[GnarfGnarf]

The sum of annual subscriptions across all newspapers I'm interested in is exorbitant.

What if I could pay on a per-article basis? I wouldn't have a problem paying 50¢ or $1.00 for an article I was interested in. It's not practical for each publisher to set up micro-payments. But, if there were an intermediate agent that accepted and managed payments for individual random articles, the money could be aggregated and remitted in a lump sum to the publishers. Sort of like an old-fashioned news stand.

What the newspaper business needs is a middleman who will collect micro-payments from me and millions of others, aggregate the money, charge my credit card once a month, and pay each publication weekly or monthly for the collective readers who have selected articles.

The middleman could accept PayPal payments, or I could open an account with my credit card, and pay once a month for all the individual articles I have read.

There is a Website called Blendle that proposes to do this. However, only a subset of articles are available. Publishers are reserving the prime content for full subscribers, and leaving Blendle with the crumbs. That's not going to work.

[nillium]

In reality, the reason why these have failed in the past is human psychology. Think about this with something other than news -- we all have $800 smartphones, but stare at the app store thinking, "hmm...do I really want to spend 99 CENTS?"

When you subscribe to a publication, you have to make decision once. You think about the amount of money against all future potential articles you can read, and decide from there. When you're paying for EACH article, all of a sudden you have to make that decision with every click. Is this article REALLY worth 50 cents?

Not to mention, this incentivizes the totally wrong things. People say they hate clickbait, but the aggregators and social networks that now act as gatekeepers force that kind of behavior -- publishers of course only get paid when you click through to their article. And in this case, it's even more profound -- we're no longer talking about a few cents from display ads, but 50 cents to $1.

For what its worth, we're trying a different tack -- especially when it comes to local news: https://blog.nillium.com/what-can-napster-teach-local-news/

[JoshuaDavid]

I wonder how well it would work if it cost $1 to read an article, but there was an easy way to say "this was a bad article and I want my $1 back" some relatively large fraction of the time. I know that if I had already paid $1 for an article, then read and enjoyed it, I would not be inclined to want my $1 back. However, if I'm being asked to pay $1 just based on the headline, and then the article is clickbait and I have no recourse, I'm probably never going to pay $1 for another article from the same source.

Also, in that system, "90% of readers were satisfied enough to let the author keep their dollar" would be a pretty strong signal of quality (especially so if the platform takes more than a 10% cut: this is one of the rare cases where a higher cut to the middleman might actually result in a better product).

[mercer]

This was how Blendle used to work, and for me at least it was very effective. Despite using it rarely, I probably still spent tens of euros on it. The ability to instantly get my money back if I didn't like an article played a big part in that.

For some reason they changed their model to all-you-can-read for $10 a month, so perhaps it didn't work so well. I stopped using Blendle as a result, though :-/.

[true_religion]

Simply habit can keep people paying. Previous to the internet , my routine was to wake up, get dressed and pick up the morning paper to read at the coffee shop.

That was about 50 cents a day.

If the system allows for it, I would probably commit to buying twitter access on a daily basis as I brush my teeth.

[exit]

the pipeline wouldn't be a simple headline -> purchase -> full article access.

worthwhile content gets surfaced on aggregators like hn, reddit, via recommendation, etc. and there has to be some "sampler".

this would also motivate defense against clickbait, e.g. reputation management and visibility systems for authors and publishers.

[okennedy]

It seems like this type of approach would incentivise clickbaity articles even more than the current financing structure does. Subscribing to a newspaper is a long-term arrangement, requiring the publisher to establish and maintain the reader's trust. Articles, on the other hand, are one-time interactions. Once you start seeing enough clickbait from a given source you can avoid the source in the future, but it would be significantly harder for publishers to leverage positive trust and reputation in such a setting.

[gxon]

I would argue the opposite.

If I submit a micropayment for an article that turns out to be low effort clickbait, my disappointment will be magnified by the fact that I lost money. I would also expect my satisfaction to be magnified for high quality content. Consequently, my trust in a brand will decrement or increment accordingly. A micropayment service could even track my reactions and maintain a personalized reputation score for a publisher/brand.

Obviously, this happens now, but I don't personally have as visceral as a reaction to losing the few seconds of time as I would to losing money. Putting even a small amount of money on the line clarifies the cost of the transaction.

Long term subscriptions, on the other hand, give the publisher more wiggle room to produce lazy, low effort content. Loss of brand image needs to build up to a critical threshold that motivates me to cancel the subscription.

[julianeon]

The pressure's also going to come from the other direction. The content you pay for is also the content that goes in front of your eyeballs - and the value of that may be much more than you're paying.

Here I am, a successful content bundler. Thousands of people pay me a measly sum to see the content I push at them.

