You would need to pay quite a bit more to make this viable for most publications. The ballpark formula is the issue price divided by the number of articles the average reader wants to read enough to pay anything. For example, a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them.

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.

The price needs to be at or below $0.09 for people to just unlock the news and read on, no thinking.

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.

Not all online news sites are the same. The New York Times does real journalism, which takes real resources. I'm not convinced that they can be sustained on advertising dollars.

> 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.

I'm thinking of what happens when HackerNews links to a New York Times article. People hit the paywall, so someone posts a workaround. NYT get $0.

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.

This is what the Brave browser is attempting to do, with mixed success

There's also scroll.com, which is more netflix-y: you pay a fixed amount per month and it gets paid out to particpating sites you visit.

Too few partners. Doesn't include the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, for instance.

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.)

I would like to see more partners too, but for me it was enough to get started. I'm not particularly worried about the NYT or the WSJ having enough money. It's the smaller sites that I'm aiming to support by using Scroll.

Do they have a plugin for Firefox? No way that strategy works without plugins for other browsers. —- I hope they succeed.

I'm pretty sure this is what Blendle[0] is doing - pay per article. I've been using it for a year and ended up subscribing to a few of the publications.

0. https://blendle.com

Google Contributor is one attempt to pay creators and it's not terrible. The big downside is that even though ads are blocked, Google is still tracking you.

It would be nice if there was somebody other than Google running the program.