[rchaud]

It's about time somebody tried this. $5/mo. is fair; I don't need a million sites to be in the catalog, but I would like a bit more variety eventually.

People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off, publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.

I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the regular Bfeed.

[mavsman]

I am tempted to visit buzzfeednews sometimes but can't bring myself to do it based on my disdain for buzzfeed as a whole.

[jimktrains2]

> It's about time somebody tried this.

I mean , isn't this essentially the idea behind patreon? You batch the micropayments payments into single transactions on the credit card network to reduce the marginal cost of the fixed fees?

Didn't Google already do something similar with new subscriptions?

Didn't flattr do this a decade ago?

It's not a new idea, and as I ranted elsewhere, is only even required because of the fixed fees on credit card transactions.

[rchaud]

I've never heard of Flattr, whereas I think most people know Mozilla or at least have heard of them through Firefox.

I'd expect Mozilla to be more invested in the "pay with $, not ads" approach compared to Google. Mozilla owns Pocket, which has been relatively good at finding longreads type material on the net and rendering it in a reader-mode view, so I think they're a better cultural/philosophical fit.

I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.

[jimktrains2]

> I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.

Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.

What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to batch them.

The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people may not like fot whatever reason.

[quest88]

I believe Google tried something like this and then shut it down.

[d2wa]

Contributor was a micro-payments subscription thing were you could buy a subscription and actively participate in the regular ad-exchanges. The idea was that you could support websites by outbidding crappy advertising on Google’s platform and see pictures of cats (or whitespace) instead. It doesn’t take much money to outbid just about every advertising you’d see in a normal month. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor.html

They’ve repurposed it as an “ad removal pass” service were you pay way more money per month per website that you want to remove ads on. It’s limited to large publishers only. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor-twopointoh.ht...

[AznHisoka]

Buzzfeed news doesnt seem to be all serious: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/what-color-a...