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
Much the same if you ask me.
There's really no comparison anymore.
Any "valuable" news/sports/politics/stocks is all freely available from dozens of competing sources.
What's left is Opinions, Reviews and Editorials, which are freely available from thousands of free competitors.
the idea that anyone would blindly microtransact ("pay $0.02 to read my clickbait article ChatGPT wrote for me!") is one waiting for all free content to go away first.
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> 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
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Because a lot of HN voters and commenters just read the headlines and not the articles.
> 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 ;)
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
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.
The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
• Advertisers want subscribers because that's a proxy for wealth and often, locality.
• Only quite rich people are willing to pay for an ad-free newspaper. The Spectator is one example of such a thing in the UK (subscription only, no ads).
• A lot of subscriptions are driven by a desire for opinion and opinionated takes, often by a single star writer, not news and certainly not neutrally written news.
Extremely slanted opinion sells like hotcakes and subsidizes all the rest, but the market for drive-by micropayments for opinion is very small. This opinion-subscription-bias amongst readers is why Substack works and also the Guardian (the Guardian is 90% just opinion pretending to be unbiased news).
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.
Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.
It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.
I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
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.
Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.
> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions 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.
Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
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?
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.
as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
It could also indicate that the news "industry" has been utterly decimated and destroyed and defunded over the past 50 years and they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies because they are desperately hanging on as it is and have all sorts of data showing them that they will never have the business they had 50 years ago no matter what because the simple reality is that humans prefer listening to a moronic talking head not ask hard questions over actual journalism anyway.
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.
Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.
Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.
The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.
This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
No, the downside is constantly being monitored. It doesn't matter whether there's actual real-life consequences. It makes me feel watched and change my behaviour. If someone follows you on the street and writes everything you do and look at down, you would mind too even if he doesn't do anything with that info.
And whether I'm "paying into the system" by buying stuff I didn't need, that's a really shady and wasteful business model we shouldn't encourage in these times of environmental disaster.
You have to account for the massive amount of money google and the rest of the advertising industry makes. It's NOT companies lighting money on fire irrationally, and it does have to be paid for.
So it feels free because we all pay for it already. There's no agency. Adding micropayments or ad-free premium services aren't alternatives, they are an additional cost.
Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.
But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
My girlfriend works in the beauty industry on the product side. Even more important that having a good product, is having a good marketing campaign. Products live and die by their advertising. And believe it or not, lots of people click on ads.
Step back and evaluate the situation considering your thoughts on the whole population, people in general, not looking at it from your perspective with people you associate with.
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...
I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
BTW. That's 10$ 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
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.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
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.
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.
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?
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
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?
This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
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.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
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.