Ask HN: Why can't I pay per magazine article?

[everling]

I get that news outlets want predictable revenue streams from subscriptions, but let me conveniently pay an inflated fee per article also, so that I don't have to contend with cancelling and so forth. Failing that, can I at least pay to access today's batch of articles? That would be virtually the same as buying the paper issue.

[jfengel]

It's the micropayments problem. That "inflated fee" would have to be over a dollar to cover the costs of doing the transaction; possibly several dollars. Not only are there the costs associated with the payment, but also the additional code infrastructure, dealing with complaints, excruciating security, etc.

As you say, it would likely cost as much as the dead-tree edition, and how much usage would it get? What fraction of people would ever use it? I suspect a lot of people would say, "I could see giving you $.05 or $.25 for this, but I'm not going to pay $3.00 to read one article. And I don't want access to more than that; I just want this article."

I mean, it would probably be worth the experiment for some major newspaper or magazine. I bet somebody has tried. But the history of micropayments is already a long string of failed attempts. Money just makes everything hard, and there seems to be a minimum below which it's just not worth it.

[everling]

I would gladly pay a dollar for an article. Two if it's lengthy. I run across articles in I want to read in American and British newspapers that I wouldn't consider subscribing to. As a foreigner the majority of the content is of little interest, so that leaves me with no viable options. I don't think I'm the only one.

[bjourne]

You'd also need to fill in your credit card details and register an account with the news site in question. So replying to confirmation mails, setting up a password, and all that crap.

[dugreader]

I've been waiting for this for years as well. I would think some group of publishers would partner with some micropayment tool. Maybe, you buy a pool of tokens, and if you don't have a subscription to a magazine, you can apply a token. I think it would require some cash, management, and connections to create an initial pool of publishers that would make the service viable (ie, I already have 10 subscriptions, so I would need n more that I don't want to before I would fund some pool). Because it doesn't exist, and seems so obvious, I also expect that it doesn't happen for other contractual/competitive reasons. But, here's hoping some entrepreneur takes it on.

[tacostakohashi]

Why can't you just buy the cable channels you want, instead of a bundle? Because they want to be able to show a certain number of subscribers to their advertisers, and selling subscriptions / bundles gives them that number.

A magazine contains ads between the articles, and that's where most of the revenue comes from. If you just bought one article, where would the ads go?

Selling a subscription gives some stability and ability to forecast revenues, and hire the right number of writers, sign leases, pay pensions, etc. Selling articles individually would lead to wildly varying and unpredictable income, and lead to the worst imaginable kinds of clickbait.

[vimy]

That was the original idea for http://blendle.com. I didn’t work.

[selfishgene]

This is helpful for news articles:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

For research journal articles, just search Google for sci-hub to find the latest domain name for Alexandra Elbakyan's paywall-bypassing site.