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Comment by dexterdog | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription. When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and providers get credited. It's really pretty simple and invisible. People get to fund what they actually use. Content creators get paid. Content providers can decide whether to paywall for out-of-network requests if they like. There is a paper trail to deal with copyright violations. I just need a huge pile of money to get people to sell it to some key players.

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Pitch it as "Spotify for text". Amazon are inching towards it with the royalty-per-pages-viewed option for some Kindle titles.

Unfortunately the obstacle is that publishers would have to give up control, and share with other publishers; and I think many would rather go out of business. The music industry only cooperate due to the threat of piracy eating the entirety of their lunch.

Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.

There is also the 'pyramid' effect you can get by owning signups. If I as a content provider or just a referrer send you in as a paying customer I can get a cut of your monthly without even serving you content.

And there is also well done advertising. Once you have a big group of people that reads articles on specific topics, I bet companies will want to pay a lot to send them (top quality of course) content that is also promotional in some way.

That could work as well. Some sort of normalization would need to occur such that someone visiting 1,000 sites on a $5/mo budget would compare favorably against someone visiting 10 on the same budget. But that would certainly further reduce inaction.

I think some sort of feedback would be important, at least in the beginning, so that people understand how this magic pile of money is being treated.

Who wants to give dexterdog a ton of money to go do this? :)

I am open to talking to anybody about it. I think I've got the core functions and issues mapped out already as I've been mulling it for years and watching a few people take a swing at it on the wrong plane.

There really is no issue with one person doing 1000 paid hits versus another who only does 10 as that all balances out. Sharing of accounts is one thing, but that's pretty easy to track as you just have to keep an eye on the heavy users.

Feedback is definitely part of the package. Users are kept anonymous to the content providers by default, but there is still some good aggregate data available. Content providers won't need to worry about their demographics nearly as much since they mainly want that to sell advertising which they should no longer have to do.

For a site like Wired and many other established publishers this doesn't make any financial sense. There's still a lot of money to be made from plain old ads, as annoying as they may be to most of us. It's obvious by now that one way or the other ads are going the way of the dodo but it's difficult to think what will replace them or if that replacement will leave us better off. The way I see it, in the not so distant future all these publishers will be paywalled and we may have to resort to 'article pirates' in order to read them because I'm not about to pay 60 different $4/month subscriptions for the eventual article posted on one of the aggregation platforms I frequent. I really don't browse most of these sites, which is what would justify the $4/month, in theory anyways.

The problem is that exact inconvenience would benefit the publishers.

Have a subscription to WSJ but not Forbes? I'm going to read more articles on the WSJ.

You will read more there, but you're also going to be more likely to leave if you start seeing articles posted elsewhere that you are paywalled out of. It's likely that most people are interested in certain writers and not certain mastheads. It's very similar to music.

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