Digital publishing is beginning to make money
axios.com
axios.com
There are interesting points to discuss here - regulatory capture through copyright laws for example. But they seem to have nothing to do with the list of companies.
But then we reach the end of the article:
> Venture investors known for expecting quick returns tell Axios that they are beginning to take a longer view of their investments in publishers that have more sustainable business models, like subscriptions.
This is nothing to do with actually discussing success, this is about investor relations, Axios trying to put out PR either in a run up to going for another funding round or because some investors are getting antsy. As an investor it would worry me that my investment is spending its time doing this sort of thing.
Basically, micropayments. First time I've paid for news in a few decades and I finally feel like I'm supporting good journalism.
Paying for links seems incompatible with how the web works, and with copyright law (as URLs are factual information which is not subject to copyright.) Paying for quoting headlines or tiny excerpts of text also seems to be incompatible with fair use.
On the publisher side: Large players were already making good money off of subscriptions and so micropayments would undercut that. They often didn't want to co-brand/co-market in any bundle or even under the same product umbrella with most other major players for brand/other reasons (owning the relationship with the customer was very important and they didn't want to be disintermediated anymore), and they often didn't want to be associated with medium to small publishers because they felt that was free-riding and diluting their brand. But most importantly, they were confident, as can be seen in articles like these, that ultimately, they could go it alone and therefore should. As for small to mid-sized publishers -- the problem really was that there wasn't enough meat on the bone in terms of willing-to-pay-traffic to warrant a service provider building a business around it. I think there could be a viable, non-venture product to be built if you can find the right bundles of niche pubs to band together.
On the consumer side: Enough people are slowly willing to pay the high fees for the big sites to not be worth investing in lower tier options. Not enough people are willing to pay enough for smaller sites to be worth their while. Many people logically say they are willing to pay a small fee for sites; for example, let's say publishers were charging $0.01 - $0.05/pageview -- you'd logically say that's reasonable amount to pay, you'd be shocked how few people will opt for that, and how many folks who do opt for that feel a sense of sticker shock when they see the bill.
Other issues: Actually charging consumers on a micro-level is a huge pain if you charge in currency, and from what I've seen now having worked in crypto, it will take a while before that model makes sense to the average consumer. Happy to discuss more.
In addition people balk at the subscription price compared to netflix. They forget that there’s still a price floor to production and a publishers audience is smaller (and maybe geographically restricted) while netflix has massive economies of scale and can amortize its cost over the entire population.
I’m seeing this kind of pricing disparity everywhere (the app store, publishing and what not). I don’t know what’s the solution. Bigger companies have distorted pricing expectations of consumers, especially when so many services/apps are available for free supported with ads.
The other option (which we and others tried) was to up-front charge a fixed rate, say $5, and debit against it as you go. Perhaps you "top up" when the account balance hits some threshold. This is analogous to how many toll payment systems worked in the US, so the assumption is customers will understand and accept it. It also solves the payments processing problem.
We uncovered three psychological issues in our research and implementation with large numbers of users: 1) People will be unhappy suddenly paying for something they never had to pay for before (trying to analogize with tolls is equivalent to the "cost of a coffee" pricing strategy) 2) People are very particular in terms of which sites they want to micro-pay for, but shockingly unwilling to choose them a-la-carte 3) People HATE variable payment schedules. People didn't like seeing charges hitting their cards when the top-up threshold was reached at unexpected times, then proceeded to complain about what sites they were billed for and how we determined billing and then churned.
There's another challenge to mass adoption for micropayment systems and it's around publisher compliance and the publisher-user relationship micropayments represent: how to get money into the hands of the publishers. If you rely on every pub to sign up, that's not going to work. And if users realize that they're paying into escrow accounts that these service providers control and that aren't going to the publishers, they'll mutiny.
Its hard to forecast these things, but micropayments for online published content seems like the one thing I do really see cryptocurrencies doing a great job. Often, its not just that people are unwilling, but that their payment systems are just not an option.
This would perhaps also allow publishers to stop the practice of selling user data for advertisement... although, I wouldn't really count on that.
Your example is incoherent. 10 mills is a payment in cents. The only reason to call it "10 mills" is that you're hoping people won't understand what you mean.
Hmmming and hawing about 10-25c per article wouldn't happen at 0.1 cent per article, or some other subcent amount.
Maybe have tiers: free tier for some content, "normal tier" for most content, "premium tier" for hot and impactful content.
If at least 3 large national news outlets (say, WaPo, NYT, FT) would offer per-article paid access through the same system, I'd start paying.
In economic terms, i believe this related to The Law of Diminishing Utility. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...
e.g. - a consumer will pay $10 to consume the first 30 articles in a month, but the 31-100 articles have a diminishing utility (so much time in the day to read). If they paid per article from the start, overall they would pay less.
If we were to say 1 article per day from NYT is interesting, a person would consume 30 articles in a month, paying $3. The NYT would need to triple their pay-as-you-go readership to break even. In reality, it's rare that a pricing change as such would accomplish a 3x gain in readship. So, the status quo continues.
Just for the record, I'm not judging your idea, just adding to the conversation of why it hasn't likely happened. There is probably room for a competitor to offer that sort of pricing, but it likely wouldn't work favorable for every organization, from a shareholders perspective.
I realize that. And there are too many sites that I'd want to read, even just from HN links. So the per site subscription model is just unworkable. So from me, they get nothing now.
But with a system for transparent nominal payments, where payments under few cents were OKed by default, they'd get at least something.
I doubt that I'm unique. But maybe I'm unusual enough that the scheme would never work.
One way to fix this would be to have a preview of each article available for free, or at least the first ~N paragraphs.
I think having the ability to subscribe to multiple publishers with a flat fee that you can spread across multiple people would go a long way.
Either with your family / friends or with some random on the internet, deciding on a bundle and pooling that money so that publishers get their $$ and you get multiple sources of content.
I stopped consuming almost all mainstream media in 2016, and I'm WAY happier for it.
Maybe there's a lot of benefits to most News being behind paywalls?
Back in the day, when the issue was sites requiring registration, bugmenot.com appeared.
And now we have archive.today and other sites. But they only archive when someone requests.
So why not have a site that does whatever Sci-Hub does to access content, but does it for arbitrary URLs?