The New Yorker Alters Its Online Strategy | Hacker News Reader

The New Yorker Alters Its Online Strategy

nytimes.com

32 pointsDoubleguitars29 comments

Isn't the real problem a lack of good micro-payment systems? I think the vast majority of readers would be happy to pay 10 cents or 50 cents for an article, if it didn't take $20 of their time to do it (e.g., create account, login, enter credit card, etc.). Look at how many people happily paid for downloading music once it was made easy enough (i.e., via iTunes).

What ever happened to micro-payments, which once were the next big thing?

It turned out that subscriptions generate more revenue than micro-payments.

but maybe this is only because there isn't an existing, good micro-payment system.

Well, "being in existance" is a inherent quality of something being better.

So, until there is a "good micro-payment system", the same can be said for anything.

"Patronage would be better, it's just that there isn't an existing good patronage system", etc etc.

Even better from a user's perspective (although undoubtedly untenable revenue-wise) would be micro-payments after reading the article. I'd much rather pay for something after I have a chance to determine its value.

Perhaps showing a preview then a paywall to read the rest would work, but the vast majority of those I've seen use far too short a preview to really tell whether the article is worth reading.

I always wondered if micropayments couldn't operate on a retroactive/guilt basis. e.g., you read articles as you would without a paywall and a cookie tracks your totals. At a certain point and every now and then thereafter, the site would tell you how many articles you've enjoyed freely, remind you of the professionals creating those articles and ask you to contribute based on your usage. Pay what you want, but suggest a typical value, etc.

Never got around to building a solution for it, but figured a startup could tackle this pretty easily with some code that clients could copy and paste to get started.

Flattr has been doing this for a few years. One of their best innovations was allowing people to "tip" publishers by simply favoriting a tweet:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/01322422720/unfor...

Sadly, Twitter in their infinite desire to shoot their platform in the foot, put an end to Twitter micropayments. Flattr even offered to forego all fees, although revshare would have made more sense. Facebook could also do something in this area, by linking Like to payments, though that may conflict with their use of non-deterministic timelines as a penalty for non-advertisers.

Instead of gating demand (with ad-throttling of publishers), what would happen if social media taxed publishing value with optional micropayments via likes/favorites?

Twitter went to a lot of trouble to terminate third-party clients so they could control user interface monetization, e.g. inject ads & video. But what have they done with that control? Executive musical chairs have already started at Twitter. It's not too late to reverse strategic mistakes and re-open the Twitter platform to 3rd-party innovation.

AFAIK, Flattr requires people to make a conscious decision to sign up and then flattr content. My suggestion is that content providers count content accesses and then suggest payment with justification. It could work for sites with regularly returning visitors like forums and news sites.

Tinypass does exactly this with its "Counter" feature that displays to readers how many free previews they have left in the metered paywall. Then, when the meter expires, the content is blocked or a donation is requested. Hundreds of publishers are using the platform. http://tinypass.com

Something like that but without the barrier/limit that stops people from continuing to browse the site.

With Tinypass: hits limit of 10 articles, donation of $5 requested; non-payers go elsewhere for their content

With my hypothetical: user ignores donation at 10 articles, maybe gets to 100. Isn't going to a competitor for content. Potentially decides that 100 articles seems like a lot, surely that's worth at least $5.

Micropayments suffers from a number of issues. If my monthly spend it $1 across 20 articles at 5 cents each then a single customer support query is likely to eat up months worth of margins for my account. Refunds are going to be just as hard. Operational costs are also generally quite high for processing payments across thousands of vendors across the Internet which requires not transaction processing, auditing, logging and so forth.

There are also practical issues such as building a common processing platform that can be used the same currency across competitors (Microsoft, NYTimes, Google News, etc), currency exchange rates, and so forth.

That said, if there were a pay-per-use model, I would happily use it without thinking twice about spending 5 cents on an article.

5 cents per article is not realistic. The rate for a basic New York Times subscription is $3.75 per week. At 5 cents per article, their average user would have to elect to pay for 75 articles per week. I don't have access to the data to know for sure, but let's guess an average user reads 3 articles per week. They'd need to pay $1.25 for each...which is probably high enough to convince them not to read some content, which is counter-productive. So it may be better business to avoid per-article purchasing, if it further reduces readership which is very undesirable.

why not pay to an operator who bundles various sites together? I could see it operating like CATV, you find a group of related sites whose content you enjoy and you pay a monthly or rechargeable account to view articles on that site without being prompted by each site.

This may prove popular internationally though. An issue of The New Yorker is more than 10€ per week, it gets you a magazine full of 'Going out in New York' and 'Talk of the town'. I know several people who would gladly pay a fee for access to the longer pieces and reports that the OP's article talks about. For them it would be nicest if they could pay per article.

If I am reading correctly you are proposing 5 cents is too low so the price should be higher. But the high price will be too high so per-article pricing is bad.

Consumption models change and pricing models change with it (singles vs albums, NetFlix vs BlockBuster, etc).

The idea behind micropayments was that people could have the al-a-carte option and publications like NYTimes could cast a really wide net, collecting cents from millions of readers.

My ISP currently adds metered billing if I go above my plan's bandwidth quota but puts a ceiling until I reach the next plan's limit (which is unmetered bandwidth). This sort of al-a-carte with a ceiling model works quite well.

> 5 cents per article is not realistic.

Then 20 cents? I didn't mean to recommend a rate.

> I don't have access to the data to know for sure, but let's guess an average user reads 3 articles per week.

