This is why I think the best way forward is for groups of news sites to come together with a single paid login to gain access to them, and then profit-share based on percentage of views each site gets.
Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.
It is either this or a system for micropayments, IMHO, which would probably be less click bait-inviting (as you pay per item, rather than having already paid for admission to an all-you-can-eat-buffet.)
Let's say you have a subscription spanning X sites, and that after you have read the first paragraph or so, you click a button if you wish to read on, being charged, say, $0.02 for the privilege.
Prepaid, so you don't get a surprise when the credit card fees are 100x the cost of the reporting you read.
Surely micropayments work in the exact opposite way to what you describe when it comes to click-bait. Like every other market with abundance (e.g. music in 2018), I imagine it will be winner take all and the distribution of rewards will skew to the most popular, creating incentives which will lead to the marvel/dc-isation of news, reduce production risk taking, and increase the fight for attention.
I mean, micropayments will essentially behave something like spotify, and that is mostly what's happened over there - excluding a bit of weirdness around the monetisation of legacy catalogue that doesn't really work the same in publishing.
I may be naïve, but the idea was that the first paragraph would probably tell you whether reading the rest made any sense; my reasoning was that if you pay a flat fee which the content providers fight over based on what is being viewed, you do not care what you click - but the other side has everything to gain by making you click.
With micropayments, you can at least hope that content providers will be wary of leaving customers with the sense of being fooled into paying for a story.
Personally, I subscribe to the Guardian (the weekend papers, I live in London) and the London Review of Books. I like this model as I'm not buying the individual content so much as I'm buying into the ethos and output of both organisations. I don't really want to be deciding which of the items they do is best, I want them to maintain a machine that will keep surprising me with stuff I want to read.
I think aggregate subscriptions are going to have to become a thing though, likely as a side contribution, without all the benefits of full subscription, but still some access beyond the paywall. Good luck and godspeed to whoever manages to coordianate that.
I think you may be onto something. But what about the incentives to click-bait this creates?
When I pay for content, I want the creators' incentives to be aligned with mine (high-quality content not designed to draw me in by appealing to my lizard brain).
This is a very important point that cannot be emphasized enough.
My first developer-gig was working at a regional newspaper back in 98-99.
Back then, we talked about personalized experience, how we could tailor it to the individual based on preferences.
I would come to the website and see a tailored mix of articles suited to my need. Some based on my interests and preferences, but not too siloed off, so I would still see the very important general news. It would be run by an organization I trust to be reasonably objective.
That is the kind of news service I would pay to use TODAY. I would pay 10-20EUR/month for it.
Today, I don't think that product exists. If it does, I am not aware of it.
I think you loose something by having a personalised news experience.
There is something to be said for reading articles that might challenge your beliefs, personalisation of news may not be the best path forward for society.
I've also found https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/ to be an eye opener on what doesn't get reported on main stream news sites.
You can choose 3-4 sources you personally trust, subscribe to them, follow them on Twitter, and get essentially the product you described. You can even follow specific feeds (eg Bloomberg Politics instead of Bloomberg) to make it more tailored.
Netwerk24 does that in South Africa. They bundled 11 Afrikaans magazines and 35 newspapers under 1 account. And you pay R99 per month for access. (About 7 USD)
Not a bad price, but I don't give a shit about all of those newspapers and magazines. I just want 1 or 2 and I don't want to pay for all of them.
My proposed solution is very similar to the old print days. You used to just buy a single copy of a newspaper. On an adhoc basis, depending on whether or not any of the headlines caught your attention. You didn't buy a single article, nor did you subscribe to multiple newspapers. (you could, but I don't think many people subscribed to multiple)
So here is my solution for a digital version of this:
- You have an account with a digital news agency (or group)
- You buy bundles of articles. E.g $1 for 20 articles. (or whatever price is appropriate)
- Everyone has access to the website, but you can just see the headlines/opening paragraph.
- If you are interested, you can use one of your article credits to 'unlock' a specific article and read it in full.
- Once you have 'unlocked' a specific article you will always have access to it, and your credit for that 1 article is used up
This way you don't have to bother with microtransactions, and also you don't have to bother with paying for a whole bunch of stuff you don't want.
