That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You decided up front how much you could afford to spend supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early user.
However, they had the problem that most of the people who you might want to support, were not on Flattr. And Flattr made a poor move early on: in a bid to avoid getting spammed by low effort/beggars, they demanded that you give and take: If you wanted to be able to receive, you had to use the service yourself.
This was eminently fair. It was also a disaster, because it exposed a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but which is a crush to most "creatives"' ego: The vast majority of us are net consumers! We watch way more than we create ourselves. Most minor bloggers/youtubers/podcasters wouldn't want to admit that, they'd just see "I pay more than I get out of this? This sucks!"
Later they backed down from this demand, and then they got the problem with low effort/begging. All along they had the problem that some influential people really wanted to see them fail, due to their association with The Pirate Bay.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is important, even though it might not click)
They survive on patronage outside of their subscriber base.
It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it’s all in Dutch now, and doesn’t work on a pay-per-article model anymore, it’s unclear to me what their model is now, since I don’t speak Dutch. In any case, what you’re asking for exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that’s why you can’t do it - it was tried, and people didn’t use it.
Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this.
To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flattr or something along those lines.
I could definitely see this working at scale.
I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of.
Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using on a NYT level publication.
Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to consume it.
It’s very much a shell of what it once was.
Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term.
If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.
It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like what Substack has, which is semi-longform stuff that doesn't need to be padded with "blog" style posts.
But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal!
The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.
But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world.
Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.
Your argument is pretty weak too. Of course I could subscribe but obviously I don’t for any number of reasons. I am saying I wish I could pay on a per article price. Sorry for wanting to pay for the content I consume.