A whole bunch of people are going to come to me, with stacks full of cash, saying, Man, I sure would like to show my content to your subscribers. I calculated your profits, 100k annually. I got $1,000,000 in this check. Does that interest you?

The numbers are made up, but with adtech money being real, it won't be long before the content bundlers buckle and become 'ad-supported' or something like that.

[bobthepanda]

Heck, I don't even know if it has to be per-article; I would like the option to pay for this month and only this month, since most subscriptions are ~$5 these days.

US consumer laws don't require good, hassle free ways to end subscriptions and the main reason I haven't subscribed to any is the utter lack of desire to spend hours hashing out a cancellation with a call center employee.

[52-6F-62]

It's not the same, but if you have an Apple device— News is something like 10-15 dollars a month for a large aggregate of sources.

Pressreader is also pretty good, but web-based. https://www.pressreader.com/

The Toronto Public Library even offers free subscriptions to it with a library card—so I'd check into your local library.

[blackoil]

Better would be to pay 10-20$ for an aggregated service, wherein you'll get all articles of to top 100 newspapers. Payment to newspaper will be done based on no. of articles read.

To reduce it being a pure click-bait pool, we can also add some sort of tipping model, wherein part of my money is distributed according to like/rating I have given. So a 5* investigative piece will get more money.

[pvg]

The Atlantic is a monthly magazine, not a newspaper. Apple News+ is a decent bundle deal for (full) magazine content and includes The Atlantic.

[donohoe]

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this I would have about $78 to $96 (estimated).

Been tried. Many times. By numerous entities, and some media orgs themselves. It doesn't really work. The issue is people.

[ericd]

Have any of them gotten WSJ, NYT, and one or more other heavy hitters onboard? If not, I don't think we know whether it'd work or not. If they have, I'd be interested in learning what happened so I can stop wishing for this.

Also, I think pay per article is doomed to failure, the amount of friction it adds would shrink the market by too much. It needs to be a fixed sub with all-you-can-read a la Spotify, with your subscription fee being split between the orgs you actually read.

It seems like it'd need to be a JV between news orgs, and not a third party. No sane news org with any leverage would hand their customer relationships over to a third party over which they have little control.

[creinhardt]

I think people tend to underestimate how most publishers don't rely on subscription revenue to survive. All the money is in advertising, which is why I think you see less focus on trying alternative subscription models like this. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice probably wouldn't provide enough revenue to be worth it for medium to small publishers.

Also, say this middleman company does exist and is adopted by a large portion of the publishers out there. How would it benefit them to pass along the majority of that $1 per article to publishers? My hunch is that publishers would be the ones that end up getting 'crumbs' and the middleman would keep the bulk.

Publishers have been burned over the years by relying on other companies and middlemen for traffic and revenue (look at the effect Facebook has had on most news organizations, and not in a good way). Putting all their chips in one basket with a company like this would be a non-starter for most companies. They don't want to get burned again.

[bolasanibk]

>I think people tend to underestimate how most publishers don't rely on subscription revenue to survive. All the money is in advertising,

Interestingly enough, NYT now gets 2 times the money from subscription as it gets from advertising. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

[creinhardt]

I think the NYT (and other very large publishers, WSJ, etc.) are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to subscription revenue.

For a newspaper that serves a small town/mid size city there is a fixed number of people they can sell subscriptions to. Compound that with digital ads being worth a fraction of what a print ad is worth and you have a problem. A print ad is still a bigger revenue driver.

[true_religion]

Ad pricing has been plummeting ever since the web allowed performance metrics to be strictly tracked, and optimized the ability to advertise in hundreds of places simultaneously.

At some point it becomes more profitable to just use subscriptions.

[dminor]

Having worked at a publishing platform, I can tell you that point is a long long way away for most publishers. The vast majority of publisher income is from advertising and it's not close.

[hardtke]

A similar argument could be made for a whole host of subscription services (gyms, television, etc.) but I think they all keep the subscription model because the mental transaction cost of buying a small amount of the product creates a huge barrier to use. Mental transaction cost is the stress that the buying decision places on the buyer. Someone once said that the only two prices on the internet are free and infinity, so any incremental cost is stressful. Additionally the prices needed to sustain a per-unit sales model are so high that nobody wants to buy. A great recent example is ski resorts. Before the Epic and Ikon passes, day passes were expensive but not insane. With these passes, however, the ski companies have decided to dramatically increase the daily cost and lower the subscription cost to maximize revenue.

[basch]

A gym isnt something where I want to consume the service of 10+ companies in a day. More traditional television subscriptions (even streaming) are still bundle based sets of channels from multiple providers.

