I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
graemep · 6h ago
I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
czhu12 · 18m ago
Don’t you think the reason news has no real value is because many news organizations have been hollowed out due to a lack of a business model that can pay for journalism?
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
clejack · 3h ago
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
darkwater · 3h ago
So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
The answer IMO is easy, and we should have learnt it after over 30 years of Internet and World Wide Web growth: because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Even if they are publishing something from a common source. Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience etc etc
graemep · 2h ago
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
Because a lot of HN voters and commenters just read the headlines and not the articles.
carlosjobim · 2h ago
Great point. That's how news should be read and how news should be presented. A filtering by the journalist to shorten, highlight, explain, and then a link to the complete and original source, so that interested readers can verify and dig deeper.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
> but a lot of news has no real value.
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
graemep · 2h ago
I agree with keeping up with things that might affect you, but that is a tiny sliver of the news.
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
nlawalker · 10h ago
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
rebeccaskinner · 6h ago
Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
matthewmacleod · 5h ago
I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
netsharc · 42m ago
I guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
greyface- · 10h ago
In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
salawat · 9h ago
Congratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
tobr · 8h ago
I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. Plenty of systems like that around.
ruined · 6h ago
too bad the middleman sells that too
prognu · 6h ago
https://taler-ops.ch/ is live in Switzerland and allows exactly this: anonymous microtransactions. What law exactly would prevent someone from doing the same in the US?
slaw · 3h ago
KYC is mandatory in the US. You can't send money without knowing your recipient.
Can I send money to someone else and then have them pay? Example: etsy knows who I am but maybe every individual store does not? Similarly patreon knows who I am but each person I'm supporting does not? How about only fans?
No comments yet
sneak · 3h ago
The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) as amended under USA-PATRIOT.
That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
robocat · 4h ago
The present system seems perfectly capable of destroying itself without our help.
dyauspitr · 5h ago
There’s plenty of destruction going on and it doesn’t look like a brighter future.
darqis · 6h ago
sarcasm is too complicated for the average HN viewer, obviously smh
AnthonyMouse · 3h ago
Sarcasm is cheap and parses as defeatism. Everybody knows the system is doing financial mass surveillance. How do we get it to stop?
cco · 10h ago
I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
jdminhbg · 9h ago
> Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
tim333 · 1h ago
I wouldn't mind sending 10c or some such but have never in ~30 years of internet use been offered that. It's all "sign up now for $1/month! (smallprint: after first month it's $29/mo billed annually up from and a pain to cancel)"
janandonly · 6h ago
You clearly never “zapped” a few says before via any Nostr client.
SpaceNoodled · 10h ago
BRB gonna make Superman 3 money
sandspar · 9h ago
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
horsawlarway · 5h ago
This is not at all what ads are...
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
JohnFen · 17m ago
And it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
close04 · 6h ago
> This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
tristramb · 3h ago
Microtransactions for viewing news would just start a flood of AI generated sludge designed purely to harvest those microtransactions.
arrowsmith · 4h ago
> The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
AnthonyMouse · 3h ago
There have always been two main things preventing this from happening.
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
kalaksi · 4h ago
I always find this kind of reasoning shallow or somewhat circular. Plenty of tech in history has been too much ahead of their time, bogged down by missing related tech, a larger movement or otherwise didn't just make it big until later.
TheOtherHobbes · 3h ago
Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c".
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
jbverschoor · 3h ago
They're not if the infrastructure is there (and it is.. apple pay, google pay, paypal, even tokens... although that's a bit of a hurdle)
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
carlosjobim · 2h ago
> The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
shafyy · 7h ago
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
tacker2000 · 5h ago
Actually i saw bloomberg doing this a couple of days ago, it was “subscribe for 1.99 a month” and you could use apple pay. [1]
I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.
But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.
