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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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