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Comment by aaronetz | Hacker News Reader

I've just thought of a crazy idea: what if there was a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps, with guaranteed privacy and no advertising? The said service would then pay royalties to the participating websites, depending on the usage.

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> a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps

Isn't that what ISP is? Except for the royalties part, of course.

Actually, that was my first thought - that the ISPs could pay royalties to websites, but that reminded me too much of cable companies -- too centralized. But who knows, this may actually happen with wireless internet providers offering unlimited Facebook bundles and the like...

But that's the most important part. I don't think you want ISPs to charge users $1M per month and then spread that cost to every website in the world plus all the things on the Internet that are not the "Web." I think this is far too problematic to ever work.

As others have pointed out, this is an old idea that has been attempted several times but never really taken off. I think it could work but it would be really really hard to implment successfully at scale. For example, I'm not sure it would work without strong DRM. People don't like ads and some install AdBlockers, but people REALLY don't like paying for things and I think even more of them would use paywall avoiding plugins. I think publishers would demand it (just as movie studios did with Netflix). That sounds like a huge step backwards for the web.

Clay Shirky wrote a somewhat famous takedown of this idea in 2009: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...

Thanks for sharing the read.

One excerpt that struck me is, "The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong." It reminds me of the perennial hubbub over unlimited cellular plans. I have so very many family and friends who only rarely use more data than you'd get from a $15/mo plan, but insist on clinging to much more expensive 'unlimited' plans they're grandfathered into because they hate hate hate the idea that on the odd month they'd have to pay an extra $10 for going over the initial allotment. Similarly for folks who barely text but still pay for unlimited texting because they'd rather pay $5/mo up front than $2.50/mo in ten-cent increments.

I subscribe to the local paper. If you amortize my subscription payment over all the articles I actually read in depth, I wouldn't be surprised to find I pay $1/article, but I think the subscription is well worth it overall. If they were to restructure their paywall such that I had to pay on a up-front, per-article basis, though, I bet even $0.10 would be enough to send me googling for the same information on a blog somewhere.

So, AOL? When AOL merged with Time Warner they made the various Time Warner magazine sites subscriber-only unless you were on AOL.

Edit: Oh, and what makes you think the advertising wouldn't come back eventually? When cable TV came out one of it's big selling points was no ads. Then, someone realized: "Hey, we can make even more money if we sell ads on top of the subscription fee." Nobody is going to resist the temptation to stuff ads into every nook and cranny unless it causes them to lose more revenue from losing customers than they gain in ad revenue, which never seems to happen.

Interesting idea.

Micropayments have been a perennial failure, but I wonder if anyone would actually use this?

I might if your "Netflix for web sites" was full of really high quality content that wasn't reachable elsewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm representative.

I would definitely be more inclined to pay a single entity and get a "bundle" than make individual purchasing decisions. But you're right, it is all dependent on the content that would be offered. Something like this would probably need a big upfront investment to get going...

This already exists: Flattr.

Not wildly popular, though. Patreon already has far more adoption.

Did flattr change? I haven't seen it in years but back then it was basically a tip button for your website. Not a subscription that got you access to a list of premium sites.

wow, almost like Cable but for websites.

its been proposed many a time, the problem being that everyone wants it to be their payment scheme and every site wants more than users are willing to pay.

It's exactly like cable, and I think it would suck for the same reason I think cable sucks. Packaged deals like that are only convenient to the customer because payments are brill inconvenient. So you get stuck paying for a bunch of shows and programs you don't want, and thus funnel money away from content creators you enjoy and toward content creators that are good at making deals with the cable company.

I'm working like something along these lines for news. Email me (it's in my profile) if you're interested in finding out more and potentially working together.

That would be a simple way to ruin your viewership. I am not going to share an article/other piece of content if those who read my post can't read it as well. So now, even if half of the web subscribe to your service (yeah right) I won't share your links. With no inbound links how are people supposed to find out about your content network? And if you have no visitors, how are you supposed to make money?

This idea, and close variations, comes up a lot. I came up with it in 2008, I've seen I think 6 or 7 companies try it.

Naturally, I think my secret sauce is better than everyone else's. We'll see.

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