Yes many newspaper offer this super cheap first month options. However, at least I, would rather pay 1 € to read one article without a subscription I need to worry about later, than pay € 2 to subscribe for a month.
dyauspitr · 5h ago
It would have to be $0.05 an article. 50 cents is way too high.
dmurray · 2h ago
Not at Bloomberg's end of the market.
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
jbverschoor · 3h ago
One of the reasons why mobile games sell game credits.
carlosjobim · 2h ago
How is your reasoning? If an article isn't even worth 50 cents, then why is it worth your time to read it? We only have limited time in this world, death is approaching swiftly.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
lovelearning · 9m ago
Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
JohnFen · 13m ago
> Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute).
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
jillesvangurp · 6h ago
I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ a month. And then everything I want to read is readable. Let somebody else decide how split that 10$. Of course the problem with that is that Spotify isn't very fair about giving artists their cut. But that should be a fixable problem.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
StackRanker3000 · 5h ago
This is a tangent from the original topic, but what do you see as unfair in how Spotify pays rightsholders?
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
chii · 4h ago
> I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
kelnos · 4h ago
> yet empirically, most people wont.
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
chii · 2h ago
> So how do we know this, empirically?
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
jeduardo · 5h ago
The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
jeroenhd · 5h ago
https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
creinhardt · 9h ago
Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
bruce511 · 8h ago
Very much this.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
em-bee · 5h ago
this is why payment integrated into wechat is a success. everyone (in china) has wechat already, and sending a few cents worth is trivial. heck, you can even give money to beggars using wechat. and you don't even need to connect a bank account to get started.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
Many countries have easy, accessible systems already. I can transfer single eurocents to everyone I have an IBAN for, and it'll appear on their bank account in seconds. Places like the US seem to prefer some kind of hybrid system where their bank integrates with one or more different companies to deal with doing easy bank transfers. The biggest problem right now is that you'd need to implement paying and receiving money for every single country's payment culture.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
em-bee · 1h ago
SEPA is nice, except until recently my bank charged me money to use it (fortunately they changed that now). but i don't want to use my bank account for micro payments. i do want a separate wallet for that. my bank account has a credit card that works like that. if i want to use the credit card i have to actively load up money from my bank account before i can use it. i want the same for a digital wallet. i do not want to use my banking app where i receive my income for that. in my case i don't use the phone for online banking at all for the same reason.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
TylerE · 5h ago
I worked at a small group of local dallies doing IT/Dev stuff about 15 years ago. Just the struggles we had dealing with very basic login/password with a large fraction of our userbase...
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
amanaplanacanal · 4h ago
Not sure i want to pay to read an article and then also have to see an ad too. Maybe. I sure won't put up with that for video content.
calebh · 10h ago
There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
janandonly · 6h ago
Blendle was the bom.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
jeroenhd · 4h ago
The subscription model happened before the sale; Blendle wasn't profitable. News conglomerates like DPG Media leaving the platform to set up their own payment plans also didn't help. I think it would've succeeded here had the news industry not collapsed into a few megacompanies.
kalaksi · 3h ago
For me, the ideal setup would be simple micropayments with 1 or 2 confirmation clicks and absolutely no subscriptions or accounts required. Just a simple payment.
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
martin_a · 3h ago
Flattr was exactly that. Was. Didn't work out in the end, I guess, but we'd all be better of with that...
sneak · 3h ago
You can do this with a centralized service that offers redeemable bearer tokens for arbitrary amounts that transfers a predefined amount from requester’s account to the redeemer’s account.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
protocolture · 7h ago
We really just need a good aggregator.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
ben_w · 2h ago
> We really just need a good aggregator.
Right, all those different writers can band together, perhaps get an editor to curate the best and make sure there's no major blunders…
But isn't that just a news organisation?
jeroenhd · 4h ago
Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
protocolture · 4h ago
Yeah all implementations thus far have sucked I am well aware.
My read is thats because the aggregators wanted to be blind middle men.
