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rebeccaskinner parent
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.

BariumBlue
True that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model".

The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.

mike_hearn
They're not interested and it's not for technical reasons. It's for business reasons:

• 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).

matthewmacleod
I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
netsharc
I guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee.

Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...

majewsky
Except it's actually 13 cents because of the Apple tax.

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