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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

I would try to eat journalism.

I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to automate payment for individual articles.

  1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet.
  2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required).

Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who would be able to make their paywalls more porous.

Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:

  - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
  - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
  - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to
    coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.

Edit: If anyone in Twitter wants to do this, please hire me - I'd be super interested to work on it. Wouldn't even need to be the CEO. ;)

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This pretty much combines the three things big media companies hate:

- Someone else owning and displaying their content.

- Someone else owning data on their viewers.

- Not being able to set their own prices.

For those reasons, I don't see any chance of serious publishers being interested in this sort of deal. There's just very little in it for them.

You wouldn't own or display their content, nor would you set their prices (you merely give them the option to collect micropayments from a central wallet). Also, all social media companies already have data on their audience - that's just the way things are.

All publishers with paywalls have massive bounce-rates due to people not wanting to subscribe. This would help them make more money.

Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom. Why read The Times content when you can be presented with a similar article written by some blogger. And why would media companies give Twitter any percentage of the cut? Twitter already supplies them with free traffic, it's in their mutual interest.

Facebook tried a similar approach with Instant Articles and the only publications that have jumped on it are the ones that are desperate for revenues. Big media companies are playing the long game. Content is king.

Regarding bounce rates, this is not as big of a deal as you think. There are many examples where paywalls have increased the overall revenue. https://medium.com/@getdrizzle/paywalls-are-on-the-rise-with...

In the end, news is a business like any other. The number of users doesn't matter, it's the size of their wallet that does.

  > Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom.
  > Why read The Times content when you can be presented
  > with a similar article written by some blogger.

Because "Content is king" [0].

I'm not talking about the big companies that publish clickbait and make money through advertising at scale. I'm talking about smaller, niche, high-quality magazines and newspapers that need to show people that they're worth subscribing to. And that would like a more granular version of a subscription that allows more people to read them (instead of having to make their content freenium or free).

[0] You cannot talk about fungibility of publishers in one paragraph and then turn back on that to say 'content is king' in the next: you either believe one or the other.

Fair point, but I think my meaning did not come across correct.

Most articles today can be substituted with lower-cost versions of the same articles (news/reviews are good examples of this). There's your fungibility. Regardless though, publishers still hold onto their content, because it's one thing that Twitter/Facebook is lacking.

Is there much evidence to suggest that people are willing to pay for individual articles, though? Blendle has been around for a while and hasn't set the world alight. There are plenty of free news sources to compete with.

Probably not, but I think there could be a "twitter wallet" that the user pays into. Let's say I add $5 a month to this wallet and twitter pays it's content partners based on the percentage of click through received by me. It would work like Brave browser's wallet.

The problem with this though is it would probably encourage more junk content and instead of annoying ads we'll get more clickbait.

That idea is as old as the web and I don't see why Twitter doing it will suddenly make it work.

blendle is taking the wrong approach, but the idea of micropayments is the way of the future

I like this idea. If I could subscribe through Twitter for the magazines/papers I'm reading I'd be much more likely to take on multiple subscriptions or try new sources out than I am now.

Basically turn it into an online Newspaper stand where I can read gated content without having to give out my personal info. or remember a username/password (to anything but Twitter.)

Yes - an adjacent thought, too: niche publications that are unable to make significant advertising money through sheer scale [0] would benefit from being able to attract users who just want to test the quality of their content before purchasing a full subscription -- or that wish to pay but only periodically for a smaller dose of content.

This might cause some niche, non-clickbaity magazines that do not have good web presences to become more interested in publishing content online.

[0] https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/

Super-important: make payment frictionless.

Let the payment gateway link to whatever payment method(s) you already have, set a limit for automatic payment per day, and make it one-click ("Buy this article"), or even optionally zero-click below a trivial threshold (e.g. 10¢).

If you hit the daily limit, ask for confirmations, passwords, etc.

Imagine how much worse the clickbait headlines would become...

I love this. Publications could choose whether to be pay-per-view ($0.10/article) or included in some base-level subscription with profits shared based on how many clicks you get.

Publications worth reading have already a pay per view medium. It is called book.

Problem is journalism is a crap market. No one wants to pay for it.

I can't remember the last time I have read a Forbes article.

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