Hacker News Reader

I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars.

You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'

Exactly!

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

Or that one article you wrote for motherboard about undersea cables in (2010) occasionnaly makes it to the top of hacker news…

Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.

Which sites/newspapers are you talking about? Many have metered paywalls, where you get a few articles for free before the paywall hits.

Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.

I’ve never heard of Blendle or post.news. I want a source of news that’s a known quantity and has been around for a while. I know where I stand with The Guardian[0] or The Financial Times or The Telegraph or Le Monde or the New York Times. None of these have tried micropayments to my knowledge.

[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.

"Dutch startup Blendle's early success in Europe has already attracted 550,000 users, the majority millennials, to read and pay for individual articles from publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post." https://www.businessinsider.com/blendle-to-launch-in-the-us-...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...

I looked up blendle and it seems to be a subscription service not a micro payment service. For the UK it only has The Guardian and The Independent. The first a reliable paper with opinion columns that lean left. The second a bit more tabloid. I can already read the guardian for free. I can’t tell if I can access US or EU newspapers or what they are. Post.news doesn’t seem to exist. Neither seems to be doing what I described which is the equivalent of being able to buy a digital equivalent of a one-off purchase from a news stand. I don’t think a service like this can work without some big names.

If you look at my link above, you'd see that it was a micropayment service with lots of major US publications.

They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.

Last year the NYT cost $2.50 at the newsstand. GP wants to pay ~$1.50 for 15 individual articles. There are more than 15 articles in a single edition of the NYT, so that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.

Much like with books, the 10-15 best sellers a publisher has fund the thousands of duds. Newspapers are as cheap as they are because the filler content gets subsidized by the good stuff. And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.

Ok, then. How about 2.5 dollars for the x articles of this day/week?

It's the micro-payment conundrum again. I happen to have a friend who is deep into payment tech, and he told me that publishers would love to sell single digital issues for a small, small fee, but customers are not buying.

This seems to cover most stuff where the transaction value in question is low, e.g. newspapers, single songs, and so on. The UX seems to be inadequate. I'm not privy how my buddy's company is trying to address this, but I guess it is hard to beat a news stand where I drop a few coins and get a newspaper and chewing gum.

Newspapers are as cheap as they are because they are still filled with ads. Not that i mind it, ads on paper are 1000x more tolerable than the blinking, spying popovers one get online.

    > And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.

I doubt it. If a reporter finds a good scoop, then it will move above the fold on front page or section header or become long form piece.

I used to buy all those gaming and elctronics magazines as a kid. But as a group of a dozen, we paid each a part of it, and it was timeshared.

Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM

All the ones I get are just PDF's... but the the trouble is I have already read all the content on the internet from other web sites a few months ago :(.

I’m talking about a general newspaper like if I go to the newsagent now and buy a broadsheet newspaper like the FT or The Guardian or The Telegraph it costs something between £1.50 and £2.50 ($2-3USD) which gives me access to about 100 articles of which I might read max 10-15 of a weekend. So I think charging the same price for the same number of articles read should work no? If that transaction used to work with physical paper why do you think it doesn’t work with digital? Obviously for more specialist articles you would charge more and it would be better for those publications because they would be able to reach a wider audience because I’m not going to subscribe to Farmers Weekly to read that one article about tractor hacking but I might buy a one time access.

Aren't newspapers all in a terrible financial state?

Mostly requiring subsidy by billionaires wanting to popularise their weird political views?

Isn’t that exactly why having the option to buy a set number of articles would be better? If you get weirded out by your newspaper of choice you can try some other ones without subscribing for a year. Or even better regularly dip into newspapers from all sides of the political spectrum to get a balanced view on a topic.

I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a friction as I must first log into my library account and click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72 hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing. I tend to use it about once a month.

I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings.

Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.

> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money

NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.

"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...

I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same information presented with similar quality, elsewhere, for free.

(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)

I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.

Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.

I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?

Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it.

By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.

The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

    > The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

I assume that LLMs are already writing most of these.

    > Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets

How much profit do you think WaPo made since he bought it? Almost none. Except for a few, most newspapers are essentially non-profit at this point.

In a country of ~300 million people and with billions of people speaking English or having English as a second language that doesn’t sound like that many? If I bought the paper edition of the NYT most days for $2 that would be ~$600/yr in which case the online subscription would be good value and they would probably keep those subscribers as they are already demonstrating that they are dedicated repeat customers. If they also added the option to add 15 article reads to your account every now and then for $2 they would create a digital equivalent for the kind of person who buys a paper now and then.

I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be willing to give some limited amount of money).

After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away.

The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.

It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.

Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

Didn't Apple just layoff a ton of people in this group?

Books.

Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be archived on the spot.

Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.

There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...

Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.

Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.

FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails.

Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.

It's self defeating.

. . .

PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.

This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!

Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.

That said, this point --

> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.

I hear you, however, firms that took ad sales back in house instead of auction, and went back to pairing ads with content instead of profiling each visitor, found they increased both ad revenue and user satisfaction. They were able to cover costs again. Separately, many who took time to build, say, substacks, found they could cover costs if audience and content were a match.

Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.

Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.

If it isn't conscious site by site, you're not volunteering your payment data to the site: you're giving it to a middle man.

Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.

Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).

No, that's not what I'm suggesting at all.

I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.

Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.

Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.