I stopped when this modal popped up:
UnHerd and our 877 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.
UnHerd and our 877 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.
You know how you are asked to agree to cookies even though you agreed recently on the same site? It's probably because they added a partner to the 1000 previous ones.
The notice is likely EU (+ UK) specific for GDPR compliance, if you're elsewhere.
> so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway
They're also using fingerprinting:
> > "[...] together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it [...] Actively scan device characteristics for identification [...] certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) [...]"
If you're using something like Tor browser that does its best to hide those characteristics then you may be fine.
Not that I'm defending this, it's all terrible. But how many of us reading this article about to stump up for a paid subscription for Unherd? I'd wager next to none.
50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggressive ads or tracked by 900 different companies? I'd be more than willing.
Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?
There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.
Asking up front has the issue that you then have to think about money every time you open an article - a lot of friction
People understand you gotta pay to go to the gym. News, on the other hand, you can get for free (give or take ads and tracking).
The gym question is "am I gonna use this?" The news question is "do I need this?" or "is this sufficiently better than the alternatives to justify the cost?"
Edit: and to touch on the "per-article" aspect, odds are that people might spend let's say ~$2/month with a publisher through article reads, but not $5/month for a subscription.
I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.
At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.
Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.
No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.
Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.
> Implement a legitimate system
By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".
It's not like things haven't been tried.
- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)
- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- Axate: https://www.axate.com
- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/
All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.
This sounds like no true Scotsman.
I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.
Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?
It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times.
Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.
They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
Want to read that NYT article? Fine, pay the 30 cents and read it. Want to read all the NYT articles? Subscribe for $20 a week.
If Youtube wasn't owned by an advert company you could have the same -- creators could have a "pay 50c to watch this 30 minute video without adverts". I believe (haven't had youtube adverts for years) that the ad rates for western viewers are under 1 cent per view, with 1 advert every 5 minutes, so a 30 minute video would be 6 adverts or 5 cents. Youtube even has the funding built in via the "tip" mechanism.