by ummonk »

In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#80

Post by BobaFloutist »

sanswork wrote: post #49
bee_rider wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe initially you wouldn’t know if an article would be good. But over time you could probably make reasonable guesses from the author/headline/title combination.

Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.

I mean that's just how reading works.
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