Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ArtTimeInvestor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ArtTimeInvestor

20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article.

Why does it take us so long?

View on HN

News vendors don't want you to pay for individual articles you're interested in.

They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.

And then cram down their bias down your throat, with you paying. Whether it’s sponsored placements or interest group’s lobbying. I mean, there is no money to make in neutrality anyway.

You think the bias is bad now? It'd be 10x worse if readers paid by the article. Have we not learned about audience capture by now?

I'm still trying to get reimbursement for the first 20 years of my life watching shitty commercials having grown up in the 70's.

There's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.

Academic press let's you do that, but it's insanely expensive for each article you want to read.

Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.

Nobody will accept real micro payments. It is a pipe dream. As soon as such monetization system is deployed the prices will start at 5$ to read an article and will increase even more in the subsequent years. Why? Because people will pay.

Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).

One reason: it wouldn't be a penny. You're off by a factor of probably 100.

Ads pay pennies though. So maybe he's merely off by a factor of 5?

Humans pay more though. Nobody will be interested in collecting 1c from hundred million of unloyal readers, prone to changing information providers because then they aren't chained with a yearly sub which can be only cancelled via an international 2-3 hour call to the USA for the price of a whole sub. Journal would sooner get that money from the loyal 100000 readers who will pay 1$ per article. But wait, why do that when they can change 10-20$ per article from 10000 and throw some meaningless loyalty program to them?

Even better, do the american healthcare trick - set a price at say 1000$ per article but allow only big corpos to have some opaque bulk discounts for their employees. Thus maximizing money extraction from richest customers.

How many ads will there be, though?

Also, ads aren't paying everyone's bills -- hence the paywalls -- so that number must be too low.

(Not to mention the other issue with this: in general it's not ads or micropayments/paywalls -- it's ads and micropayments/paywalls. Hell, if micropayments were feasible, it would probably be all three.)

On the VERY high end the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is what, $2? That's 0.2 cents per view. I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read the article, even up to $1 if it's a really good investigative/well-researched piece.

I'm not paying $5/outlet/month though, ever!

This only works with: 1. Common authenticated and identy system 2. That system makes the payments, already linked to your source eg card or bank

I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks

> 20 years of World Wide Web

30.

30.5 - the Internet went commercial in the summer of '94

Eternal September was '93. I remember it well.

I don’t think the economics of that would work for big publications. Maybe at 5-10 cents per article they would.

How easy the transaction is is almost more important to me than the actual cost. As long as it can be one click, I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read a good article

control of money. It's not a lack of solutions but the people who control money make the solutions illegal , because taxation / terrorism / child porn / the usual

Because all payment processors want 2% + 0.x per transaction.

Which is why you need either a roll-up system, or pre-payment.

This is seemingly what Brave wants to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com