These days you need to curate. I would almost pay just to remove the bottomless pit of pseudoscience from my feed.
re-thc · 7h ago
> Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
protocolture · 4h ago
They were forced to make private arrangements to pay various media companies what they thought their content was making on their platform. In aggregate its roughly the same.
re-thc · 1h ago
> In aggregate its roughly the same.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
snowwrestler · 51m ago
Micro transactions are a classic example illustrating the differences between what people say they want to do, and what they actually do. They’ve been tried many different ways and never worked financially. There’s no conspiracy; most customers just didn’t want to use them.
zelos · 3h ago
That's how Minitel used to work: each page you accessed would add a few pence to your bill.
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
kelnos · 4h ago
Regarding your issues around buyer's remorse, I just don't see this as a problem. If you're paying 25 cents for something, and it turns out to be garbage or full of ads or whatever, you shrug, eat the 25 cents, and never visit that website again. For such a small amount of money, I think a "no refunds" policy is reasonable.
ben_w · 2h ago
Sure, except that SEO-optimised AI listicles are currently on top of the search results for a non-trivial fraction of my searches, and the cost of generating an AI article to match any novel search term is much less than even 1¢, which means any given person will either learn to not bother reading the news at all, or find the AI generated *literally fake news made up on the spot for you when you look at it* is compelling and keep giving their money to it while mistaking it for a real source of truth.
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
pjc50 · 3h ago
Quite possibly. But scams tend to proliferate. What ratio of scam to legit causes someone to refuse to use the micropayment system itself ever again?
mgiampapa · 9h ago
Why not just have an extension on your phone's browser that does this automatically for you? Firefox still lives!
jeroenhd · 4h ago
That's how flattr used to work. Like all well-intentioned attempts to pay creators, it collapsed because people lost interest.
Spivak · 10h ago
Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
hereme888 · 10h ago
Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias.
Still others will tip based on quality.
However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
MarkusQ · 10h ago
If that's what's bothering you, I can put your mind at ease by pointing out the absurdity of our world today. Half the news you read is, in fact, part of a coordinated political agenda.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
usefulcat · 9h ago
> Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
usefulcat · 9h ago
> Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
Simulacra · 10h ago
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
ProllyInfamous · 10h ago
I was just discussing this, earlier today, with a fellow on HackerNews:
microtransactions are not doable with the fees of the overhead
pfdietz · 4h ago
Toss a coin to your paper, O browser of plenty.
kevin_thibedeau · 9h ago
I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
lynx97 · 4h ago
Dark patterns around subscription cancellation have led me to only use subscriptions I can do via Apple. Having a single menu in the Settings app to manage all your subs is such a comfy feeling.
jbverschoor · 3h ago
Exactly. I wish all the Apple bashers good luck. Well worth the 15-30%
MrDrMcCoy · 8h ago
I use privacy.com proxy cards for this. Don't even bother unsubscribing most of the time, I just cancel the card and let nature run it's course :)
hiq · 3h ago
Legally, can't they let the subscription run and say you owe them the money?
Nextgrid · 3h ago
I can say you owe me money too. The hard part is collecting said money. The overheads of collecting from a non-cooperative customer would not make it worthwhile.
tim333 · 1h ago
But what if they pass it to a debt agency? I think it's a risky strategy.
eastabrooka · 10m ago
Depends if they allow signup from a prepaid visa.
There's no one to chase, its a prepaid.
Nextgrid · 19m ago
Ignore it? Even a debt agency has profit margins to hit and wouldn't take on unprofitable clients.
Cerium · 9h ago
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
apical_dendrite · 9h ago
You can subscribe to The NY Times through the App Store and then cancel painlessly just like any other app subscription.
very agreed, they have tons of good articles which is about as many times as I've been warned never to sign up with them because you cancel.
