| The problem is that subscription models are flawed, at least for things like Ars Technica. In most cases, people don't want to commit a portion of their monthly budget to a specific website for the rest of their life. I don't know how often I read Ars Technica, but it's probably a couple of articles a month. That is worth maybe $0.10 to me, so they can never collect that profitably. They use ads because then I "pay" whenever I visit, without having to approve any payment. More people visit, they automatically get more money. I wish there were some sort of globally-accepted micropayment system. With the billions of cryptocurrencies floating around, it surprises me that nobody has attempted this yet. I buy $10 of cryptocurrency. It gets loaded into my web browser. The webserver says "hey, you have to pay for this". My browser asks me if I want to do that. If I pick yes, then the server sends me the rest of the HTML after it agrees that the money was in fact transferred. (The closest thing I've seen to this are Twitch "bits". That is a micropayment platform that seems to be working pretty well, but it's used by the same people that want to pay their favorite content creators a stipend and so real-money recurring subscriptions are just as good. For that reason, I'm not sure we can infer much from that model, except that people will buy value in bulk and then dole it out to individuals at random intervals... which is pretty interesting if you think about it.) I think what is stopping this from being a thing is not any technical issue, but rather just greed from the content creators. I am sure that anyone that sells a subscription service is making money from people that have forgotten to cancel or don't get the maximum value out of their subscription, and it's probably a lot of money. Nobody is going to give that up. I also think advertisers pay too much for ads. I bet the "brand awareness" ads aren't worth nearly as much money as they pay. Meanwhile, publishers are making a lot of money off of selling impressions, and are probably hesitant to turn off free money from dumb people. Remember, serving an ad requires no input or investment from the end user; the website loads, they get money. If there were "brakes" applied every so often ("are you sure you want to pay the content creator using your real-world hard-earned cash?") revenue would go down. So I think the problems here are: 1) Advertisers want to advertise. If you remove your publication from the list of places where they can get something advertised, they'll go elsewhere. The money won't be removed from the ecosystem, and your competition will be enriched. That's not strictly a PROBLEM, but your investors will not be making happy faces at you when you leave money on the table. Only some sort of law could change that, and there will never be any such law. 2) Publishers are making a lot of money on unused subscriptions, so they continue to push subscriptions over micropayments. A lot of people are making content worth paying for. It's just that we can't afford it, but the advertisers can. |
More broadly, though, I agree with your comment and think there are additional unlisted problems.
I pay for Ars Technica because they offer an amazing cross-format (HTML, RSS, PDF, etc) clean browsing experience for paying customers plus sent a branded Yubikey plus had clear online cancel buttons instead of hoops like other publishers. In my personal utopia, every news site would be served in this cross-format ad-free fashion.
I honestly wish they'd send a new branded Yubikey every year so I'd always have an important branded physical reminder of their existence as its the best and most useful tschotske I've received as a thank-you-for-subscribing gift (and probably likely so for others in the HN crowd).
Ars Technica is one of the few sites I regularly visit directly (just like I visit hckrnews.com to often and directly). Just like here on HN, I directly visit for the content curation and occasional comment (both of which is better than social media algorithms).
Which lead me to the consideration of a third problem...
3) Users try before the buy. You can only begin the process of receiving money after they've read enough content.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more cryptocurrency-based $1/week type subscriptions to unlock the content/features/etc for a week at a time (or perhaps forever, if a user sent enough cryptocurrency).