Not because they cost money (I am willing to pay), but because it's not practical to buy an online subscription to 10+ major news sites individually.
Is there a service that lets you pay 1 monthly fee for a subscription to the top 10 major (paywalled) news sites?
Maybe the news orgs need to do the same thing. Create a federated login system with a single payment and then divvy up the funds in some fair way.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Yea.. the purpose of this comment was to ask if there's a way to pay for these paywalls to permanently bypass them.
And there were some useful replies: I haven't looked into Apple News Plus before. Thanks for the reply, jbigelow76 and runwerks
And sorry Daniel. I guess I should have posted an Ask HN instead.
Individually subscribing to 10 different paywalled news sites is not going to happen among the general public. Paying exactly the same aggregate monthly price for all ten, via just one redistributor, is more tolerable, especially if the customer can individually select subscriptions without forced bundling. Subscribe by checking this box; unsubscribe by unchecking it.
If I can sign up online, but have to cancel with at least one phone call guaranteed to last 30 minutes or more, I don't care if it's only $0.05 a month; I'm not buying it. It's not always the money cost. Sometimes it's the cognitive overhead or transaction friction. My use of the Internet lately seems to be governed more by the number of accounts I am willing to manage than by how much I am willing to pay, and the fragmentation is going to kill some of the sites that can't solve that problem.
When the NYT is in full control of its own paywall, you get nonsense like described here: https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 [2014], where it's cheaper to buy the print version and just throw it away to get past the paywall, than to get the unlimited digital subscription. And this is likely fueled by a dark pattern: in order to get a price for print delivery, you have to call a phone number during NYC business hours, whereas you can just click to get an offer for all-digital access. It's only $8/4 weeks right now, which seems like a good money value, but I'm just not in the mood to worry about yet another website login.
If trust can be restored I will pay. I will not pay for bullshit.