ChaoPrayaWave · 6h ago
Most people don’t pay because the flow is broken. You’re curious, you click, and then you hit a wall. The moment is gone. It's not about money, it's about momentum.
enraged_camel · 4h ago
Not really. Even sites that make payments optional and present the dialog after you've been on the page for some time aren't successful.
JohnFen · 1h ago
I pay for sites that I frequent. For the ones where I'm just interested in a single article, I would be willing to pay to read it if the price for it were reasonable and I didn't have to subscribe or have an account.
littlecranky67 · 6h ago
News is technically stuck in the 2000s. I would pay a Netflix-like subscription of 10$, but would not want to install custom Apps for each and every news product that tracks me. Send me the newspaper in an open format (pdf, epub, mobi) everyday via Email - that is a news subscription worth paying for.
paxys · 1h ago
So, Apple News?
timbit42 · 1h ago
No middle man/person please.
janandonly · 6h ago
Which Europeans remember Blendle? You put a few € into your account and then you browsed all popular magazines and news papers. If you saw an articled of interest you bought it for 10-70 cents.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
guerrilla · 5h ago
These kind of things still exist. Libraries often have them. I think it might just be a case of weak marketing. We don't hear about them.
teeray · 10h ago
Nobody wants a subscription to the Podunk Nowhere Times—they just want to read the one damn article they published this decade that is actually interesting.
yorwba · 6h ago
People in Podunk Nowhere might want to read it more often. And everything about Podunk Nowhere Times' monetization structure will be designed around those repeat customers, not people who visit their website once a decade. If you hit a paywall and don't want to pay, most likely you're not the target audience anyway.
ggm · 7h ago
The value proposition shifted. I subscribed to print paper and they had a model: hook you in on a dollar a week, move you up to a dollar a day.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
CSSer · 7h ago
I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
ggm · 7h ago
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
spacemule · 4h ago
This sounds interesting, but I cannot understand what you're saying. Could you dumb this down a bit for someone with no experience in marketing/sales?
ggm · 4h ago
There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
grogenaut · 9h ago
having been screwed by multiple peridocials when I wanted to cancel I'm very suspect on signing up again. and when I did It was such a pain to stay logged in. Archive.is is easier. If they fixed that and allowed simple cancellation I'd actually consider it.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
asimpletune · 9h ago
I sincerely believe many of our societal issues could be resolved if, somehow, people started paying for stuff again.
yuretz · 6h ago
And vice versa, many of our societal issues would go away, if companies won't only be concerned about profits.
Let's not blame the players for the game rules being flawed.
Hilariously enough, this Pew article would not have been worth having paid any subscription term to have read.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
UmGuys · 4h ago
I would certainly have negative money if I subscribed to every prompt. How would a person even manage that? The emails. You would have to hire someone to unsubscribe. The model clearly isn't functional. It seems like only the entertainment outlets can afford to be free. So we have MAGA and really wild people.
cypherpunks01 · 10h ago
Did all the pay-per-article services fail (like Blendle) or are there any decent ones remaining?
MathMonkeyMan · 10h ago
I don't want to read the news often enough that I'd pay for a subscription. Not anymore, anyway.
I subscribe to a print newspaper every day, it's about $2.35 per day, delivered to my house.
usrusr · 9h ago
In the ad-fundeed years, we got used to not feeling tied to the opinion bias of one or two publishers. Even if effectively we are tied, not really routine-checking more than one of two news sources, it would feel like a huge loss loving ourselves down by a subscription or two, as we did in the paper age (those of us old enough to remember).
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
lazyasciiart · 9h ago
I would pay double my local newspaper subscription if it would get me access to a couple dozen articles from other newspapers each month, especially regional papers where I’m never going to subscribe for that one-off piece about a friend but I want them to survive.
timewizard · 9h ago
> I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication"
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
creinhardt · 9h ago
Isn’t this basically Apple News? It would be great if you could select your local news source, and it funneled part of your subscription their way.
stared · 5h ago
I pay for a subscription -> a year later I see that I paid $ for something I barely read.
