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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I would like a "Build your own magazine" type deal. Let me configure a list of the writers I want to read and give me a sizable discount on the subscription or a bundled deal. I don't want to pay 10 dollars a month to each of 20 writers, but I would pay 20 dollars a month to read and support 20 writers.

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The problem with this type of thing (channel unbundling has the same problem), is the finance doesn't work out.

After someone has written something / produced a TV channel, sending it to one more person costs basically nothing.

So, if (making up some simple numbers) there are 100 writers who want paying $10 each, and 100 customers who want to pay $10 each, you can:

* Charge each customer $10 and let them read every writer (most of which they won't want)

* Charge each customer $1 a writer, then they get to read 10 writers.

* Charge each customer $10 a writer, then they get to read 1 writer.

People often say they want to pay a smaller amount for a subset of content, not realising that if everyone does that, you just end up spending the same amount as you started, on a subset of content.

This is what excites me about the proposed W3 Web Monetization standard. I don't want to establish a billing relationship with every creator whose content I value.

Have a wallet that's loaded with value, send out payments for every second you spend with a creator's work.

https://coil.com and https://WebMonetization.org

The idea is quite old, Flattr has been doing something similar for 11 years now. The UI is a bit less polished though. https://flattr.com/

Thank you! I'm in the same boat and think that it's a great potential way forward, with very little friction - it can work on any random blog without me having to trust them with my payment details. I hope more people pick up on it ( and tried to help with an article that somehow got to #1 on HN, but the comments were mostly negative)

> for every second you spend with a creator's work

Time spend is a really bad metric since it can easily be gamed. For non-entertainment content time spent could oven correlate negatively with value.

Totally agree with this. We'll just end up with more waffling long form content packed with videos and distractions to encourage users to spend more time trying to find what they were originally looking for.

And if you're charged by time spent on a page it makes sense to use a bot to download the pages you want to read and then render them locally.

If I'm paying per second I can download something that would take me 5 minutes to read in 5 seconds, saving me 59/60ths of the cost.

That's if you assume a static set of readers and writers and fixed prices.

If every reader gets to choose which writers get their money, the least popular writers will get nothing and the most popular ones will get much more than they expected.

Then the writers who got nothing will presumably give up, thus increasing the average attractiveness of content on the platform. Meanwhile, the most popular writers can adjust their expected compensation upward but still lower the price per reader, thus increasing their readership even more.

On the other hand, if you're paying a flat fee to read anything you want, you'll be subsidizing a whole lot of crap you don't want, without a feedback channel to correct that.

The problem is with fixing the prices on the sellers end. You’re leaving money on the table by not allowing for price negotiation. A set price essentially tells everyone below that price point that your store is closed so don’t even bother. It also gives away your content at a discount to those who would gladly pay more.

Which is the case for 99% of things that are sold whether physically or digitally. Because, in general, at least in the West, most people don't want their days to be endless successions of bargaining where only the best and most persistent negotiators get good deals.

I certainly don't want to negotiate every time I want to read an article. Heck, I don't want to decide to pay a fixed amount every time I want to read an article.

I wasn’t touting haggling, I meant a name your price model.

We basically have channel unbundling now though don’t we? Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Disney+, HBOMax, etc. It works for the most part. And it’s cheaper than what Comcast charges for cable.

It probably is cheaper if you ditch live TV (like I did)--or can get it over the air. If you add a $60-ish live TV subscription, without sport adders, it isn't especially.

I wonder how much of that is currently being heavily subsidized, and prices will rise. One significant difference is access to old content -- we might just not need anywhere near as much new content, which will makes things cheaper in the future.

The writers you're most likely to want to read – the top-earning writers – have already demonstrated (through Substack) that they can easily acquire an audience of tens of thousands of subscribers by charging $5-10 dollars per month for themselves. Why would they participate in the bundle you're suggesting?

Advertising? Have some articles be part of the bundle as a "preview", and most articles behind an individual subscription?

This idea of building your own newspaper sounds kind of interesting actually: a mix of authors you've picked and an automatically curated content from other authors to help you find new authors.

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