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Comment by jaredwiener | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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