At the same time, I would love to pay $2 (a half of a cup of coffee) or so for a quality article. Most people, as I understand, would rather waste their time and attention than pay anything.
Hilift · 2h ago
I'm not paying for something that is more annoying on mobile than on a notebook or desktop. You want money you should learn how to interact with humans.
dzonga · 2h ago
paying for the physical paper made sense specially for local papers - since relevant local ads/ opportunities were in those papers.
now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.
now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?
internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
Daisywh · 5h ago
Maybe the problem isn't why people won't pay, but why the news industry still thinks the old model works. People are willing to pay for music, games, coffee, but news isn't engaging or pleasurable anymore. It's more like spinach: good for you, but you don't crave it.
PaulHoule · 10h ago
Lies are free but the truth costs money.
crabmusket · 10h ago
Yep, because the truth is hard to vary but lies have few constraints.
PaulHoule · 9m ago
Lies have their own pataphysics. In my mind "fake news" is characterized not so much by its falseness but by the way it plays on people's emotions.
News gathering, on the other hand, means riding a regional jet coach to a flyover state, talking to people you don't know, working for six months on a data project and sometimes putting your life on the line. [1]
The sad thing is that most clicks to The New York Times are for the editorial page where the likes of Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Charlie Blow blow it out their ass every day. [2]
[2] It's not whether I agree with them or not but rather that it is all low effort and it sells because it plays to people's emotions. I can see things to agree with or disagree with with Klein's "Abundance Agenda" essay but it's the kind of thing a high-schooler could write as an essay.
Ferret7446 · 6h ago
Not really, there's more than an abundance of truth to be had for free, you can even pick what truth you want, from the boring "aligns with my beliefs" to the more exciting "makes me slightly uncomfortable" and even spicier than that when you're looking for a complete makeover.
bdangubic · 6h ago
you can even pick what truth you want
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t · 9h ago
By this logic, Twitter is truth?
jasonfrost · 10h ago
>nyt is truth
ludicrousdispla · 9h ago
"all news is views"
bell-cot · 5h ago
Then modern capitalism moves in, and "truth" is redefined as "whatever maximizes our quarterly profit".
jimnotgym · 5h ago
I wouldn't be suprised if few Americans (proportionately few) read quality news at all. People seem more interested in forming into tribes
kelnos · 4h ago
Of course I don't pay for news. I had a WaPo subscription for a couple years, but I cancelled at some point once I felt Bezos was exercising too much editorial control.
Most of my news comes from aggregators, where every day I click through to many sites that I may have never visited before, and may never visit again. Even sites I will come back to, I might read 3 or 4 articles a month. That's not worth $15/month to me. Even if it was something more reasonable like $2/month (for that quantity of articles), I'm not going to subscribe to a news source (or lots of sources) when I don't actually visit their sites directly; it's like roulette through the aggregators.
If I hit a paywall, I'll mostly just close the tab. Occasionally I'll see if it's on archive.is, if it's a topic I'm really interested in, but if I'm clicking through from something like Google News, odds are there's another site without a paywall that is discussing the same thing.
postexitus · 5h ago
It would be interesting to compare this with The Guardian's model - it's not paywalled, but you are encouraged to donate / subscribe (similar to Wikipedia). I have not only subscribed to digital edition, but also included physical delivery later. I think people would be more willing to pay after receiving a knowledge service, seeing the quality and being satisfied with it.
No comments yet
tim333 · 1h ago
I'm surprised "other" is only 2%. I bypass most paywalls with a couple of chrome extensions. (bypasspaywalls and the archive.is one).
_wire_ · 7h ago
Who wants to pay to be told what to think?