So basically the model is exactly as you want it, but the price doesn't work.
If I was keen on news I'd say 7 USD sounds a lot better to me than 10. Not sure I would pay 10. But also not sure I'd take the offer at 5.
It's really hard to price those correctly for the readers. There were times I subscribed to a print computer mag, which was ~5 EUR per month - but I read it cover to cover - wehen I stopped doing that, I stopped my subscription.
I do like your model - but I'm not sure it would work out. Maybe the people who pay 7 USD only read ~20 articles, so you'd only get 3 articles for your 1 USD.
I guess I'd still be much more likely to set up a subscription of 1-2 per month and get a low number of free articles than pay more for "I won't use it anyway".
Edit: Everyone's free to tell me I'm cheap (living in Germany and not in ZA, so I guess the 7 USD per month are more palpable to me) - but it's a matter of worth. If I don't want those 2 coffees per month enough (for 7 USD) I also won't buy them, simple as that.
That seems like a good idea, although it is maybe difficult to bring it into reality. Only thing I would change is not basing the percentage on the number of views because this will (just like ads) make an incentive for newspapers to promote clickbait. Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.
Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.
Then you have the problem of speedreaders like me vs slow-readers plus that it's still not tracking free.
News Corp tried to build that back in 2010 see eg https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/why-news-corp-really-... - there were issues getting newspapers to commit to a bundled experience. And it wasnt going to be a profit share by views exactly either.
It is.
Isn't it the idea behind Brave.
Or maybe I didn't understood it, looking at browser's market share, looks like I was not the only one to not get it.
We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.
They could do both. Keep the individual "one source only" that is cheaper if you only want this one, and the bundle that is cheaper is you want to access 5 sources. The bundle would be less profit per head for each source but you could expand the volume this way.
Me neither. My whole life I've been told to "be informed". For all sorts of reasons, including having something to talk about when on a date. And all those reasons are bullshit. Being informed has had zero positive impact on me. In fact the impact was negative. Constant worry, depression and frustration.
Been news free for about 5 of my 50 years and never happier.
>For all sorts of reasons, including having something to talk about when on a date
If that's the reason they could come up with for one being informed, I'd hate to live in that society...
>And all those reasons are bullshit. Being informed has had zero positive impact on me.
Being informed is not about having impact on the person being informed. Is about the person being informed having an impact themselves, i.e. being an active member of society. Today this is reduced to voting once every few years (if that) for most people (which is a mockery of being a citizen), but being informed is important even for that.
There's a newish product out of Australia I just heard of called Inkl, that's seeking to solve this problem with a bundled subscription that includes the Economist, the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Independent, and a premium option that includes WSJ and Barrons.
Blendle is a great alternative, you can buy seperate articles for a few cents from a lot of different papers. It's a Dutch company, and they have almost all Dutch newspapers, but they also have American news papers
I will second Blendle. I found it via HN recently and signed up. Being USA-based, I found that NYT and Economist are both available, which are value-adds for me. For example, I paid $0.19 to read a short NYT article, which seemed fair to me.
I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean, and they both do great journalism that I want to support (IMO).
I would definitely pay for a third if I thought it was worth it to me. I can imagine if I was in finance I’d pay for FT or something.
>I pay for the Guardian and WaPo, and I’m pretty happy with this so far: I use one for UK/EU/world news and the other for US/world. You see different perspectives from each side of the ocean,
Well, not that different.
Both are parts of the same echo bubble (the other-side analogue would be following e.g. Fox News and Daily Mail -- either bundles not only fail to get the other-side perspective, but miss tons of nuance not available to neither one or the other "mandatory" side of establishment sources).
Someone needs to make a "Netflix for news", where you pay one monthly subscription and get access to almost everything. Then distribute the money to the sites I visit, just like Netflix or Spotify.
I see two challenges:
* Getting news sites on board. The more "premium" sites may be unwilling to give away access for cheap, but in general news orgs are desperate for a reliable income stream. Maybe a 20/articles per month limit would be fine for some sites.
