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Comment by _o_ | Hacker News Reader

That is actually an excelent question!

The high quality news will be gladly paid for, while there will be far less clickbait sites as the ads revenues will drop. We will have less garbage on the internet and this is actually great, on the other side, the real journalism (not news like how to enlarge your penis) will hopefully come back into spotlite.

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Maybe...clickbait garbage is so cheap to produce I don’t think you’ll see a large decline there.

Quality small to medium publishers are the ones who will get squeezed hard.

It would be pretty shocking if suddenly EU users started happily paying for journalism. It’s going to be an exciting petri dish.

The issue with paying for journalism is that quality journalism is spread out over many, many publishers on the web. I can't afford to pay for subscriptions to dozens of quality news sources. Until micro-payments or, more likely, a multi-publisher, subscription-based model is available, I would not be interested in moving to a payments based system.

Ironically, the most effective micro-payment or subscription-based system will probably come from Google or Facebook in the end.

I agree micro-payments are likely to be Google/Facebook/Apple driven. The EU has been pushing for a mandatory "link tax" that may help fund some news organizations. That'll force more media consolidation though.

I wouldn't be so sure. It's not just you that has to pay for the news and other websites, it's your entire family. Would your grandma pay for it? Would you pay for this for your children?

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