Ferret7446 · 6h ago
Devil's advocate, the best solution to this would be a cryptocurrency protocol that could actually scale to micro transactions along with sufficiently good UX. It needs to be trivial for anyone to tip anyone a few cents here and there.
martin_a · 3h ago
> best solution to this would be a cryptocurrency
No. Cryptocurrencies are never a solution to anything. Don't lie to yourself (or others).
robertlagrant · 4h ago
I think this would need to be integrated into web browsers as a standard or as an extension. You have a chunk of money you've prepaid to a service, and that service lets you pay (makes you pay?) $0.05 for viewing an article, and remembers that you did it, and the paywall gives you the option to instantly pay with PayService.
Of course then PayService will have surge pricing turned on. And that will be fun. But still - viable?
keiferski · 5h ago
But does it actually matter in terms of what happens in the world? My impression is that people deeply involved in business, politics, etc. do pay for the news, and often pay for multiple subscriptions to things like the NYT, The Economist, Financial Times, etc. and they all seem to be doing just fine financially.
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
k310 · 9h ago
Micropayments never went anywhere, so how about this? Part of the exorbitant highwayman fees collected by ISP's could buy credits for content creators. A bazillion risky online payments is the problem, not the solution. Breaches are a matter of when, not if.
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
so, how does one get to be a "content creator" and how much money to the pay?
If it's going to be per-view, who is going to be fighting ad^H^H view fraud, and what would be their incentive to do so?
If this this going to be fixed amount per content creator, why won't every random person sign up to be one?
k310 · 6h ago
I was thinking that you get credits to spend as you choose. Smacks of "free market" :-)
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
Animats · 6h ago
Most major news sources now have paywalls. NYT, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters...
The legacy broadcast networks just dislike ad blockers, though.
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
ruined · 6h ago
good news doesnt pay for itself and neither does bad news
uzername · 3h ago
I've been paying for NYT for five years. I remember the NYT paywall before that. I've been interested in local news so after my 5th hit in recent memory hitting my local newspaper's paywall, I finally bought a year subscription.
On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
gethly · 6h ago
This is interesting because about next month, I'll start working on paywall as a service to add to Gethly.com platform. There are few challenges with this and I am not surprised we have not seen much traction with this.
diogolsq · 3h ago
That shows the danger of the clickbait economy.
A weird, provocative headline creates misinformation.
Of the people who try to access the article, only 12% actually read it (1% who pay, and 11% who bypass the paywall). Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
And those are only the ppl that tries to read the news, the majority of ppl doesn't even bother trying to open the news link.
Ylpertnodi · 1h ago
> Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
How is the number '53%', calclated?
Whilst I'm here...
If the 53% got the information [they looked for], and it thereafter WASN'T 'misinformation', would that be considered a good, or a bad, thing?
amelius · 6h ago
We need more paywalls in social media feeds.
charbelnicolasg · 9h ago
Imagine having to pay mostly for propaganda and fake news... No, thank you.
tonyedgecombe · 6h ago
Read the news and you are misinformed, don't read the news and you are uninformed.
spencerflem · 5h ago
The Guardian is the only good US news site, and it doesn't have a paywall.
I donate and reccomend others do as well.
No comments yet
bell-cot · 5h ago
Pre-web, when high-quality news seemed to actually exist, and I could just pay for dead-tree editions of that, I did. Probably over $2k/year, in today's money.
Now - most newsrooms have been gutted, once-great magazines like Scientific American are sick parodies of their former selves, supposedly top-tier news sites are full of click-bait drivel, they monetize your personal information every way they can, and cancelling your subscription may require lawyer. I pay $0/year.
chaostheory · 10h ago
Apple News gives me access to most of the popular paywalled news sites at a reasonable price. I think Bloomberg is the only one that’s not covered.
janandonly · 6h ago
Too bad I still don’t have that service in my European country.
lynx97 · 4h ago
Most news aren't worth a penny. Whining about people not wanting to pay for your "tomorrow out of-date"-lies is pretty pretentious.
timbit42 · 56m ago
But some are. The problem is people don't know how to figure out which ones are.
