[tyzoid]

The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.

There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.

[Arubis]

There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.

[dwb]

They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.

[vunderba]

This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.

[qwerpy]

Thanks for making this known. On the face of it, it’s a good deal. First party slick app with ad-free good quality news content, with a nominal fee. If you pay the Apple premium, they’ll give you the best possible experience and not clutter your screen with ads, right? Guess not.

[Arubis]

Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_ of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching those.

[Aurornis]

> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.

How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts

Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.

I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.

[tyzoid]

Upper-end estimates for typical web traffic CPC/CPM rates are around 10¢ per click and 0.5¢ per impression. I never click on ads, but let's hypothesize that with very-well targeted ads 5% of people click through. That ends up at around an estimated 1¢ per page view. Even at 5x that rate, I'd be able to read 1000 articles ($5 USD) before even approaching the $6 USD/mo rate I think is reasonable.

That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.

Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.

If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.

[immibis]

Yes? If they show me one page per year, they can get a few cents per year. That's how it works. If they want more money, they should produce more content worth viewing.

[moontear]

NYT is a good example though - I will not pay for a subscription, since I really don't consume it that much. But I would LOVE to pay for an article / a podcast here and there. Let me pay 50c for this one article and I'd gladly pay for it. Unfortunately this doesn't fit the subscription model and publishers are too afraid (I assume) to offer this additional model since there are a lot of subscribers also paying the full subscription fee and not using the service a lot (just like me).

[morkalork]

Like Spotify and how big name artists/record labels shaft all the individual content creators when it comes to revenue sharing. I do pay for Spotify regardless, I would pay about the same for the written equivalent. Not sure if that would be enough to sustain any real investigative journalism though

[JKCalhoun]

> How many sites would you end up splitting that across?

For news? Two, I guess.

My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.