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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

> A spokesperson for the Atlantic said the magazine will launch with annual pricing equivalent to “one fairly nice cup of coffee per month.

If every online property asks me to do this, I would be buying wayy too much coffee and losing too much cash.

That being said, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure what the answer is. I pay for my NYT and WaPo subscription, but probably can't (or won't) be paying for Atlantic.

I really really like Vox media though, but they don't seem to have a subscription based option. Also: Politico.

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I say pretty much the same thing when charities try to get me to sign up for a monthly payment.

If I gave money to every charity that asked for it, I wouldn't have any money left myself.

Maybe what we need is a sort of central payment system for news media. Sort of like Spotify for news, except that the outlets keep their own sites and you have a single sign on for all the sites. Your monthly payment would be distributed according to how many articles you read on each site (or some other, more fair metric to reward high quality articles, maybe time spent?).

There's already an app that I know of that does that - or at least close enough. Blendle is an app where you pay per article you read, paid through your in-app account. My uncle uses it to selectively read articles from some large publications.

I think one downside is that those publications don't let you sign in on their systems, so you have to rely on the availability of the articles through a third-party. I agree that it would be great to have publications allow you to sign in through a third party system instead of their own. Maybe we can hope for one in the future?

Also, while I'm sure it's there for practical reasons, the per article price makes me very uncomfortable. There's this split second decision that I make as open an article - is it worth my time? To ask "if it's worth my money?" before every read seems less than ideal. For instance if my music service asked me a penny for every song I play, I'd probably end up listening to a lot less songs than I do.

Blendle offers instant refunds for this reason.

Blendle offers this service, it's called Blendle Button: https://pay-docs.blendle.io/

I think charities also become less frugal when they have many monthly subscribers. If they know they are getting a large repeat income every month, they will hire a chief executive with a big salary, and generally become inefficient with doners' money.

If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. I think the same is true for online news.

>If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it.

They also have to repeatedly spend money on fundraising. Monthly donations are good for charities, just like monthly subscriptions are good for software businesses - they have a very high LTV if churn is properly controlled and make the finances of the organisation far more predictable.

Many still spend vast sums on fundraising even with healthy recurring donations - it just means they spend more on prime-time TV advertisements. Charities should not be trying to sell their services along side perfumes, car insurance and supermarket advertisements - single-use "things" - they should be going for the long term organic growth by fostering a great reputation for efficiency ("good done" per unit currency).

People selling perfume and car insurance clearly believe that prime-time advertising is cost-effective. Why shouldn't charities use the same media?

If I give $1 to a charity, I'm more than happy for them to spend it on fundraising if they're getting $1.05 ROI. That's a fantastically effective use of my money, as long as the $1.05 gets used effectively to deliver on their charitable purpose.

There's probably a good game-theoretic argument against fundraising activity if charitable donations are zero-sum, but I've yet to see any evidence that they are.

I wish I could just pay the sites I go to the equivalent of what they'd get from me in ads. How much could that be worth per month? Like $10? I'm sure loads of people would be willing to pay that to support and get ad-free content from all the sites they read. There's just no easy way to do that.

There is one called Google Contributor.

Human nature rears its head.. cant we optimize this, by breaking long articles up in thousand small ones.

We are going to make soo much money. Hey, HN- Reader who suggested this, can you make a FlyWeigth implementation that treats every letter as a article?

You don’t have to subscribe to every publication out there. Find two or three which provide diverse viewpoints and suitable to your taste and call it a day. Bar few, I don’t think most of the population has the capacity or time to read hundreds of articles per day from tens of different publications

I don't want to read hundreds of articles per day.

I want to read maybe 50 articles per month, from tens of different publications.

> I pay for my NYT and WaPo subscription, but probably can't (or won't) be paying for Atlantic.

Ironically, I think the way the Atlantic iterated on their model put me off. While NYT and others went to a paywall with limited free views, Atlantic blocked anyone with an adblocker.

So, when I chose to subscribe to some journalism outlets, I was engaged with the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. I was already trained by the Atlantic’s adblocker blocker to ignore them.

Now they’re moving to a reasonably hefty-sounding subscription model. Great, but my media budget has already been consumed by NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, and a handful of professional journals. And, again, they’ve already trained me to ignore their site.

I have no trouble imagining an alternative timeline in which they had my money, but the manner in which they iterated on their model killed it for me.

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