_Algernon_ · 9m ago
Is that a problem with people or with the news itself? And are people incapable or just unwilling to sift through the haystack?
And if it is a problem with the news or people are simply unwilling to sift through the haystack, why should we expect people to pay for that privilege?
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Because a lot of HN voters and commenters just read the headlines and not the articles.
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
No comments yet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.
But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
Right, all those different writers can band together, perhaps get an editor to curate the best and make sure there's no major blunders…
But isn't that just a news organisation?
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
My read is thats because the aggregators wanted to be blind middle men.
These days you need to curate. I would almost pay just to remove the bottomless pit of pseudoscience from my feed.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
Let's not blame the players for the game rules being flawed.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
Maybe I should go back to paying [7 bucks](https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers) every time I want to sit down and read the news.
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
At the same time, I would love to pay $2 (a half of a cup of coffee) or so for a quality article. Most people, as I understand, would rather waste their time and attention than pay anything.
now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.
now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?
internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
News gathering, on the other hand, means riding a regional jet coach to a flyover state, talking to people you don't know, working for six months on a data project and sometimes putting your life on the line. [1]
The sad thing is that most clicks to The New York Times are for the editorial page where the likes of Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Charlie Blow blow it out their ass every day. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles
[2] It's not whether I agree with them or not but rather that it is all low effort and it sells because it plays to people's emotions. I can see things to agree with or disagree with with Klein's "Abundance Agenda" essay but it's the kind of thing a high-schooler could write as an essay.
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
Most of my news comes from aggregators, where every day I click through to many sites that I may have never visited before, and may never visit again. Even sites I will come back to, I might read 3 or 4 articles a month. That's not worth $15/month to me. Even if it was something more reasonable like $2/month (for that quantity of articles), I'm not going to subscribe to a news source (or lots of sources) when I don't actually visit their sites directly; it's like roulette through the aggregators.
If I hit a paywall, I'll mostly just close the tab. Occasionally I'll see if it's on archive.is, if it's a topic I'm really interested in, but if I'm clicking through from something like Google News, odds are there's another site without a paywall that is discussing the same thing.
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No. Cryptocurrencies are never a solution to anything. Don't lie to yourself (or others).
Of course then PayService will have surge pricing turned on. And that will be fun. But still - viable?
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
Paywalls incresse the digital divide. Lies and hate will always be free. Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.
Graphic (imgbb)
https://i.ibb.co/d663L0X/waoi.jpg
If it's going to be per-view, who is going to be fighting ad^H^H view fraud, and what would be their incentive to do so?
If this this going to be fixed amount per content creator, why won't every random person sign up to be one?
Monopolists and gatekeepers will hate the idea.
So, I decide that 5 credits are too much to pay NYT for news that everyone knows, or some outlet that smacks of having LLM's write everything, so I spend them rewarding some freelance writer or artist. If NYT does some outstanding research, I'll pay some credits for it.
Freedom of choice. A radical idea for media. Indies need equal footing.
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
A weird, provocative headline creates misinformation.
Of the people who try to access the article, only 12% actually read it (1% who pay, and 11% who bypass the paywall). Another 53% look for the information elsewhere, which may or may not clarify the misinformation.
And those are only the ppl that tries to read the news, the majority of ppl doesn't even bother trying to open the news link.
How is the number '53%', calclated?
Whilst I'm here...
If the 53% got the information [they looked for], and it thereafter WASN'T 'misinformation', would that be considered a good, or a bad, thing?
I donate and reccomend others do as well.
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Now - most newsrooms have been gutted, once-great magazines like Scientific American are sick parodies of their former selves, supposedly top-tier news sites are full of click-bait drivel, they monetize your personal information every way they can, and cancelling your subscription may require lawyer. I pay $0/year.
And if it is a problem with the news or people are simply unwilling to sift through the haystack, why should we expect people to pay for that privilege?