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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

How do you know what is "one good article" and what isn't until you actually read it?

There is already an increasing problem with clickbait as sites have to fight for eyeballs to get ad revenue. Making online journalism microtransaction based will completely kill whatever is left of the industry.

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For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care.

If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.

Think of the number of links you click on in a regular day. The front page of HN itself contains 30 articles. Browsing a few pages of it at 25c each is already $40+ in costs. Is that something you are willing to spend?

No. (Also, I'm confused at how you got to the $40+ figure with each article costing $0.25, but alas.)

And consequently, I'd just browse less. If anything, I might spend more time outside as a result.

"Browsing a few pages". After enough pages, you could end up at any monetary amount.

The signal given by articles that make it to the top of news aggregators would be even stronger if they were all paid content. No one is going to post or upvote something they didn’t like and lost money on. It also sounds like it would be a healthy limit on your media consumption if you’re reading 160 articles per day right now.

The number of links that involve a paywall on the front page of HN is a handful at the most. Not $40 over a few pages.

How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?

The general idea with micro transactions is that you have some small number of service providers that you use to pay the individual retailers with. You know like how credit cards work.

And that’s the real reason micropayments haven’t caught on—there is no universal one-click payment system for the web. Every payment processor requires at least one redirection away from the content at hand. A micropayment transaction needs to be as easy as clicking “Continue {Reading,Watching,Listening}” and the content resumes without skipping a beat.

Sounds like a solvable problem

Indeed, so why doesn’t it exist yet?

I mean Apple and Google have prepared users for it with the mechanism built into apps when someone wants to upgrade to a premium version or add a subscription. I think the lowest I've seen is 99c but a smaller micropayment using the same system/interface is simple.

The counterpoint is that this will produce EXTREME clickbaiting

Will it, though? What's the likelihood that people stop visiting because the clickbait is both unrewarding and financially impactful?

I guess that's the unanswered question. If the likelihood is zero or closer to it, then yeah, clickbait suddenly directly upticks revenue, but if the likelihood is high enough, it might actually force the tide against clickbaiting.

That’s not the case with other paid products. I’d argue it would reduce click bait since the whole idea of click bait was created as a solution to drive more impressions on a page regardless of the quality of the material. Impressions matter because revenue comes from ads so you don’t give a shit if someone actually reads the article, you just want them to click on it or share it based on the headline. If your main revenue source was being paid by people who wanted to read the full article then you would succeed by creating articles people wanted to read. You have to show a small preview to do this but that’s standard practice now. You could also prorate by number of pages read or number of words if you wanted to be fancy.

Charge per token like OpenAI does. If the article is going nowhere, bail.

You will come to rely on publisher branding, following the work of specific authors who you know do good work, etc.

Its no different than knowing if the food tastes good at the new restaurant.

If you rely on branding then why not just subscribe the the publisher...

Sure, but it takes time to build brands like NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc. Until then, personal credibility will have to suffice.

I feel like you're just running in a circle leading to the discovery of a free trial

Even then I don’t subscribe to any news sites. I want to just roll up and say “I’d like one article today please, here’s a quarter” I refuse to sign up to something I’ll barely use.

I think news is a public good, and much like paying for educating our kids, there has to be a sustainable funding model to educate the adults as well. But thats my view, and we may have a disagreement. I don't wish to convince you otherwise.

That's why people with strong enough brand have been moving to Substack.

The "medium" model could be one way around this.

The first 10% or so of the article is visible, after that you need to sign in. Or in this case, pay.

This exactly IS the paywall model, except aggregated. I doubt how expensive this kind of aggregator would be to REALLY allow these media to survive. I heard media on Apple News+ doesn’t get enough money from them.

The point of micro transactions is to get rid of the aggregators that charge larger fees for monthly subscriptions to a basket of content

That’s already been gamed: author just makes sure the actual information you came for is past the wall, and then writes the top of the article like it’s a cliffhanger episode.

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