I'd rather honestly pay for great content that is worth reading. I think that ads misalign incentives, and force journalists and writers to focus on writing clickbaity articles to drive as much traffic as possible. If more people would agree to pay for content - we would see less bullshit ads and less articles needlessly separated into 10 stupid parts.
It would provide a legitemate business model for new writers and allow them to focus on creating high quality content instead of being forced to dumb it down to the mainstream level to get the views.
Also, if websites like facebook could suggest an alternative payed model without being hated for it by everybody, they could focus on user experience and building quality products, instead of tricking people into watching as much ads as possible and selling their data.
Right now writers and artists can only:
- Rely on ads for their income
- Beg for money on patreon
- Have to sell some t-shirts and dumb merch
to support themselves. The only honest and bullshit-less way to make money is selling books, but it's not always applicable.
I believe that if you think that the content is worth reading - it is worth paying for. Do an honest business transaction, and pay money for the value that you receive, instead of forcing people to come up with shady and manipulative ways to extract money from your attention.
If more people would agree to pay for content, internet would be a much better and more awesome place.
but why fight what the market wants with paywalls?
for me it's the "nickel and dime" thing, not just simply paying for quality product. i can't stand it. i want to pay for everything once, in an indirect way, that is almost unnoticeable to me.
have you ever driven in switzerland and italy? you enter switzerland and you pay 40 euros to use their roads and you sort of hate switzerland for it. then you enter italy and you don't pay anything and then all of the sudden you start hitting pay gates every so often and you end up paying double what you did in switzerland.
i fear for where these paywalls will take the internet in the future...i want something more like driving in switzerland than in italy
There needs to be some universal way to conveniently pay small sums of money for viewing an article or watching a video.
It would be awesome if there would be some generally accepted system that allows you to embed a button on your website and accomplish that in one click.
Maybe it even exist, I'm not sure(if it does it's not widely accepted enough), also maybe there's more elegant and clever way of doing that. But to me it seems like a great startup idea, if someone could solve this problem a lot of people would be happy.
it fits with peter thiels philosophy from zero to one: what is nobody else doing?" "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
First, most material behind paywalls aren't that great. The NY Times hardly has the monopoly on quality reporting. In fact, most money-driven publications tend to be low quality in many respects, especially when facing people with power and money, because the paywall isn't their only revenue stream. The Intercept, which is a non-profit, routinely beats out the NYT on national security reporting.
Second, these paywalls can be easily bypassed. Again, why pay for this? These notions that these words are their property and hence need to be paid for it have no moral weight to me, especially when some of these publications got us into the Iraq War.
It's the user experience that puts me off - dialogs with patronizing sentences like "it looks like you are someone who enjoys great content", signing up with a strong password, storing that password in passwordsafe, verifying email, logging in, selecting a plan, entering credit card details....
Instead, if they just used a prepaid wallet through my gmail sign-in and silently deducted some amount - say 10 cents for every 5 minutes spent on their site - without bombarding me with all those irritating dialogs, I wouldn't mind paying.
In fact, I treat pages that require registration and/or a question answer exactly in the same manner as paywalled articles. If the article is interesting enough, I may give a random answer or create a one-time registration.
I do not like the proliferation of "free registeration" sites. Over time I have become more and more irritated but such requests.
I actually pay for the NYTimes. They provide a real value to me, but not in their webpage
Their value to me comes in their mobile app. I like to read their articles there, and they make me feel good. For example, they hit your app with "Good morning, here's what you need to know" followed by a daily briefing. the daily briefing is worth it alone, but having that extra part, as lame as it sounds, makes me feel good.
It's rather rare that I find an online article that is well enough researched and written to warrant paying for it. I suppose if I found more online forums with long-form articles with on-the-ground research than I would be willing to pay up but it I haven't really seen anything that quite fits.