Ask HN: If you could pay/article, what sites would make a fortune off of you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you could pay/article, what sites would make a fortune off of you?

6 pointsgunnr1519 comments

Ads ruin the reading experience, and subscriptions don't work at scale for all the sites you visit once or twice a month. If you could automatically pay the publisher directly for a clean, fast reading experience, what sites would have the most to gain?

Asked another way: What sites do you quit once you hit their paywall?

Bonus - how much would you be willing to pay/article?

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I'd be willing to pay probably $0.25/article for what I read on NY Times and Washington Post. I'd be willing to pay anywhere from $0.50 to $20.00 for many of the answers I come across on Stack Overflow (depending on how certain I were before reading the answer that it would actually solve my problem... plus how long the problem would take me to solve on my own and whether I can find the answer elsewhere) since I can directly see how that contributes to my productivity at work (and because I'd be able to charge it to my company).

Side note: In general, I actually wish there were more ways to pay per article. I really want to pay for people to write good content and it scares me that many great content creators of old are going out of business in the digital age. The problem is that for many sources, I'm not interested in a subscription to their entire repertoire since I only want an article or two.

If you had to pay for answers on stackoverflow, many of my peers and I would not have escaped college. There's no question the answers have provided me with a lot of value though - I can't even imagine the amount of troubleshooting hours that site has saved me.

Blendle fits in perfectly what you are describing. Each article costs around anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents. They also have good number of magazines and newspapers listed.

It is also easy to get a refund without hassle or big customer support interaction if the article dont met your expectation. - just a click

I'm happily paying for the economist. The writing is topnotch succinct and enjoyable without wasting my time, the breadth of subjects way more than I can handle and I find the selection of articles mind-expanding (and often surprisingly anticipating what will be general news in the near future). I started with the introduction offer convinced I would cancel but got hooked. Paying for what I read also helps quite well with reducing information overflow (because since I have paid for it, I read this instead of swallowing dozens of free sources)

> Ads ruin the reading experience, and subscriptions don't work at scale for all the sites you visit once or twice a month.

One thing to keep in mind that newspapers and other print media that have subscriptions also have ads. Subscriptions never covered all (or even most) of the costs of in the majority of publishing. One of the things subscriptions do do is require the subscriber to place a value on the content they're paying for (more than whatever piques their interest as they're browsing the web), which in turn puts pressure on the publisher to publish what keeps people paying for the content. This can make the per-view/per-click value of the publication higher. (There's also the issue of figuring out ways to be able to provide content that can't easily be redistributed elsewhere without authorization.) We haven't really gotten there on the internet yet.

That is a solid point. I am very interested in learning more about the revenue break-down here between ads and subscriptions. If you have access to any resources, pls fwd them on.

From my research, the average internet user generates between 11-31 cents in online ad buys a day. It seems the the numbers here are low enough that a decent % of online users would choose for that $ to go directly to a publisher in exchange for a clean reading experience. At least that is the theory.

I searched for "new york times revenue breakdown" to find this article I remember reading a while back:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/business/media/new-york-t...

I'm sure there are more out there if you dig.

Respectfully, this is a broken mental model. Patreon and a tip jar are a much better approach to trying to monetize small websites. It can be done, though it isn't easy. Also, almost no one "makes a fortune" at this stuff. Some people make surprisingly good money. Jeph Jacques was initially make $10k/mo via Patreon for his web comics. But it isn't for a single article or whatever. He posts comics five days a week.

I envy both his financial success and his lifestyle, but even he doesn't have what you are describing. You seem to be asking some version of "How can I buy a winning lottery ticket?" Well, we all wish we knew how to do that.

Actually, I am asking a slightly different question: how can we build an alternate monetization model for online content (outside of ads and subscriptions).

I like your example. I will look up Jeph.

As noted above, in addition to Patreon, you can do a tip jar. Here are some of my posts on tip jars, including instruction on how to create one:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/search?q=tip+jar

I don't get a lot of tips, but I don't have a lot of traffic either. From what I gather, my track record of getting cash directly from my audience is vastly superior to that of most people doing stuff online. I mean, until Patreon. But I used to have donate buttons. I have always made more from my audience just giving me money than from ads. I can't figure out merchandising.

Even so, I can't figure out how on earth you turn this into a middle class income or something like that. Still, I think it is a model that holds promise given what is happening with ads.

No site can ever make a fortune of me for some article. I would pay 0 for any article/s.

Everything that anyone needs to read is legally available for free if one cares enough to look for. There may be some very rare negligible exception to this statement like less than 5% or max 10%. And not everyone needs to read everything.

A nano degree course on AI is being offered for free. It is only the certificate that one pays for and that is the ideal payment design. If that can be offered for free should we consider anything and everything else might as well be suitable for free publication?

So can I assume that you are happy with the current Ad Supported model? Do you see any way to improve it?

what ad supported model? what ad are you talking about? i haven't seen any for a while. at least not second time from the same site. if a site tries to push an ad at my eyeballs i just block them in my browser. that's why i never ran into the Verge r these 9to5 sites and other such sites. i am not sure if they are still working.

The Economist. I really loathe subscription payments because they're a great way to balloon your budget, but I'd be willing to pay maybe as much as $1 for each article I stumble across on HN or elsewhere and then am desperate to read. I probably run afoul the 3/mo free limit one month out of two on average.

https://flattr.com

You can check and study flattr and their ad block products. Unless you are reverse marketing for them.

I want to read things in the public sphere that I can link my friends to, so I don't want to participate in any kind of pay per view.

How much am I willing to pay? Nothing. Keep your ads classy and relevant and don't have that shit flood me with pop-ups.I find paywalls ruin the reading experience and I'll literally disregard websites and their content if they try slap me with a paywall. Ask me to pay directly for 40 seconds of my time, article by article? Your dreaming. Adds work fine and I've actually had some tech sites through great add placement actually direct me to useful products I actually wind up buying.

I'd be willing to pay you with a small portion of my attention for your article. It's doubtful most articles are providing some rare insight not freely available elsewhere too. so make use of that attention and slip me some subtle advertising.

Context: I'm poor af. I'll open my wallet for food but the concept of paying for articles online I'll leave that to the maybe 1 in 20 friends who are financially comfortable enough for a luxury like that.

>I'll literally disregard websites and their content if they try slap me with a paywall.

What sites fit in with your description here?

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