But is this not a fundamental problem if you expect everything to be available for free? For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
> For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
Printed, paid-for newspapers also have ads.
Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the article you were reading, and no one tried to shame you for not looking at them, unlike today's HN users.
AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda
Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.
For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But it would require a new service, I’m not going to make an account to pay $1, a good number of newspapers would have to work out a shared system before this sort of thing would be interesting.
Unfortunately the ad-net has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for this kind of business model.
Another way to monetize is to make it interactive and bring back comments. Allow a well-regulated peanut gallery for each article, but have it actively moderated, require people to use their real names, and set a high bar for what comments are even allowed. Have journalists actively engage with them. A comment will only be published if it adds value. Then encourage people to have spirited discussion about each article. And guess what, actively commenting will cost you admission.
On top of financial motivations, newspapers often have different political alignments for example, I suspect some of them basically hate each other; a system where they get along and engage in good faith is too much.
I’d rather see an account where you dump money in, the site can say “buy this article for $x”, and it asks your account for that money. It doesn’t even really need to be a centralized site, it could be an API that multiple services can implement, or whatever.
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
That’s a little more interesting.
IMO an architecture that was a little more distributed and ala cart, as you say, would be nice. But it is definitely neat that at least somebody is taking a swing at this kind of solution.