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 · 1h 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.
chii · 13m 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).
nlawalker · 5h 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 · 2h 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 · 43m 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.
greyface- · 5h 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 · 4h 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.
prognu · 1h 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?
tobr · 4h 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 · 2h ago
too bad the middleman sells that too
greyface- · 4h ago
That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
dyauspitr · 1h ago
There’s plenty of destruction going on and it doesn’t look like a brighter future.
darqis · 2h ago
sarcasm is too complicated for the average HN viewer, obviously smh
cco · 5h 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 · 4h 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.
janandonly · 1h ago
You clearly never “zapped” a few says before via any Nostr client.
SpaceNoodled · 5h ago
BRB gonna make Superman 3 money
sandspar · 5h 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 · 46m 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.
close04 · 1h 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.
shafyy · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
It would have to be $0.05 an article. 50 cents is way too high.
jillesvangurp · 1h ago
I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ 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 · 26m 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
jeduardo · 53m 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 · 25m 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 · 4h 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.
TylerE · 1h 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 · 4m 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.
bruce511 · 4h 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 · 1h 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.
protocolture · 2h 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.
jeroenhd · 2m 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.
re-thc · 2h 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.
calebh · 5h 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 · 1h 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 ;-)
mgiampapa · 4h ago
Why not just have an extension on your phone's browser that does this automatically for you? Firefox still lives!
Spivak · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 4h 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 · 4h 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 · 5h 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 · 5h ago
I was just discussing this, earlier today, with a fellow on HackerNews:
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.
ChaoPrayaWave · 1h 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.
stared · 26m 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.
kevin_thibedeau · 5h 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.
Cerium · 5h 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.
MrDrMcCoy · 4h 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 :)
You can subscribe to The NY Times through the App Store and then cancel painlessly just like any other app subscription.
grogenaut · 4h ago
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.
ggm · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 14m 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 · 59s 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.
teeray · 6h 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 · 2h 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.
janandonly · 1h 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 · 53m 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.
littlecranky67 · 1h 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.
grogenaut · 5h 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 · 4h ago
I sincerely believe many of our societal issues could be resolved if, somehow, people started paying for stuff again.
yuretz · 1h 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.
I subscribe to a print newspaper every day, it's about $2.35 per day, delivered to my house.
Daisywh · 1h 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.
usrusr · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 4h 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.
postexitus · 33m 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.
jimnotgym · 1h ago
I wouldn't be suprised if few Americans (proportionately few) read quality news at all. People seem more interested in forming into tribes
cypherpunks01 · 6h ago
Did all the pay-per-article services fail (like Blendle) or are there any decent ones remaining?
_wire_ · 3h ago
Who wants to pay to be told what to think?
keiferski · 1h 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.
Ferret7446 · 1h 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.
gethly · 1h 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.
PaulHoule · 6h ago
Lies are free but the truth costs money.
Ferret7446 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
you can even pick what truth you want
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
crabmusket · 5h ago
Yep, because the truth is hard to vary but lies have few constraints.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t · 4h ago
By this logic, Twitter is truth?
jasonfrost · 5h ago
>nyt is truth
bell-cot · 57m ago
Then modern capitalism moves in, and "truth" is redefined as "whatever maximizes our quarterly profit".
ludicrousdispla · 5h ago
"all news is views"
Animats · 2h 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 · 2h ago
good news doesnt pay for itself and neither does bad news
k310 · 5h 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 · 2h 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.
charbelnicolasg · 5h ago
Imagine having to pay mostly for propaganda and fake news... No, thank you.
tonyedgecombe · 1h ago
Read the news and you are misinformed, don't read the news and you are uninformed.
amelius · 1h ago
We need more paywalls in social media feeds.
bell-cot · 43m 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.
spencerflem · 1h 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.
chaostheory · 5h 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 · 1h ago
Too bad I still don’t have that service in my European country.
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.
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).
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.
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
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 ;-)
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
News simply might not be a mass market product, at the end of the day.
all of insanity of today’s World summarized in one fragment of one sentence :)
Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart News remain freely available.
This is a problem.
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.
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.
I donate and reccomend others do as well.