[hakanito]

> 3. New news

I think this is where blockchain tech will prosper. Integrated wallet in you browser and nano payments to purchase access to articles. I don't want to subscribe to FT or New York Times, because I only read one or two articles per week. But I would happily pay 50c per article to get a few days access

[ghaff]

Micropayments as an idea have been around for maybe 20 years. The technology isn’t really the problem and you don’t need blockchain. You just need a centralized frictionless payment system that everyone uses. Clay Shirky wrote off the problem to transaction costs. It’s too much mental energy to decide whether to pay 10 cents to read an article.

I don’t disagree it would be nice. $100 per year subscriptions are a pretty high bar for me. But the evidence that people will consume digital news and other articles transactionally just isn’t there.

[shaki-dora]

This a-la-carte model is quite dangerous, because there's a difference between readers' willingness to spend money, and both the amount of work and the importance for society an article has.

These sorts of decision are currently in the hands of editors who, despite all the growling, are still inclined to allow vast, expensive, investigative goose-chases.

If you introduce per-article payments, it becomes just too easy for the business department to explicitly see which articles bring in more than they cost. But you want the cross-subsidies that are necessary for a well-rounded publication.

[GuiA]

+1.

The sad thing is that this is what Ted Nelson has been advocating for since the late 1960s (amongst with many other things that made his vision of a worldwide web much more compelling than the one we have now, but technologically unfeasible until very recently). If it ever materializes, it'll just be half a century+ late :)

[hkmurakami]

We should consider how this would incentive editorializing and reporting by the news organizations.