[subpixel]

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.

That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.

It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.

You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.

This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.

[makestuff]

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.

I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.

[Gigachad]

It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them.

Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".

[bscphil]

This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support.

(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)

[scuff3d]

I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere.

If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense.

And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.

[TheGRS]

We could make a loot box for news! Maybe you get today's WSJ, maybe you get a National Enquirer.

[linsomniac]

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article

That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.

It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...

[CrazyStat]

Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.

[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

[eli]

Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work.

Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.

Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.

[Forgeties79]

Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it

[1659447091]

> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.

Apple News+ is ~$13

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

The list of publications included

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

[landl0rd]

No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones. Look at that list: no FT, only partial WSJ, no Bloomberg (only Businessweek), no Economist, no NYT, no Foreign Affairs, no SCMP. I guess Foreign Policy and Puck bundled could be cool but most "high-value" publications are excluded. This is like netflix where it's never worth subscribing because it's ten thousand things you don't care to watch.

[jasode]

>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included

Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...

[ErikCorry]

$13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?

[crazygringo]

Yup, this is both the solution and the problem.

Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple.

But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled.

And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...

[bobro]

>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.

[subpixel]

In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.

[servo_sausage]

The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery...

If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying.

With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.

[akoboldfrying]

> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).

It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.

[PantaloonFlames]

It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of

- cable bundles

- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)

- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)

And somehow all of these models now coexist.

[Telemakhos]

Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0].

Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.

And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...

[mmooss]

> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.

People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.

iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.

[Retric]

Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.

[StanislavPetrov]

Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this means spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee.

Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.