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Comment by EwanToo | Hacker News Reader

The future of reading on the web is easy to change, all we need to do is pay some money for each article we want to read without adverts...

Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.

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The fallacy there is that there is nothing to prevent ads from creeping in even though you do pay. That's been the history of cinema, cable, and internet radio.

Absolutely right, but at the same time if you do pay, you have some (perhaps small) leverage over the content provider to try and ensure the advertising remains of a tolerable quality.

In practice, it seems that advertiser dollars always trump subscriber fees.

I am hopeful that as the providers become more directly connected to the consumers and it becomes increasingly feasible to deal with them directly, instead of at an arms length in aggregate as was the only option up until now, that we can cut out what is ultimately functioning as a middleman in the relationship, the advertiser. You know how the internet feels about middlemen than aren't adding much value.

Even if I just had the option of outbidding the advertiser I'd be happy.

This has been my dream for years. Netflix is satisfying part of my content needs with its streaming option. I can only hope that more company's will follow suite.

What I'd really like to see is a "real" news website that supplies non-biased news written by real investigative journalists with no advertisements. I'd pay handsomely for that.

> What I'd really like to see is a "real" news website that supplies non-biased news written by real investigative journalists with no advertisements. I'd pay handsomely for that.

+1, I'd definitely pay for that. Right now I don't trust news media by definition, and I believe only what I get from articles featured on HN - because I can be sure that when I click on "comments", I'll find it thoroughly analyzed and debunked by people who actually know and care about what they read. </rant>

Re: "real news" - http://www.propublica.org/ comes close...

I don't know about most people, but I don't read many articles from the same source: I read a few from some online newspaper, then some from another, then a blog post, etc. Now take NYT.com: the minimum subscription is $15/month - it's absurdly expensive for the three or four articles I might read there.

You need to solve micropayments to make paywalls work.

Only if that's your business model.

The New York Times paywall seems to be earning them a fair bit of revenue, and they're more than happy to give you the three or four articles a month you'd read there for free-- you're not their target market segment.

I think the view that NYT.com and www.thetimes.co.uk are taking is that if you pay the $15, you'll end up sourcing most of your news from that site, justifying the price.

I don't know how true that premise is, but it's definitely a simpler solution for them than coming up with a solution to micropayments (which you're absolutely right, does need to get solved).

Sourcing most of my news from the NYT would seriously impair my knowledge of the world. It would be like going back to the bad old days before access to the internet.

That's part of what we're trying to do with http://TipTheWeb.org/ , letting people support the content they like with voluntary micro-donations.

For instance, I've already tipped the original article 20¢ :-) (see my Tip stream at http://tiptheweb.org/tipstream/patg6vy3pyb62/ )

If publishers can get direct financial support from their audience, they wouldn't need to overdo things with ads, and they'd focus more on providing the best possible experience for that audience. Better for everyone.

It's a concept that has been around in various forms for some time but doesn't seem to have gained much traction anywhere. As well as a tip everywhere system I assume your letting publishers after they have claimed their site to push the tips with buttons on their site?

I don't think I would be inclined to ever tip unless I knew that the author has a presence on the tipping service so I knew they were actually going to claim the tips. Wonder to if a reverse model, similar to a kickstarter would work, as in an author proposes a piece of content they will put some time into a produce if they get some upfront commitment of tips.

I'm still hoping that something like Flattr can work. It should be possible to have a middle ground between "everything is ad supported" and "everything requires subscriptions or credit cards", especially for niche "small" content (that don't take months or years to produce) where the audience can appreciate the work done and its value.

I hope Flattr or one of the others like it can work, but I think the habits of people who are now used to things being free, and who aren't likely to en-mass start voluntarily "tipping" authors, will be hard to change.

I don't know if that's even the biggest hurdle. The intractable problem I see is, any author who's good enough to convince people to sign up for Flattr in order to tip them has much better monetization options than Flattr. Flattr is only compelling to writers who are not themselves all that compelling.

There are other services besides Flattr that have their own good parts. For instance, Tip The Web (http://tiptheweb.org/) is a non-profit that serves as a hub for micropayments and maintains itself from tips without taking a cut.

Why? Most popular consumer magazines don't even cover the cost of printing and postage with their subscription fee.

If Time magazine no longer needs to print and mail their product, should't they be making MORE money?

One of the fundamental problems that no one mentions is that advertisers have been grossly overpaying for print ads for decades. They had no measure of the effectiveness or reach of their ads except "X magazine has Y subscribers".

With digital targeted advertising, we know exactly how many views, clicks, length of view, not to mention tons of demographic data on the reader. That's worth something. It's worth a lot more than an untargeted ad on a page in a magazine that might go straight from the mailbox into the garbage.

I'm not claiming to know what will happen in digital advertising, but I really don't think paywalls or micropayments are the future. My guess is something like major media companies will get rid of their entire ad sales staff, outsource advertising to Facebook/Google, and deliver their content through multiple channels/feeds/API which can been interpreted by various apps or devices to be viewed in the way the consumer likes.

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