Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way.

We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.

You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.

What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.

I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.

I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.

But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.

View on HN

Copying the cable model would favor big media companies over smaller, more local players.

A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)

I tend to agree, but the big problem is "who will operate this?".

The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.

I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.

If you thought clickbait headlines were annoying when people were competing for ad impressions, just wait until they’re competing for micropayments.

I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar.

Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)

Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.

Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.

Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...

Scroll was successful. It provided more income than ads to participating companies. So it was hastily acquired and killed by Twitter.

Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.

I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.

Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.

They had basically no investor money.

> Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees?

Yes. That's literally all they did. You paid for a subscription, and they distributed subscription fees among the sites that you visited.

In return, you got an ad-free browsing experience.

By the time they got killed, it was used on Ars Technica, TheDailyBeast, TheVerge and some other major news sites.

Apple news is around with that model. Not sure how successful they are though.

Anecdata: I use Apple News+ for exactly this reason. I get many publications included, and some magazines, and over time it learns what stories I like and surfaces those more often.

Centralised billing effectively makes serious journalism impossible. Omnibus subscription services will ruthlessly cut anything that affects the bottom line, and effective journalism is necessarily unpopular.

Exactly! That's why Spotify doesn't allow any noisy music or music with curse words. The mainstream public would flee from the platform.

I'd encourage you to ask a recording artist how they like the arrangement they have with Spotify.

But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.

The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?

+1. I come online to discover new things because there's less friction online than anywhere else. What's more, digging through a mountain of content to find something that resonates with you is a form of work in its own right.

Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.

We also have PBS as a model.

The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.

Until it gets defunded based on the whims of the administration :(

That doesn't change the fact that it worked for fifty five years.

What if you're not a major news outlet?

Also, how's the deal between the distributor and the news outlets? Do you get paid according to views or is it a flat fee?

Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.

The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.

Oh, but don't you know? If our newspaper is on the same subscription as another newspaper which we don't like, then that means we agree with them in all their radical and dangerous opinions? No, no, no, people want to read only one newspaper, which tells them what to think and how to feel on every subject matter.

That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com