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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

With all my respect to quality media like NYT, I don't want a full-scale subscription. What I'd like is paying a few cents for a specific article in a hassle-free way.

Micropayments are hard because of the transaction costs, but this seems to slowly change (see e.g. flattr). I wish more sites offered a per-view zero-setup one-click micropayment solution.

What's more interesting is what Google will do if their ads revenue shrinks considerably — I suppose 99% of their income is targeted online context ads.

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I don't think micropayments are the future. Flattr has been around since 2010 and I don't think even a single person has made a living wage from it.

The main problem when charging for content is justifying to the user why the price is "fair" before they've actually seen the content. If you can get around that problem, e.g. by using teasers or word of mouth to instill a need, then you can get away with charging much more than a few cents. And if you can't, very few people will be wililng to pay even one cent, because of the huge perceptual gap between zero and one cent.

This model works best for huge chunks of content like books, movies or video games, where you can create compelling teasers that don't give away the whole experience. It's much harder for stuff like music or NYT articles, where the consumable chunks of content are small and teasers don't make much sense. I don't know any good answer for those.

Well, I'm not a representative sample of the general public, but for me NYT's paywall is mostly about the hassle, not the money. I totally won't mind losing 10¢ on an article that was not worth reading, as long as getting to the content was just one paid click, without a monthly subscription or entering details.

What I'd like is a PayPal one-click payment sort of system for that, with limitation of e.g. 50¢ per transaction without authentication (with limits per hour and per domain, etc, preventing money-bleeding exploits).

A huge selling point for me would be an ability to come to a previously unvisited site supporting this system and pay with one click.

The thing is that I don't browse media sites from their home pages, I mostly follow links found in social media. This gives the links some level of trust, because I can assess the poster's credibility before clicking the link.

I think it could be interesting to see if Google could arrange an "ad blocker subscription" pass for websites. The site would block people with ad blockers unless they were a subscriber.

Google would charge 10-15 bucks or whatever the average web user is worth in gooogle adsense.

I guess the hard part is actually effectively detecting ad blocking. I assume you could write an adblocker that downloads and then just never actually displays ads. Without total control over your browser, I'm not sure how ad blocking detection would ever be accurate.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

That's a really interesting future option here, hard to see how it will compete with free adblockers though.

There's more problem with per-article payments than transaction costs. E.g., how I know if I want to pay for particular article - maybe it's a useless crap that isn't even worth my time, let alone money? I could pay _after_ reading, but then the publisher has no guarantee I would bother to, after all I've already got what I wanted.

You'd say "well, NYT is so good you would want to pay for _any_ article published there!" - but then why wouldn't I subscribe if I value them so much?

A hassle-free after-reading tipping jar would be welcome!

It could even say "If you liked this article, pay $0.nn and the next article you open on our site will be ads-free for you."

Perhaps written content will end up going down the music route, with subscription based aggregators?

Certainly something that Apple News seems like it could be well placed for.

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