It's not that consumers want free stuff, it's just that most people do not have extra money laying around.
I'll also add that "charging a fair price" has never deterred companies from engaging in unethical and privacy-violating practices in addition to taking your money. See: Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
I've seen it first-hand: startups intentionally forgoing revenue so they can be measured by the stick of imaginary future profits correlated with their free product's success. Then when investors finally do start asking to see real returns, it's a scramble to find something that doesn't involve charging their current user base (because of course no one wants to pay for something that has been free previously). That's when the "creative" money-making ideas start getting real consideration.
In effect, those actions end up communicating to the public that software is free when it really isn't. It gives the impression that there isn't a cost associated with developing and maintaining software, when really it might just be funded temporarily by investors with deep pockets and high expectations, or supported by other revenue sources that the end user would not agree to in full transparency.
I don't get the vibe that HN thinks the current state of affairs is completely the fault of the customers. it's a two way street. companies offer free services either at a loss or supported by ads or data mining. once people have a free option, it takes a lot of value add to get them to actually pay for a competing solution.
It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be that interested. Pricing schemes that increase the total reading cost on a log curve can be imagined.
Of course we dream of a micropayments system fluid enough that people start consuming 10-100x the content so the price per piece can go down accordingly, but that is unlikely since there isn’t that much free time. A first mover might accumulate a lot of new readers, but that would eventually even out.
An online newspapers might make $3 per thousand views, plastering ads everywhere and maybe videos. That means they survive with way less than 1 penny per view. They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
> They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
But that's just what you proposed. $0.09 is over an order of magnitude greater than $0.003. That pricepoint would still be fine - far less than the price of a coffee.
If there were an extremely convenient way to pay a few pennies for access (a price low enough that I wouldn't think twice), they'd be making something, at least. I'm not about to go through the hassle and cost of subscribing for a month, to access a single article, and neither is anyone else here.
I understand that this 'one shot' model isn't necessarily representative of how their website is generally used, of course.
> a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them.
For a physical copy.
Disregarding current promotional prices, The Guardian charge £12/month for a digital subscription. New York Times is £8 for 4 weeks. Not sure how many articles the typical reader gets through though, or how that should inform our thinking here.
I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)
It would be nice if there was somebody other than Google running the program.
I think Apple started this movement with the App Store and the .99 cent app. I think it coincided with the shift from on-prem software to cloud, but that really shifted what people can charge for software. We've seen a bit of a shift back the last ~5 years maybe? But I still think it the App store started the current epoch.
Hence companies like MicroSoft are shifting towards services.
Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free. The terrible consequence is that in response to that pressure, many companies choose ethically-questionable ways to make money when they need to, rather than simply charging a fair and honest price for their product (this includes selling users' data, overwhelming the user experience with ads, in-app purchase shenanigans, etc). Paying fair prices for things we use isn't the most appealing idea in the world, but (in my opinion) we probably need more of it, not less.