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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.
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?