It is either this or a system for micropayments, IMHO, which would probably be less click bait-inviting (as you pay per item, rather than having already paid for admission to an all-you-can-eat-buffet.)

Let's say you have a subscription spanning X sites, and that after you have read the first paragraph or so, you click a button if you wish to read on, being charged, say, $0.02 for the privilege.

Prepaid, so you don't get a surprise when the credit card fees are 100x the cost of the reporting you read.

Surely micropayments work in the exact opposite way to what you describe when it comes to click-bait. Like every other market with abundance (e.g. music in 2018), I imagine it will be winner take all and the distribution of rewards will skew to the most popular, creating incentives which will lead to the marvel/dc-isation of news, reduce production risk taking, and increase the fight for attention.

I mean, micropayments will essentially behave something like spotify, and that is mostly what's happened over there - excluding a bit of weirdness around the monetisation of legacy catalogue that doesn't really work the same in publishing.

I may be naïve, but the idea was that the first paragraph would probably tell you whether reading the rest made any sense; my reasoning was that if you pay a flat fee which the content providers fight over based on what is being viewed, you do not care what you click - but the other side has everything to gain by making you click.

With micropayments, you can at least hope that content providers will be wary of leaving customers with the sense of being fooled into paying for a story.

The keyword here being 'hope'. Sigh.

We still have to maintain hope :)

Personally, I subscribe to the Guardian (the weekend papers, I live in London) and the London Review of Books. I like this model as I'm not buying the individual content so much as I'm buying into the ethos and output of both organisations. I don't really want to be deciding which of the items they do is best, I want them to maintain a machine that will keep surprising me with stuff I want to read.

I think aggregate subscriptions are going to have to become a thing though, likely as a side contribution, without all the benefits of full subscription, but still some access beyond the paywall. Good luck and godspeed to whoever manages to coordianate that.

I think you may be onto something. But what about the incentives to click-bait this creates?

When I pay for content, I want the creators' incentives to be aligned with mine (high-quality content not designed to draw me in by appealing to my lizard brain).

This is a very important point that cannot be emphasized enough.

My first developer-gig was working at a regional newspaper back in 98-99.

Back then, we talked about personalized experience, how we could tailor it to the individual based on preferences.

I would come to the website and see a tailored mix of articles suited to my need. Some based on my interests and preferences, but not too siloed off, so I would still see the very important general news. It would be run by an organization I trust to be reasonably objective.

That is the kind of news service I would pay to use TODAY. I would pay 10-20EUR/month for it.

Today, I don't think that product exists. If it does, I am not aware of it.

I think you loose something by having a personalised news experience. There is something to be said for reading articles that might challenge your beliefs, personalisation of news may not be the best path forward for society. I've also found https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/ to be an eye opener on what doesn't get reported on main stream news sites.

You can choose 3-4 sources you personally trust, subscribe to them, follow them on Twitter, and get essentially the product you described. You can even follow specific feeds (eg Bloomberg Politics instead of Bloomberg) to make it more tailored.

I think it mostly exists as aggregators like Hacker News.

How is it any worse than what we have now, though.

Netwerk24 does that in South Africa. They bundled 11 Afrikaans magazines and 35 newspapers under 1 account. And you pay R99 per month for access. (About 7 USD)

Not a bad price, but I don't give a shit about all of those newspapers and magazines. I just want 1 or 2 and I don't want to pay for all of them.

My proposed solution is very similar to the old print days. You used to just buy a single copy of a newspaper. On an adhoc basis, depending on whether or not any of the headlines caught your attention. You didn't buy a single article, nor did you subscribe to multiple newspapers. (you could, but I don't think many people subscribed to multiple)

So here is my solution for a digital version of this:

- You have an account with a digital news agency (or group) - You buy bundles of articles. E.g $1 for 20 articles. (or whatever price is appropriate) - Everyone has access to the website, but you can just see the headlines/opening paragraph. - If you are interested, you can use one of your article credits to 'unlock' a specific article and read it in full. - Once you have 'unlocked' a specific article you will always have access to it, and your credit for that 1 article is used up

This way you don't have to bother with microtransactions, and also you don't have to bother with paying for a whole bunch of stuff you don't want.

What do you guys think?

So basically the model is exactly as you want it, but the price doesn't work. If I was keen on news I'd say 7 USD sounds a lot better to me than 10. Not sure I would pay 10. But also not sure I'd take the offer at 5. It's really hard to price those correctly for the readers. There were times I subscribed to a print computer mag, which was ~5 EUR per month - but I read it cover to cover - wehen I stopped doing that, I stopped my subscription.

I do like your model - but I'm not sure it would work out. Maybe the people who pay 7 USD only read ~20 articles, so you'd only get 3 articles for your 1 USD.

I guess I'd still be much more likely to set up a subscription of 1-2 per month and get a low number of free articles than pay more for "I won't use it anyway".

Edit: Everyone's free to tell me I'm cheap (living in Germany and not in ZA, so I guess the 7 USD per month are more palpable to me) - but it's a matter of worth. If I don't want those 2 coffees per month enough (for 7 USD) I also won't buy them, simple as that.

That seems like a good idea, although it is maybe difficult to bring it into reality. Only thing I would change is not basing the percentage on the number of views because this will (just like ads) make an incentive for newspapers to promote clickbait. Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.

    Instead this system could be a lot smarter by measuring (for example) the time spent reading an article because it is not bound by the classical advertising constraints.

Then you have the problem of speedreaders like me vs slow-readers plus that it's still not tracking free.

You can monetize based on the time to read per person divided by the total time of this person. This way you eliminate {speed,slow}readers.

Those who use Pocket or Reader views or similar tools will skew the results.

News Corp tried to build that back in 2010 see eg https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/why-news-corp-really-... - there were issues getting newspapers to commit to a bundled experience. And it wasnt going to be a profit share by views exactly either.

Sounds like the us cable system all over again. pretty soon it'll be filled with useless subscriptions you'll never use, and still have to pay for.

Isn't this just cable bundles all over again?

It is. Isn't it the idea behind Brave. Or maybe I didn't understood it, looking at browser's market share, looks like I was not the only one to not get it.

We pay premium for a lot of things, food, cars... but not for news.

They could do both. Keep the individual "one source only" that is cheaper if you only want this one, and the bundle that is cheaper is you want to access 5 sources. The bundle would be less profit per head for each source but you could expand the volume this way.

https://contributor.google.com/ is supposed to be this. You pay a monthly fee which is distributed to the sites you read according to your pageviews.

I wouldn't pay for any news but that's just me.

Me neither. My whole life I've been told to "be informed". For all sorts of reasons, including having something to talk about when on a date. And all those reasons are bullshit. Being informed has had zero positive impact on me. In fact the impact was negative. Constant worry, depression and frustration.

Been news free for about 5 of my 50 years and never happier.

>For all sorts of reasons, including having something to talk about when on a date

If that's the reason they could come up with for one being informed, I'd hate to live in that society...

>And all those reasons are bullshit. Being informed has had zero positive impact on me.

Being informed is not about having impact on the person being informed. Is about the person being informed having an impact themselves, i.e. being an active member of society. Today this is reduced to voting once every few years (if that) for most people (which is a mockery of being a citizen), but being informed is important even for that.

I recently voted in Europe. I do my own extensive research on all parties. Don't need the news for that.

The date anecdote was one reason of many.

>I recently voted in Europe. I do my own extensive research on all parties.

So how's that different from getting the news? Without checking out news sources you do what?

Isnt this what Brave browser trying to solve?