* Unlike Netflix etc, it needs to work in more than one app: Each news sites own app, in the browser, and the mini-browsers inside social media apps. I don't want to type in passwords all the time just to read an article someone shared.
Apple is in a great position to do this. They have the experience with iTunes/Apple Music, and they have the leverage to make one subscription work in all apps. I just hope they don't intentionally break it on Android or Windows.
Nope. I pay one (the guardian) and I graze the rest because they're very expensive by comparison for at best no better and often worse content for me.
I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. I don't want to live in a bubble but I can see my on bias is quite strong in this: maybe I just recognize editorial markup more clearly in what I pay for.
I'd rather pay another European or Asian source than the exemplar rates in this article.
>I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact.
That's a great practice. But even better to step beyond both "oppositional" sides, and check alternative sources that are not partisan of the two parties that alternate in power in each country.
My concern about all these pay per view plans in this thread is that they will discourage cross pollination. We will be not just learning about other perspectives but paying for them.
Both sides are 90% opinion 10% fact. We can just see the opinions more clearly in the side we disagree with. Personally I'd much rather subscribe to a news source that just provided the facts, but I don't know of one. I used to read the independent and the telegraph in the UK for a slight-left and slight-right perspective, but they've both drifted further apart in recent years.
I still rate the ABC and SBS (Australian) and the BBC for foreign news. The BBC fell off it's pedestal over Scots independence and brexit pretty badly and the ABC has undergone too much Google-following change to infotainment. SBS is underfunded but has a huge following of ex-patriates who lie both sides of most other economies politics and I suspect keep them honest.
It's interesting inasmuch as the Guardian is trying to be reader-supported without a paywall. You can be a "supporter" for €50 per year which, if I think of it as buying a reporter a pint once a month, is basically nothing.
Of course, it's worth remembering that people on HN complain pretty loudly if a paywalled link is shared. Have we considered revisiting that policy given the vulnerabilities in primarily-advertiser-funded news sources?
For years I've been thinking about a kind of loose bundling service where subscriber would pay like 10 per month, but for no particular bundle of sites. The business would then go out to sites that users are consuming and basically say 'hey, we've got money for you'. They put some tracking code on their site and start getting paid based on how much the services users consume. It's sort of a push-based Patreon.
Never did it because the idea never sat right with me.
Actually this has also something good. There is so much redundant news, sometimes the Reuters messages are just copy&pasted. IMHO the only reasonable development would be micro payments though. Being a heavy news reader, 3 or 4 is by far not enough - also I value my ability to choose where to read from myself. So a paid Google News or so wouldn't really work for me, actually their selection of articles got worse over the years.
We need a micro-payment system for the web! So that you can pay per article. Versus pulling up my credit card, using the banks second factor authorization, and meanwhile knowing that 75% of the transaction is banking fees. Paypal could have solved the problem, but instead choose short term profits and to sale out, instead of long term - changing the world.
None of this moves the needle on anything that matters to me. I don’t want to pay another subscription for yet another business that doesn’t offer material benefit. I love the long form, but I want specific benefits that matter more than as a matter of discourse.
News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will. Ok. Why should I?
I think it makes sense to distinguish between "news sites".
Can the Financial Times, Economist, Bloomberg and trade publications survive on a paywall model? Probably - their readers likely consider them as operational expenses.
But I don't see how the traditional newspapers can maintain their advantage going forward.
If we develop a browser model that allows them to make money via micropayments, convince people to sign up for it, and they actually use it, some of them _might_ survive.
I think there's a lot of mental gymnastics happening here though - ultimately I think they're gone unless outside funding keeps them alive (e.g. they essentially become propaganda).
I just can't see wikinews doing serious investigative journalism, though, which is one of the major reasons that news corps like WaPo are worth supporting. A talented journalist can work on a major story for months (like in the Theranos bombshell), and you need to be paying someone a salary as well as money for flights/hotels.
Wikinews is a nice idea, but the vast majority of its news is just wikipedia-style sourcing of other news organizations. The original research it does seems to be mostly Q&A interviews.
Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.