Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

To me, the problem is not technical. It's that most of what we call 'news' has no direct economic value to the reader. A story about Aleppo might make me better informed but there isn't really a dollar amount associated.

Whatever value it has, little of it arises from time sensitivity, high accuracy, or coming from a particular source: which is to say that reading it today at the New York Times or in a week at the Economist or sometime in between at USA Today is pretty much the same.

News sources for ordinary news are largely fungible. The typical story behind a paywall can be replaced by one that isn't. What isn't fungible is the quality of the reporting. That's why individual sites can collect subscriptions.

Anyway, a service with many sources and an app is back to selling on the aggregate model with the additional complexity of negotiating with the sources and the risk of users avoiding payment using the open web.

Good luck.

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News as such is fungible, but good newspapers and magazines provide their unique value through op-ed pieces, columns, research journalism, thought pieces, etc. That kind of writing is not interchangeable.

I have a subscription to a newspaper (on real paper!) not for the daily news (which as you say is fungible) but for these in-depth articles that go beyond the news, and provide some background and perspective.

I agree. I see part of the value in a newspaper [irrespective of material form] is as an aggregate. It filters against hard and soft criteria and that's what is worth paying for [for some people]. The pay-per-article model might work if it can meet that function and offers better value than a 'newspaper subscription' and offers better value than the free internet to some market segment.

The question is not 'Are there profits to be had when I can charge a penny every time someone reads an article on the internet?'. The hard question is 'How do I show people it is worth paying me a penny to read an article on the internet?'

I agree with the long held role of newspapers in aggregating a set of articles based on their criteria.

But in the current age, bundling seems to be broken for 2 particular reasons:

- Most people discover content via their social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc) where they have invested a long time to curate a set of individual journalists, public figures and acquaintances rather than orgs.

- Diversity of audience expects a rather focussed content curation from different view points rather than all encompassing single identity.

This makes me believe that going forward in future, people should be able to show appraisal to unique pieces rather than a wrapper organisation, based on their quality. This might be encourage grass root level curation by people who are incentivised for their effort rather than association with an existing brand.

The hurdle is inconvenience. Using a special news reading app and maintaining an account are inconvenient relative to just reading for free. On top of that, reading an article becomes a decision of both time [to read it] and money [the price of the article], that's also [mentally] less convenient.

To me, the difficulty is that there is no obvious win for the pay by article model and my experience is that people hate being nickeled and dimed. Charging is not necessarily the best route to build the goodwill necessary for donated effort toward curation and curation that relies on goodwill tends to attract players with financial motivations in addition to people with voluntarism in their hearts.

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