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Comment by doomrobo | Hacker News Reader

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...

https://www.ft.com/products

or if you want to actually support proper journalism.

Not OC, but the thing with most of these international media articles is I want to read an ft.com article maybe once per year. Tomorrow it's another media with another article. Why would I want a subscription to read one single article?

Sounds like you just hit on a business model... multi-subscriptions to news. You could change the world with that.

They could also just get more flexible with the product they are offering. For example selling single articles for let's say 50 cents or so.

If I could pay 50 cents for an interesting-looking article AND be guaranteed they would not use my email/CC to spam me or add extra charges in the future - I would jump on it.

I'd buy into that model.

I'm interested in hearing how this has been explored in the past. People have mentioned Blendle, but it seems to be in Beta hell. The business model strikes me as the issue. I'm curious if one could find success by allowing ads, and cutting the aggregator's cut from 30%...

Another business model... some kind of system that all sites could use. Wow how different that would be...

Media companies themselves prefer traditional subscriptions, so this really didn't work out. I don't exactly understand the business behind it since I am a developer, just that I know about this from people I work with. (EDIT: But I see about Blendle now - I really hope it works for them.)

Pretty sure it has something to do with "recurrent revenue". Having 100 subscriptions means you have a guaranteed that the in the next month you will get 100 * cost in. On the other hand being a pay perview model leaves you to the risk of having high fluctuation of costs. Payperview I see it favored for content providers who provide high cost content once in a while. On the other hand, making a subscription based model works better for content that you put out fast and at a relativelly low cost IMO

That only works if you can get enough to stay in business... It seems they're barely making it from what I hear.

Blendle is perhaps the most successful with that, but they're definitely not changing the world.

I'd post a Blendle link to the article, but they don't appear to have FT, just FTWeekend.

Is it even offered in English? I'm just getting Dutch and German

I'm paying for Apple News+ and still get asked to pay for NYT. Absolutely frustrating..

or micropayments for the article. maybe $1

I’d support it, if it didn’t cost $10/month on each damn website to read one random article a month.

Someone's gotta invent the iTunes of articles.

Many people have been talking about it. Apparently the issue is that publishers do not see beyond subscriptions.

There was an article once here where someone was describing exactly that problem. I don’t have a link, though.

German Heise publisher will sell you individual magazine articles, though.

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