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Comment by m82labs | Hacker News Reader

I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.

I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.

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Does somebody remember the service Flattr from a decade ago? You’d set a fixed amount to pay every month. Like a subscription.

Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.

There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.

Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.

If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments.

We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.

What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.

I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.

Maybe you wouldn't mind, but nevertheless, it has been tried and didn't work. Here's how it went for Blendle, which had the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Time, and more on board. It wasn't payment processors that killed it.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

Is it really about people not being willing to pay though?

I hadn't even heard of Blendle, had I heard that it was a thing and had the mentioned publishers I would've used it.

I've visited those sites so many times and I've never even seen a mention of Blendle.

They haven't been tried plenty of times, what are you talking about? It's been discussed since the dawn of the Internet and the ideas been around since forever, but actual attempts have been very limited in scope. The rails are there though, they're just not user friendly (http://micropayments.fyi).

Unfortunately you aren't willing to pay enough.

Micro payments for journalism don't work

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