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Comment by jonathansizz | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty sad that so many people balk at paying very modest amounts of money for high-quality material. It's as though everything that's available on the web should be free, just because it's on the web.

It's the same with people moaning about paying a couple of dollars for an app or even installing pirated versions rather than paying. There's something seriously wrong here.

The New Yorker costs $50/year - about the same as a single evening in a bar with a friend. Or a dozen coffees.

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We've had this thing to deliver content for 20 years (the web) but in the same 20 years no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

I'll balk at 50 dollars a year the same way I'll balk at 3500 dollars worth of gourmet coffees paid on January 1st. Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

The subscribe section gives you 12 weeks for $12.

> Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

ding ding ding

Amazon's mobile app does this excellently with the One-Click purchase.

And don't even get me started on Steam sales.

I dare not look at my spending history on either of those two.

For me that's GOG.com and the Humble Bundles. I keep telling myself that someday I'll have the time to go back and beat Baldur's Gate, or any of the hundreds of other games I've bought on sale. Fat chance...

One of these days I'll do something like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1jg15u/so_i_actu...

A while back NPR's Planet Money did a show on the penny[1]. It included a piece on a company that was trying to allow and make easy to charge/make fractional cent payments, so we could have content that cost a fraction of a cent. While there are obvious technical hurdles to be overcome at multiple levels in a technology like that, I like the idea of allowing small payments for content to support the production and delivery of that content.

1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/16/312732409/episode-...

> no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

Single click amazon payments, google wallet? Or gumroad? Or stripe?

How about monthly things like patreon? Flattr? Or things like bitcointip on reddit?

How much simpler do you want things?

http://www.patreon.com/

https://flattr.com/

https://gumroad.com/

https://stripe.com/gb

That's just it. You listed 7 different services that provide various ways of streamlining payment. Should I sign up for all seven? Or can I rely on all content providers supporting the one I choose?

Just like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex* are accepted everywhere, this problem won't be solved until an underlying universal payment network is established and ubiquitous.

So... BitCoin?

* I know I know, but it's 80%.

Bitcoin makes it very easy: http://www.coinwall.co

No, it doesn't. The intersection of New Yorker readers and people who already possess Bitcoin would be infinitesimally small.

This would, in fact, mean "Open a Coinbase account, scan your drivers license and passport, link your bank account, do the two-small-deposits thing, initiate a transfer, wait the first-time-purchaser waiting period, and then read the article. Weeks later."

I might not object to paying 50 bucks a year, but I read articles shared by dozens of people on different websites so it would be more like ten times that, to different publications.

I very rarely actually go to any one publications website.

I'm sure there's a better way for authors to get paid. Would you pay (say) $1 for a credit for any five articles from the archives of a magazine, with free previews to help you decide? Or would you pay for a Netflix-like service for long-form materials?

I might choose either of those options, as I have no objection to paying a (small) amount for the stuff I read, but neither of them would be very fair. If we just measure cost per article then it just means they would have to push out two articles (similar to what you do with academic publishing) where it would have been better if it had been in one.

Make it so that some articles cost more and it just becomes too complicated.

If we are talking about £50 per year, I'd quite like email subscription to a service that popped out a couple of long form articles per week selected from a range of good quality publications. Just plain text. Its the writing I enjoy. I imagine licensing of the content a month or two after publication would not be outrageously expensive. Just expensive.

Yup, Reader's Digest for 21st Century.

My main problem is with the fact that these publications (not necessarily New Yorker) charge me as much (or even more) as the printed version for the digital version, even though the costs associated with the digital version are significantly lower: no printing, no mailing, no delivery, etc.

Case in point: NY Times. Home delivery to where I live (SF, CA) for a week: $8.45

Full digital access: $8.75 (or $5.00 for Tablet. Or $3.75 for smartphone. Really??)

Make the all-digital version reasonable considering the savings in printing and distribution, and I'll buy. But right now their attitude is: only the rich people have tablets and smartphones anyways, so let's sock it to them.

Thanks, but no thanks.

This a 1000x. I feel the same about kindle books that are the same price or higher than paperbacks.

On the other hand the printed edition has no servers, no CDN, no developers, no sysadmins, no pay-per-click advertising pipeline, no app developers, no tech support, and no 30% to Apple for Newsstand.

I'd like to see what the cost differences are, but it's pretty hard to speculate.

To get the most value from high-quality writing, I need to be able to share and discuss it with others. A paywall stops me from doing that.

That depends on the paywall; some give you a private URL you can use to share the page with non-subscribers.

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