I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
Don’t you think the reason news has no real value is because many news organizations have been hollowed out due to a lack of a business model that can pay for journalism?
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
> I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.
Ya, I'd pay $0.25 or $0.50 on a whim for any random article. For good articles I'd pay more, but the problem is that you don't know if it's going to be good information or some clickbait crap until you read it, so it has to be priced with that risk in mind.
But maybe I'm unique, I currently have paid subscriptions to a few online publications because I believe it's important to pay for news with money instead of clicks (if you want the news provider to be incentivized to generate quality news instead of clickthroughs).
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?
The answer IMO is easy, and we should have learnt it after over 30 years of Internet and World Wide Web growth: because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Even if they are publishing something from a common source. Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience etc etc
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
> Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute).
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
I was a Blendle user until I realised it was simply too expensive. Even with refunds, the disappointment of paying 23 cents (rather than 2.3 cents, or 0.23 cents) for an underwhelming article was not a good experience.
> I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c".
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
They're not if the infrastructure is there (and it is.. apple pay, google pay, paypal, even tokens... although that's a bit of a hurdle)
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
The guardian works because it has a reach far beyond the UK for having a clear progressive identify and deep insights. They're a paper that still does what it should. Most don't. I've subscribed for a while too but I dropped it during Brexit. I'm not in or from the UK and I got sick of reading about Brexit every day and Boris Johnson asking the EU for things he knew he couldn't possibly have (like the separation of goods and services market)
> The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
> The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
There have always been two main things preventing this from happening.
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
I always find this kind of reasoning shallow or somewhat circular. Plenty of tech in history has been too much ahead of their time, bogged down by missing related tech, a larger movement or otherwise didn't just make it big until later.
Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias.
Still others will tip based on quality.
However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ a month. And then everything I want to read is readable. Let somebody else decide how split that 10$. Of course the problem with that is that Spotify isn't very fair about giving artists their cut. But that should be a fixable problem.
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
This is a tangent from the original topic, but what do you see as unfair in how Spotify pays rightsholders?
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
I worked at a small group of local dallies doing IT/Dev stuff about 15 years ago. Just the struggles we had dealing with very basic login/password with a large fraction of our userbase...
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
For me, the ideal setup would be simple micropayments with 1 or 2 confirmation clicks and absolutely no subscriptions or accounts required. Just a simple payment.
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
You can do this with a centralized service that offers redeemable bearer tokens for arbitrary amounts that transfers a predefined amount from requester’s account to the redeemer’s account.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
Regarding your issues around buyer's remorse, I just don't see this as a problem. If you're paying 25 cents for something, and it turns out to be garbage or full of ads or whatever, you shrug, eat the 25 cents, and never visit that website again. For such a small amount of money, I think a "no refunds" policy is reasonable.
Micro transactions are a classic example illustrating the differences between what people say they want to do, and what they actually do. They’ve been tried many different ways and never worked financially. There’s no conspiracy; most customers just didn’t want to use them.
When I was a child in the 1980’s I was blissfully unaware that many adults around me were convinced the world was about to end. I went to school, came home to read and ride my bicycle, then went to bed. I didn’t really care the news existed or bother trying to consume it.
After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?
It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.
I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.
But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.
What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
For as long as there is financial gain to be had from it, business and investment news will continue to be a profitable niche. Sports also seems to do just fine, I don’t personally understand Sports very well, but even from an outsider perspective, there continues to be a lot of money and emotional investment in Sports, and that includes coverage of Sports. Not sure anything else is safe, but they weren’t exactly in a safe position prior to AI either.
The only way I would consider paying for news[^1] is if they removed all the negative first and second order effects of advertisements and clickbait for paying subscribers.
In other words:
- Neutral front page with informative titles and headings that are designed to inform, not make me click. Articles written from the ground up with the inverted pyramid[^2] in mind.
- Remove most "psuedo-events"[^3] based "reporting", and if not analyse them critically.
- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
- Do proper investigative journalism.
- Be conscious of the 5 filters outlined by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent and actively resist them.
In short, the news should live up to the narrative of being the fourth estate it claims legitimacy from, instead of being an entertainment product serving the lowest common denominator in terms of audience.
(This will of course never happen.)
[^1]: With the possible exception of being forced to pay for my nation's public broadcaster through taxes.
>- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
A huge part of the problem with news media is that what people want is completely divorced from what makes good journalism.
Good journalism requires that you continue to pay despite the fact that they haven't been able to to release a piece in a while because they are still knee deep in three different big things that still haven't played out. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay despite the fact that the big story this month is about how you are a bad person who belongs in jail for arguably defrauding half your customers. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay when the article is about how your entire world view is wrong.
But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
I actually wonder if tabloids have been hit as hard business wise as say the NYT has.
Ultimately not everyone wants that, and the audience that would would appreciate well researched and methodologically sound journalism are lacking in options at least partly because they aren't the biggest and thus most lucrative audience.
Nonetheless, even if there were outlets willing to serve such an audience, the problems which remain include "how do I know the money I pay for a subscription will actually fund good journalism instead of garbage". Especially garbage third parties pay to have fed to you.
It's less clear how to be readily transparent with that or to quantify it. How do I know reporters are seeing past their own biases? How do I know they will report on things which might impact their paycheck by making the owners of the company (or their owners in turn) look bad?
Also, once you've found such an outlet how can you finance funding several to try to cover over available blind spots and increase the benefits of horizontal reading?
>But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
Compulsion isn't desire. People are compulsively checking the news, Tiktok, Reddit etc. because thousands of smart engineers' full time job is to maximize how much time people spend consuming content. If you ask people if they want to spend 6+ hours doom scrolling every day, very few people would agree. Don't confound revealed preference with intrinsic desire. The former is just an assumption of an economic model.
