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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

Paywall :( Perhaps a better way to earn money than tracking users.

Three business models have emerged for newspapers:

* Be a sponsor's mouthpiece. This works pretty well if you're OK with your news being nothing more than someone's PR department.

* Advertising. This, as you say, hinges entirely on tracking users.

* Subscriptions. Also hinges on tracking users.

In short, you're absolutely right! There could be a better way! I just don't know of any and can't think of any.

I'm 100% convinced this failure of imagination is just my personal failing, through. I'm very interested in knowing what this better way could be, and I'm sure the news industry would similarly be deeply curious. What do you have in mind that's practical, workable, reliable enough to build a business around, and in no way, shape, form, or manner involves tracking users?

Why do you need to track users for a subscription?

Generally speaking, it requires knowing who is subscribed and being able to check this status when they are trying to view an article. Thus some method of tracking users is required. Cryptography and signed tokens might make it possible to abstract the who from the status, but the nature of a subscription requires the user being able to prove their status.

That's not really tracking. Advertisers track users across multiple web pages to target ads to their inferred interests. An advertising-based site would need a way to associate a visitor with a bunch of other sites. A subscription-based site doesn't have to collect or keep identifying data. A username and password will do, along with something like a Stripe token which only lets Stripe identify the user.

Under some definitions of tracking, you're absolutely correct!

Charge me per article I want to read. 25 or 50 cents? Make it seamless so I can hit Apple Pay and then read the article. I would do it, and I bet so would many others.

I genuinely don't see many people doing it, at least not enough to make a tangible difference to the papers bottom line. The only answer these days is a subscription service, but I don't want to subscribe to 50+ different ones... be nice if there was a general 'internet' bill included in your ISP that distributed the money according to the sites you visited the most. Though that's a whole tracking/privacy problem once again.

This is similar to the idea mentioned, but again... requires you to be logged in and tracked. I liked the first implementation of it, not sure about the current form. https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Pay-per-item is a wonderful business model! It works spectacularly for movies and books and similar.

However, one possible wrinkle springs to mind. That is, all the sectors what per-item media payment works well for are long-form. There's an active review and feedback ecosystem around them, allowing consumers to judge quality before paying. This performs the critical function of enabling consumers to de-risk their purchases.

Once again, I'm completely sure this is just a personal failing, but I'm struggling to find a way to construct such a system around newspapers. Reviews only work well when the desire form immediate access is low and the time-cost of the review is a small percentage of that of the content being commented upon. Newspaper articles would seem to fail both tests!

Please, help me with my failure of imagination and comprehension.

People have experimented with this and it's not very popular en masse.

A workable model might be something akin to a subscription service wherein you get 200 articles a month from WSJ/NYT/Bloomberg/Whoever for $10 and the revenue is distributed equitably after the provider cut.

I would definitely pay for this. Economist, WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, FT would cost about $200/month for a full subscription to each. I don't read any of them that much to justify that sort of money, but if it was 10-20 for a bunch of articles across them all a la spotify I'd definitely pay for it. I think most people I know would too.

However, they are probably concerned about cannibalising their own subscriptions too much to do it, which sucks.

How about two or three dollars? You need to give them something on top of transaction costs.

I actually think a paper might as well charge $10-50 per article because they won’t make anything charging little enough to attract tire-kickers, and above $1 they won’t get many to pay besides people who have a strong interest in the content and people using the company card.

If the NY Times allowed me to register an account, and then billed me in aggregate every month, then I would gladly pay 25 cents to $1 per article.

The problem that Lightning network hopefully solves is exactly the system that the media industry needs. And they are so hyper consolidated, it should be viable to create some type of system.

Alternatively, maybe Americans need less news and information.

Why not just get a subscription at that point? NYT basic is $180/year so you are just asking for a discount on that, assuming you would plan to read less than a couple hundred articles a year.

There we are, tracking users again, the very system the parent wanted to get away from.

I want this model too. Unfortunately, credit card processing fees will eat most of that. We need a new payment infrastructure that's low fee and enables small digital purchases.

We may also need people whose thought processes aren't perturbed by stopping to make payments. It's possible that not all transaction costs are captured fully in per-txn fees.

This might have the effect of gating news coverage by income and prevent lower-income people from being able to access news.

In a way that paywalls don't? I doubt it.

There's a service called Blendle that does this. I used them a little over a year ago.

The legalization of sports betting will probably have a secondary effect of resuscitating the newspaper industry. It will be a huge boon to a lot of industries, actually.

https://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-m...

I'm fascinated by this outline.com. That's a pretty nice domain name...

Nice bit of mental gymnastics going on in the DMCA page and in their Terms of Service - you, the user, are considered to be the publisher of this material. That way their hands stay clean! How could they possibly know you're NOT the publisher of Bloomberg and the WSJ?

https://www.outline.com/dmca.html

"If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:

    you own the rights to,
    is in the public domain,
    constitutes fair use, or
    you have consent of the copyright holder.

https://www.outline.com/terms.html

'“you” or “publisher” means the individual or entity using the Services'

Pinterest does the same copyright gymnastics.

There are several ways to get around it.

The one I usually go with is by pasting the link into the search box on archive.is

[flagged]

Any company that requires that I call an 800 number to cancel my subscription will never get a dollar from me again.

Amen, though once I called them it was pretty easy to get them to cancel me. SiriusXM, though...spent 25 minutes on the phone arguing with the rep that I didn't want to pay for their service anymore, in any fashion or form. I was begging them to let me cancel by the end of the call.

Glad I'm not the only one. NYTimes and SiriusXM are companies with solid products whom I refuse to do business with due to the hassle of cancellation.

Meanwhile Netflix allows you to sign-up, cancel, or even temporarily pause your service without a single moment of hassle.

I've cancelled two accounts with them before and never called an 800 number...

This is worth it if you read their content even slightly regularly. But I really only visit the WSJ when it's linked to me like on HN. I just checked my Chrome history and I've visited 10 articles total this year, counting this one. So $18.50 per month doesn't really seem worth it to me to read 2 articles a month.

Here's a Firefox addon that sets your referer to "Facebook" every time you connect to either the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. You won't get a paywall:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/

I didn't get paywalled, perhaps try incognito?

EDIT: for clarification, I fully support paying for journalism, I am a subscriber of two online news outlets myself. My suggestion is provided "as is" without moral blessing of any kind, express or implied... ;)

wsj paywall depends on how many wsj articles you have viewed recently

It's actually completely independent per user. They have a model that predicts whether or not you're more likely or less likely to subscribe and whether giving you a free preview will increase that chance.

It's a soft paywall. It's only triggered when an IP exceeds the monthly quota of free content. OP or someone on his subnet has been enjoying their journalism, but doesn't want to support it.

It the post-truth world, I have no problem supporting these news organizations whose content I regularly consume.

Try outline.com

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