[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.