Reminds me of the YouRube extension DeArrow[0], that renames videos and replaces the thumbnail with an accurate still from the video to make the content less clickbaity. It’s a seriously valuable change in my experience.
I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
Dark patterns around subscription cancellation have led me to only use subscriptions I can do via Apple. Having a single menu in the Settings app to manage all your subs is such a comfy feeling.
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
That’s an interesting observation. I canceled mine last year and it was nearly one click, easy. Navigate to my account, manage subscription, cancel (or similar). Donzo.
I was so not irritated by it at all that I was actually willing to resubscribe a deep discount.
I wonder if changes were made this year, because I’m generally pretty sensitive to that malarkey too
Same for the Economist. I was on their signup page about to start a subscription when I figured I'd better check how cancellations work. Sure enough there's no simple online cancellation option like there is for signing up. There are a whole bunch of stories out there of people being given the run around and wasting a stupid about of time cancelling their account.
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
The FTC was looking to do this stuff with "Click to cancel" but it's currently in limbo "to give the companies more time to comply" for some freaking reason.
Nobody wants a subscription to the Podunk Nowhere Times—they just want to read the one damn article they published this decade that is actually interesting.
People in Podunk Nowhere might want to read it more often. And everything about Podunk Nowhere Times' monetization structure will be designed around those repeat customers, not people who visit their website once a decade. If you hit a paywall and don't want to pay, most likely you're not the target audience anyway.
Most people don’t pay because the flow is broken. You’re curious, you click, and then you hit a wall. The moment is gone. It's not about money, it's about momentum.
I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
Which Europeans remember Blendle? You put a few € into your account and then you browsed all popular magazines and news papers. If you saw an articled of interest you bought it for 10-70 cents.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
Readit News
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
Ya, I'd pay $0.25 or $0.50 on a whim for any random article. For good articles I'd pay more, but the problem is that you don't know if it's going to be good information or some clickbait crap until you read it, so it has to be priced with that risk in mind.
But maybe I'm unique, I currently have paid subscriptions to a few online publications because I believe it's important to pay for news with money instead of clicks (if you want the news provider to be incentivized to generate quality news instead of clickthroughs).
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.
Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.
This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!
The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments).
So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.
People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.
Also Substack and Medium.
The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
The issues are:
1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct.
2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data.
I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period.
Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway.
The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off.
If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions.
And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.
But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...
BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway
Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
(Unless it improved in the last few years.)
Rather than ad-blockers we could have "junk content provider" blockers.
Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again.
Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
Right, all those different writers can band together, perhaps get an editor to curate the best and make sure there's no major blunders…
But isn't that just a news organisation?
Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments).
Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system.
They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?
It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.
I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.
But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.
What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
In other words:
- Neutral front page with informative titles and headings that are designed to inform, not make me click. Articles written from the ground up with the inverted pyramid[^2] in mind.
- Remove most "psuedo-events"[^3] based "reporting", and if not analyse them critically.
- Pretend that the 24h news cycle doesn't exist. Update at most once a day.
- Do proper investigative journalism.
- Be conscious of the 5 filters outlined by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent and actively resist them.
In short, the news should live up to the narrative of being the fourth estate it claims legitimacy from, instead of being an entertainment product serving the lowest common denominator in terms of audience.
(This will of course never happen.)
[^1]: With the possible exception of being forced to pay for my nation's public broadcaster through taxes.
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
[^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event
A huge part of the problem with news media is that what people want is completely divorced from what makes good journalism.
Good journalism requires that you continue to pay despite the fact that they haven't been able to to release a piece in a while because they are still knee deep in three different big things that still haven't played out. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay despite the fact that the big story this month is about how you are a bad person who belongs in jail for arguably defrauding half your customers. Good journalism requires you to continue to pay when the article is about how your entire world view is wrong.
But consumers want content and drama and opinion. Consumers want the talking heads on Fox News telling them what they want to hear. Consumers want something to consume all day, every day, constantly, whenever they need to feed their doomscrolling addiction.
I actually wonder if tabloids have been hit as hard business wise as say the NYT has.
Ultimately not everyone wants that, and the audience that would would appreciate well researched and methodologically sound journalism are lacking in options at least partly because they aren't the biggest and thus most lucrative audience.
Nonetheless, even if there were outlets willing to serve such an audience, the problems which remain include "how do I know the money I pay for a subscription will actually fund good journalism instead of garbage". Especially garbage third parties pay to have fed to you.
It's less clear how to be readily transparent with that or to quantify it. How do I know reporters are seeing past their own biases? How do I know they will report on things which might impact their paycheck by making the owners of the company (or their owners in turn) look bad?
Also, once you've found such an outlet how can you finance funding several to try to cover over available blind spots and increase the benefits of horizontal reading?
Compulsion isn't desire. People are compulsively checking the news, Tiktok, Reddit etc. because thousands of smart engineers' full time job is to maximize how much time people spend consuming content. If you ask people if they want to spend 6+ hours doom scrolling every day, very few people would agree. Don't confound revealed preference with intrinsic desire. The former is just an assumption of an economic model.
[0]: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
I was so not irritated by it at all that I was actually willing to resubscribe a deep discount.
I wonder if changes were made this year, because I’m generally pretty sensitive to that malarkey too
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
Nowadays they don’t work with that model anymore, unfortunately.
The next best thing we have now is zapping on Nostr. Install the Primal.net app and find out for yourself ;-)
The concept of “zapping” small amounts of money to others for their texts or memes is one of the things that makes the Nostr social network so much more fun that Twitter.
I only wish more websites supported the ability to “zap” an article that I enjoyed.
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