Some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three?
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
Pay £20/month for "News" and then my money would tend to go to the Independent and the Guardian, while someone else's would go to The Daily Mail and Fox News. But I could read the occasional Fox News article and they could read the occasional Guardian article, if we wanted to.
We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.
Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.
When I pay for content, I want the creators' incentives to be aligned with mine (high-quality content not designed to draw me in by appealing to my lizard brain).
My first developer-gig was working at a regional newspaper back in 98-99.
Back then, we talked about personalized experience, how we could tailor it to the individual based on preferences.
I would come to the website and see a tailored mix of articles suited to my need. Some based on my interests and preferences, but not too siloed off, so I would still see the very important general news. It would be run by an organization I trust to be reasonably objective.
That is the kind of news service I would pay to use TODAY. I would pay 10-20EUR/month for it.
Today, I don't think that product exists. If it does, I am not aware of it.
Been news free for about 5 of my 50 years and never happier.
If that's the reason they could come up with for one being informed, I'd hate to live in that society...
>And all those reasons are bullshit. Being informed has had zero positive impact on me.
Being informed is not about having impact on the person being informed. Is about the person being informed having an impact themselves, i.e. being an active member of society. Today this is reduced to voting once every few years (if that) for most people (which is a mockery of being a citizen), but being informed is important even for that.
The date anecdote was one reason of many.
So how's that different from getting the news? Without checking out news sources you do what?
Let's say you have a subscription spanning X sites, and that after you have read the first paragraph or so, you click a button if you wish to read on, being charged, say, $0.02 for the privilege.
Prepaid, so you don't get a surprise when the credit card fees are 100x the cost of the reporting you read.
I mean, micropayments will essentially behave something like spotify, and that is mostly what's happened over there - excluding a bit of weirdness around the monetisation of legacy catalogue that doesn't really work the same in publishing.
With micropayments, you can at least hope that content providers will be wary of leaving customers with the sense of being fooled into paying for a story.
The keyword here being 'hope'. Sigh.
Personally, I subscribe to the Guardian (the weekend papers, I live in London) and the London Review of Books. I like this model as I'm not buying the individual content so much as I'm buying into the ethos and output of both organisations. I don't really want to be deciding which of the items they do is best, I want them to maintain a machine that will keep surprising me with stuff I want to read.
I think aggregate subscriptions are going to have to become a thing though, likely as a side contribution, without all the benefits of full subscription, but still some access beyond the paywall. Good luck and godspeed to whoever manages to coordianate that.
Not a bad price, but I don't give a shit about all of those newspapers and magazines. I just want 1 or 2 and I don't want to pay for all of them.
My proposed solution is very similar to the old print days. You used to just buy a single copy of a newspaper. On an adhoc basis, depending on whether or not any of the headlines caught your attention. You didn't buy a single article, nor did you subscribe to multiple newspapers. (you could, but I don't think many people subscribed to multiple)
So here is my solution for a digital version of this:
- You have an account with a digital news agency (or group) - You buy bundles of articles. E.g $1 for 20 articles. (or whatever price is appropriate) - Everyone has access to the website, but you can just see the headlines/opening paragraph. - If you are interested, you can use one of your article credits to 'unlock' a specific article and read it in full. - Once you have 'unlocked' a specific article you will always have access to it, and your credit for that 1 article is used up
This way you don't have to bother with microtransactions, and also you don't have to bother with paying for a whole bunch of stuff you don't want.
What do you guys think?
I do like your model - but I'm not sure it would work out. Maybe the people who pay 7 USD only read ~20 articles, so you'd only get 3 articles for your 1 USD.
I guess I'd still be much more likely to set up a subscription of 1-2 per month and get a low number of free articles than pay more for "I won't use it anyway".
Edit: Everyone's free to tell me I'm cheap (living in Germany and not in ZA, so I guess the 7 USD per month are more palpable to me) - but it's a matter of worth. If I don't want those 2 coffees per month enough (for 7 USD) I also won't buy them, simple as that.
Don't know how well they're doing or how good the product actually is, but it seems like the right approach.
I don't have any affiliation with the company, but am acquainted with a guy who's advising them on marketing/growth, which is how I heard about it.
I would definitely pay for a third if I thought it was worth it to me. I can imagine if I was in finance I’d pay for FT or something.
Well, not that different.
Both are parts of the same echo bubble (the other-side analogue would be following e.g. Fox News and Daily Mail -- either bundles not only fail to get the other-side perspective, but miss tons of nuance not available to neither one or the other "mandatory" side of establishment sources).
I see two challenges:
* Getting news sites on board. The more "premium" sites may be unwilling to give away access for cheap, but in general news orgs are desperate for a reliable income stream. Maybe a 20/articles per month limit would be fine for some sites.
* Unlike Netflix etc, it needs to work in more than one app: Each news sites own app, in the browser, and the mini-browsers inside social media apps. I don't want to type in passwords all the time just to read an article someone shared.
Apple is in a great position to do this. They have the experience with iTunes/Apple Music, and they have the leverage to make one subscription work in all apps. I just hope they don't intentionally break it on Android or Windows.
I try to read papers I feel distinctly oppositional to, mainly Rupert Murdoch press ones. Factual content is good but sparse and a lot of opinion masquerades as fact. I don't want to live in a bubble but I can see my on bias is quite strong in this: maybe I just recognize editorial markup more clearly in what I pay for.
I'd rather pay another European or Asian source than the exemplar rates in this article.
That's a great practice. But even better to step beyond both "oppositional" sides, and check alternative sources that are not partisan of the two parties that alternate in power in each country.
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/series/one-million-mi...
It's interesting inasmuch as the Guardian is trying to be reader-supported without a paywall. You can be a "supporter" for €50 per year which, if I think of it as buying a reporter a pint once a month, is basically nothing.
Of course, it's worth remembering that people on HN complain pretty loudly if a paywalled link is shared. Have we considered revisiting that policy given the vulnerabilities in primarily-advertiser-funded news sources?
Never did it because the idea never sat right with me.
News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will. Ok. Why should I?
Can the Financial Times, Economist, Bloomberg and trade publications survive on a paywall model? Probably - their readers likely consider them as operational expenses.
But I don't see how the traditional newspapers can maintain their advantage going forward.
If we develop a browser model that allows them to make money via micropayments, convince people to sign up for it, and they actually use it, some of them _might_ survive.
I think there's a lot of mental gymnastics happening here though - ultimately I think they're gone unless outside funding keeps them alive (e.g. they essentially become propaganda).
Wikinews is a nice idea, but the vast majority of its news is just wikipedia-style sourcing of other news organizations. The original research it does seems to be mostly Q&A interviews.