They may read 3 articles in full each week, but someone reading the news skims many more than 3/week, IMHO. I bet I would pay for 50 easily. I suppose they would need to show me the 1-2 paragraphs before I agreed to pay.

The problem with micro-payments is that the customer is always reminded that they are paying for the service. The subscription-model will always be superior in this way.

I've always thought the biggest problem with micropayments is the mental cost of deciding whether or not to purchase something. Decisions are painful, and deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 online isn't much less painful that deciding to spend $2.00 or $20.00 online. The pain of deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 far, far outweighs the value of the $0.20 to me. This suggests micropayments are an inefficient payment system.

Being asked whether or not I want to spend $0.25 or $0.50 twenty or fifty times a day is not an appealing prospect.

In short, don't make me think.

The compound problem with micropayments is, they'd still make you go through the loop of sign up-receive the newsletter-download the app, which would offset the advantage of the micropayment and corroborates your "Dont make me think" motto.

There is a solution to that problem -- pay AFTER reading the article. Now you don't have to predict the article's value; you know what it was.

This solution comes with its own problem: after reading, there is absolutely no incentive to pay other than good will. And most won't pay.

Besides the lack of incentive, there's also no actual way to pay!

I've been thinking about an idea that would solve this: Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. After they read an article, they can click either a "worth it", "meh" or "garbage" button. At the end of the month, all subscription fees are distributed to each publisher proportional to their "worth it" votes. This will drive up quality. If "garbage" votes are penalized, it will discourage bad content as well as link-baiting, dishonest titles or any other gaming of traffic.

The primary impetus is to get the internet off of advertising. It's an absolute fallacy that ads give us content and services for free. It actually makes the web much more expensive:

1. The advertisers who pay google get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising as predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of services that rely on advertising revenue.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web searches and email than if we could just straight up pay Google for straight-up ad-free versions.

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

I like this idea. I'm sure there are flaws that need to be tackled (Should we discount the votes of the leechers who vote "meh" on everything to avoid paying? Would this encourage publishers to post lots of short articles instead of long thoughtful ones to raise revenues?). Look at flattr for an implementation similar to this in some ways. But in general, I think this is an excellent idea and should be tried.

Certainly there are details that need to be thought through, but I believe I've covered the important questions you raise:

>Should we discount the votes of the leechers who vote "meh" on everything to avoid paying?

Unlike flatter, subscribers pay monthly, up front. Voting does not affect how much you pay, only how your flat payment is distributed across the publishers in the collective. It is thus impossible to leach. If a subscriber honestly votes "meh" on everything because all the content is (to her) truly meh, then she should probably discontinue her subscription. That is as it should be. The free market mechanism applies not just to comparative success of publishers within this collective, but the collective as a whole. If the collective cannot retain a sufficient number of subscribers, it should fail.

>Would this encourage publishers to post lots of short articles instead of long thoughtful ones to raise revenues?

Good point. Clearly we should remove the "if" from my statement about "garbage" votes, which are explicitly designed to penalize any and all gaming, as determined by the subscribers. If subscribers detect such behavior (We would encourage such a critical attitude among the subscriber community culture) they should vote "meh" or "garbage" depending on the degree of offense.

But what if those many short articles were actually good? Should five short articles get the same share of subscription fees as one long thoughtful one? I'd like to leave this in the hands of the subscribers, but also keep the system simple. Maybe we allow greater than +1 for "worth it" votes, which would increase that article's share of revenue, and may or may not increase it's ranking in any recommendation system that we include in this system.

I've had this idea for over a year (along with many others intended to get us off this advertising addiction). Maybe I (or we!) should get this moving! If you or anyone else is interested, whether to flesh out the idea, evangelize it, or build it, shoot me an email.

> The pain of deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 far, far outweighs the value of the $0.20 to me.

Different strokes ... I don't think much at all about paying 20 cents; just minimize the disruption to my train of thought with a simple button and a responsive interface.

Nobody likes nickel and dime stuff. I'm not paying a quarter to read a single article when I could subscribe to a whole year of the New Yorker for $15.

I really hope they improve the app as well. Great articles in print but app was almost unusable last year when I tried to do a digital only subscription.

What ever happened to advertising as a form of revenue?

In print publishing, all newspaper/magazine articles are typically space filler to direct your attention path to the accompanying ads.

With a decent sales staff and correct ad pricing there should be no reason to charge users to read an article online. Sure, printing costs are high, but repurposing content for online publication is cheaper by an order of magnitudes.

I've been in (newspaper/magazine) publishing over 30 years. I surfed through the waves of insanity when the internet started to become ubiquitous and publishers were pulling their hair out over fears that it would be the death of them. It's nothing more than an excuse for greed. It could have been handled properly by establishing ad revenue pricing structures early on, but it was easier for them to cry, complain and voluntarily remain ignorant of new tech while the owners of the publications bemoaned that their paper publication is not making enough money to stay afloat and keep their trophy wives in sport cars and designer jewelry at the same time.

I have no pity on these ignorant fools. If the New York Times goes bankrupt/offline it won't affect my life one bit. Other, more fiscally responsible individuals/organizations/bloggers will fill the niche and do it right.

First, are you actually saying charging people for something they consume directly instead of charging them indirectly through advertising[1] is greed? Does that mean my corner grocer is greedy for asking me to pay for my milk rather than slapping ads all over the carton?

Second, I'm amazed that you decry greed and in the same breadth promote advertising. I don't know whether to cry or laugh. Advertising is predominantly (some would say almost entirely) manipulative and dishonest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773

Reply on news.ycombinator.com