I wonder if at some point in the future, there will be a reaction to this push for a subscription-based news model. Perhaps a website who's value proposition is that it only focuses on news, with no clickbait articles and titles.
I work at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is doing a lot of work in this area; the Digital News Project reports are interesting: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-...
I've recently authored one of these reports looking specifically at digital-born news media in Europe, which is particularly focused on the diversity of non-advertising focused news business models.
EDIT: What about micropayments?
(See this comment for more on the subject
The first is traditional public service broadcasting (such as the BBC, or the German ARD). As these are funded by a compulsory public levy, they don't need either advertising or subscriptions, and have no need to exclude using a paywall. This model adapts from television to Internet news very well.
The second is something donation-based. Some organisations are trying to fund reporting using either public donations (e.g. Krautreporter), foundation support (e.g. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), or a mixture (e.g. Correctiv). It's difficult to scale, though.
Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'.
In Italy, the leftist newspaper il manifesto basically rebooted around this concept, although they still have a printed edition. They dramatically lowered costs (also shedding quite a bit of personnel) and now survive relatively well, but the numbers are far from replacement - they still sell 7 physical copies for each digital one, digital subscriptions are pretty stable, and their paper numbers are crashing in the same way as all other newspapers.
Digital models have higher margins but clearly they cannot reach the same amount of people as traditional models yet, and don't fully compensate the inevitable death of paper.
However I think there's a gap here to do something radically different, global and paid for with subscriptions (from those who broadcast and companies who want aggregate data about fashion trends for example, or weather reports based on individuals reporting it).
If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources of information from the fringes then that works.
If you want someone who knows where to go, who to talk to, and how to actually build out a story then you still need journalists.
Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything.
I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press.
There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.
Is that why I see numerous people live blogging every city council meeting or random discussion forum on a possible new law?
Yeah, 20k people will post that they're at the inauguration and thought that X had an ugly dress or Y looked unhappy... but that's hardly useful.
And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.
Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content.
[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
The Brave browser is trying to integrate micropayments into the browser. It blocks ads by default and pays websites directly out of a monthly amount that the user configures.
https://brave.com/publishers.html
Flattr tries to do a very similar thing even earlier, except you have to click the "Flattr" button on websites that you visit that you want to fund. But still works with the same model where you set yourself a monthly budget and the system pays content producers directly for you.
I realize not everybody would take advantage, but I certainly think it's worthwhile to integrate to supplement revenue.
You can theorize it might work, but has an enormous activation energy, but it's hard to move past that theorizing without a few dozen million dollars for marketing. Most things easier than that have been tried.
The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. But then again, if you've already consumed it, then you're too late to decide if it's worth reading or not.
This is why reputation is important in journalism. If you step back and think about it, your sense of "quality" depends 99% on what other people think. I'm not insulting you, this is how it works. People have better things to do than sitting around reading every single article to figure out if it's high quality or not, and that's why most people regardless of intelligence rely on reputation to judge quality.
That's why the successful model will be building a news organization with high reputation. That's what people actually want (so they don't have to waste time trying to decide what to trust or not) and that's what makes sense for the organizations financially. That's why the micropayment model will never replace the subscription model and increasingly so.
If you read my comment above, that's basically what I'm saying. You are delegating your quality judgment to Blendle, so you are not paying for quality articles "regardless of where they come from". You are paying for quality articles that Blendle sent you. You know it's worth your time to go through the list because you trust Blendle's reputation.
Like say, being awkward to set up with normal payment processors. Things like taxes and fees mean that genuinely 'cheap' articles (read, a couple of dollars or less) are prohibitively awkward or expensive to set up.
They also don't have popular appeal as a concept, since free competition is just too high. Yeah, some people will pay for 'quality'. But a lot of people will just find free alternatives regardless of how accurate or well written the content is. Or if they're like a lot of people now, they'll write off the sources charging for content as 'fake news' and 'propaganda'.
And it also doesn't really fix the clickbait issue. It makes it slightly less convenient for some people (since you can't trick the 1% of people that see through your shoddy reporting any more), but most people just want content based on their own biases. Even when the content is something they're paying for.
I mean, look at a print newspaper if you need proof of that. Over here in the UK, questionable quality tabloids and gossip rags like the Sun and the Daily Mail sell a whole lot better than the likes of the Telegraph or Guardian. If micro payments caught on as a concept, I suspect the same thing would happen there. People would buy poor quality articles that support their own views and don't challenge any of their beliefs.
In general, I don't think people like being nickel & dimed, and that's basically what micro payments are. Subscriptions allow one to rationalize the price upfront, then consume without concern. This appeals to heavy consumers, consumers who overestimate their usage, as well as consumers who don't want to think about each purchase.
There would need to be a large enough category of people who would be willing to buy a few articles per month, but not want a subscription. And that would need to generate a large enough profit beyond paying for the micro payments implementation, support, etc.
By and large, it seems that once you get to $1+ per unit cost, people are willing to put at least a modicum of thought into whether they want to buy/rent something. For a long period, people had no problem renting a film (or going to a theater) for $5 or so. There wasn't a lot of demand for unlimited passes. (Of course, now we have Netflix as well.)
I suspect it's the literal nickel and dime-ing that's the problem. It's too small a transaction to want to fuss with. Think if you had to go through some sort of transaction process every time you flipped on a light switch (which is pay-as-you-go but the financial transaction is largely opaque). And I strongly suspect that, at the end of the day, the dollar amounts involved just wouldn't be large enough to be interesting.