Hacker News Reader

why can't the news outlets just charge people when they arrive on the site? just paywall it and let people read the article for like 5 cents or something?

i know this has been tried and supossedly didn't work. but why not? I would gladly be willing to pay 5 cents to read an article I like but I sure as hell am not going to shell out 250$+ yearly subscription for it (just to read one article), like most news sites do these days.

View on HN

Because news organizations are used to double and triple dipping (get revenue from subscriptions, from advertising, and now from incoming links), and when things didn't go their way they are using their enormous lobbying power to force it to be so.

As far as I know, there is no good way to process transactions on the order of a few cents. Micropayments are hard.

They could take a PACER approach and only charge when you've viewed enough articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com