[linsomniac]

My biggest resistance to subscribing to some publications is the cognitive load of managing more subscriptions. Adding payment info, keeping it updated, remembering to remove it if I'm not using it... That "feels" very expensive to me. Especially with the "we'll automatically renew your subscription" tactic that is so popular now.

I really like Patreon for supporting YouTube content. I think my YouTube subscription is supposed to fund that too, but there are 5ish that I add in Patreon. The down side is that the Patreon-only content is kind of annoying to find, so mostly I just use Patreon to support the content they make on YouTube.

[leokennis]

Blendle had all major publication on board in the Netherlands for a few years. €0,10-€1 per article. It was heaven.

Also it was not profitable; most people read a few articles a month, netting them €1 or €2.

Now they only have a €10 a month subscription, giving unlimited access to a “selection of the best articles”.

I guess it’s better to have 5 customers paying you €10 every month, than 20 customers who might give you €1 or €2.

[hadtodoit]

I can't speak for the Netherlands but in the US most publications are just glorified tabloids. Not enough people appreciate quality journalism to pay for it, at least not enough to cover the operational costs of our bloated news outlets. So they turn to publishing "anonymous sources", hearsay, and outright lies that will be quietly retracted because it pays more than the truth. Spreading FUD has always been the MO of the news, I won't be upset if all these companies go belly up. Make way for a new generation of grass roots journalism.

[HashBasher]

Micro-payments can be done quite easily via Bitcoin's second layer network Lightning Network. There has been a functional demo of this technology for articles, check out yalls dot org.

Also, no middleman needed, you can host your own server to make the invoices and accept payments using BTCPay Server https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver.

[tzs]

You want a middleman to avoid a tax nightmare.

If you are selling directly to the readers, you potentially have to deal with sales tax or VAT in every jurisdiction in which you have a paying reader.

Many jurisdictions do have thresholds that you have to cross before they want you to collect tax, but those are often of the form ">= N transactions OR >= $S sales". N = 100 or 200 is pretty common for US states. It would be pretty easy to get a situation where you have enough transactions to have to collect, file, and remit tax, but not enough revenue from those to cover the costs of doing so.

Stick a middleman in there and you can avoid all that.

Arrange things so that all your sales are to the middleman who then resells to the readers, and then you only have to worry about whether or not your sales to the middleman are subject to sales tax or VAT in wherever the middleman is located. Any sales tax or VAT in the reader's jurisdictions will be on their purchases from the middleman, and dealing with them is the middleman's problem.

At the middleman level, the tax problem is much much much less bothersome. That's because the middleman can be dealing with other publishers besides you. The middleman might even be selling things that have nothing to do with news or magazines. That gets the middleman's revenue up enough in each jurisdiction that the costs of dealing with taxes there is just a tiny fraction of revenue.

[tomComb]

> What if I could pay on a per-article basis?

You would probably fall into the trap of picking and choosing (and paying for) the articles that say what you want, and so they would pander, and here we are.

We need people to carefully choose a lower number of sources, that they believe are of high quality and who they will try to hold to that standard, and then read their articles even when they don't pander.

[lukevp]

I had a similar thought and then realized that this describes Apple News Plus. It’s one place you can pay for articles and I assume there are licensing or per-article agreements just like a streaming service would have. Granted this is more geared toward Apple users but nonetheless, this is an existing manifestation of the idea you can pay for and use today.

[data_spy]

You may this payment daily with something called ads, they cost like $0.00150 for an article, but we all hate them.

[J5892]

It's already super easy to charge for single articles. They just need to throw a stripe or paypal instant payment button on there.

The problem is there's no real money in the a la carte model. If a startup wants to be a middleman for online news, they'd have to be some sort of subscription aggregator.

[netcan]

>> The problem is there's no real money in the a la carte model.

True, but sometimes these things are true until they are false.

I'm not saying there is definitely or obviously a workable business model using pay-per-article... but I wouldn't write it off as impossible, or even very unlikely.

Theoretically, the financial fundamentals aren't too bad. Really good writers often struggle to reliably get $500 for an article. Say $1000 + editing is a more sustainable rate. Say an average ppv reader reads 3 article at a go @ 10c each...

If articles can get 10,000 paying (10c each) readers, it is, broadly, viable... at least at this unit level. To be actually good, the business model would have to crossfund (or somehow fund) harder journalism. Hard journalism costs.

Anyway, I'm not saying I have a solution. Just saying nothing seems improbable about ppv articles. Tens of thousands of readers willing to pay pennies to directly fund (and access) journalism on any given day. Doesn't seem like that big an ask.

[ForHackernews]

This more or less exists already in https://scroll.com/ that charges a flat fee and distributes it to publishers based on your reading behaviour. In return, you get reduced adverts on sites that support it.

[jseliger]

What if I could pay on a per-article basis?

https://piszek.com/2020/05/19/micropayments/