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Comment by meowkit | Hacker News Reader

“Fuck you, pay me” - Childish Gambino

The whole thing needs a reframe. Ad driven business only works because its a race to the bottom. Now we are approaching the bottom, and its not gonna be as competitive. Throwback to the 90s when you paid for a search engine?

If you can charge the user (the customer- NOT the product) and then pay bespoke data providers (of which publishers fall under) then the model makes more sense, and LLM providers are normal middlemen, not parasites.

The shift is already underway imo - my age cohort (28 y/o) does not consume traditional publications directly. Its all through summarization like podcast interviews, youtube essays, social media (reddit) etc

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"Fuck you, pay me" - Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990)

:-)

I think something as important as accurate and quick search should be definitely something that people are willing to spend on. $20 / month for something like that seems absolutely a no brainer, and it should for everyone in my view.

People already spent upwards of $50 a month for the internet itself, plus they probably pay monthly for one or more streaming services. They likely pay separately for mobile data too.

Separate monthly fees for separate services is absolutely unsustainable already. The economic model to make the internet work has not yet been discovered, but $20 a month for a search engine is not it.

For me the ideal would be some form of single subscription - I'm fine with $100 / month, where whatever I use is proportionally tracked and the services I use are ad-free, orientated to bring me the content I absolutely want and nothing else. Depending on usage of all of those is how the $100 would be spread among them.

I totally agree this payment pattern would work. I think the technical implementation is pretty straightforward but getting enough writers and artists to join would be difficult.

Don't you think the bigger problem is the statistically insignificant number of people that could actually afford such a model?

Not really. Everyone is paying monthly anyways it can just be a part of that or a surcharge on top. And I don't envision this being a mastodon thing but a "serious writing/news/art" kind of thing. Alteady there is a lot more asking of direct support online than twenty years ago. KoFi, medium subscriptions etc. I think people are open to the idea of direct sponsorship of creative people they like. The product space is there we just need good infra.

That’s a nice idea, but the entire world is used to getting their internet content for free by now. People who are willing to pay anything for websites are a tiny minority.

How do you get these high amounts for the internet? In my country (EU) 600Mbps costs below $15 and I know that's not the most popular fee level. $100 or even $50 on the internet only (not counting video subscriptions) sounds like something too high for the vast majority around me.

I pay for Kagi, and apparently so do many others here on HN. This, however, solves only half of the problem - publishers are not on board with the scheme, so they still output impression-optimized "content". But at least the search engine isn't working against my interests.

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