Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.

FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.

It's self defeating.

. . .

PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.

This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!

That said, this point --

> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.

Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.

Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.

Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.

Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).

I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.

Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.

Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.

Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.

The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.

It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.

Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'

Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.

This seems to cover most stuff where the transaction value in question is low, e.g. newspapers, single songs, and so on. The UX seems to be inadequate. I'm not privy how my buddy's company is trying to address this, but I guess it is hard to beat a news stand where I drop a few coins and get a newspaper and chewing gum.

    > And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.

[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...

They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.

Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM

Mostly requiring subsidy by billionaires wanting to popularise their weird political views?

NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.

"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...

(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)

I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.

Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.

I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?

By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.

The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

    > The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

    > Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets