[mahyarm]

TBH I don't think conscious micro-payments would work well. Something like spotify where you pay a flat fee for 'all you can eat' and proceeds are distributed via what you consume would be more practical. Medium is going towards that, but they still require you to press a like button to pay someone.

Most people will choose free with ads, but a significant amount will chose premium if it is compelling enough and that can represent a lot of money.

[archagon]

I don't know — I think many people have an allergic reaction to subscriptions of any kind. (I know I do.) Also, no one service could possibly encompass every blog, project, or publication that one might want to "tip", and people aren't going to subscribe to more than a handful of services at once. (Especially when things like Medium posts are already provided for free.)

Ultimately, I think people are very charitable when it comes to trivial transactions, but not when they're inconvenienced, and so I think it would be best for everyone to make that usability gap as tiny as possible. Even better if you could actually get something for your quarter: stats showing your tip% compared to peers or friends? Different site styles for high tippers? Personal stats tracking your interests over time? Monetized, unskeezy, free-as-in-freedom "likes": lots of possibilities here.

[criddell]

> I think many people have an allergic reaction to subscriptions of any kind.

Many people? I don't think it's a lot. Look at the subscriber numbers for Netflix. Or consider how many are willing to sign a contract for their cell phone. People will pay if the value is high.

I think the truth is most people don't care very much about the news. Time is scarce and people have a lot of choices about how to spend their time.

[archagon]

Yes, because Netflix and Spotify are amazing, amazing deals. The news? You can read that anywhere. Why would anyone subscribe to a service that offers them what they already have?

And yet, people are more than happy to tip a busker or leave a few bucks for the waiter or bartender. (Even outside the US, where tipping isn't expected.)

[criddell]

There's more than one thing at play here though.

Netflix and Spotify are giving people something they want without a lot of friction. I can get everything on those services for free other places but the experience is worse.

People are tipping buskers because they are sharing a physical location with that person. Put the video of the street performance on YouTube with a tip button and the dollars per view number is going to drop drastically.

Bartenders and waiters are tipped well because they are providing personal service.

[XorNot]

The news fails because to be useful these days you need to consume news from a variety of sources. And you explicitly don't want to only get news from one media empire because then you're just getting whatever bias the CEO wants distributed.

I haven't heard a subscription news model which doesn't feel like its also trying to sunk-cost me into being less critical of the reporting.

[criddell]

I subscribe to Netflix, cable TV, MLBtv, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube Red. The only newsy thing I subscribe to is New Yorker magazine.

Subscribing to multiple services isn't that unusual. There just has to be some value to it.