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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of.

What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"

Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.

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The trick is market share. I'm not going to subscribe to a NYT/WaPo/WSJ trio because sometimes I want to read Reuters and I'm not going to pay for a partial solution.

I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.

I like Apple News too, though they are walking a bit of a tightrope with their publishing partners which is why you can't just click a link to wsj.com/blahblah and have it open in Apple News, and you can't really just browse a front page. (Also it notably does not have NYT.)

There was

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat...

which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.)

I can only guess that the New York Times, WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sign up third-tier news sources.

I assume it was more about dollars and cents than pretensions. Scroll was plausible as a replacement for ad network revenue, but at $5/month it can't come close to robust subscription or premium ad revenue. NYT subscription is more than the entire $5.

I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.

Scroll was successful. I had a subscription, and it worked on multiple sites that I was visiting.

So Twitter acquired and killed it.

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