Daring Fireball: Pay Walls

Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by andreyf on Friday July 24, 2009 @11:25PM (#722918)

I see a different problem: if there were a one-click paywall of $0.25 for a single story (without ads) on NYTimes.com, given a one-paragraph "abstract" of the content, I'd probably pay it several times a day, much more than I'd ever pay for a single newspaper. So based on my own (imagined) behavior, I'd hypothesize the problems of newspapers could largely be solved with micro-payments.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by mechanical_fish on Saturday July 25, 2009 @12:07AM (#722952)

I'd hypothesize the problems of newspapers could largely be solved with micro-payments.

This has been the Business Plan of the Future for at least the last fifteen years. This Clay Shirky essay is getting on towards nine years old:

http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html

... and yet the counterexamples are still pretty thin on the ground. Where is the newspaper that thrives on micropayments? It's not like nobody has had the time to try it yet.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by Adam503 on Saturday July 25, 2009 @09:54AM (#723264)

Nobody is going to take the time to go through a complex credit card transaction in order to pay a dime or a quarter to read a newspaper.

If the transaction is anything easier than a credit card transaction to process, it's not gonna be secure. There might be some attempt at some "no bother" microtransactions systems, until people start getting microbills from Kiev for 3,780,000 nickles for micro-porn. Ooops. I figure these microtrasaction system got about 6 months before Ukrainian hackers have figured out how to buy BMWs with nickles

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by eli on Saturday July 25, 2009 @12:20PM (#723396)

Would you really pay $0.25 for the Washington Post's story about a new healthcare plan when The Politico or CNN has a similar story for free? At best, this would only work for really "important" stories. Very few people are going to pay $0.25 to read an obit or a restaurant review.

Frankly, I think this approach is far worse than a flat subscription. And $0.25 is way to high. I would probably switch to a (lesser) news site that was free rather than pay a fee for 95% of the stuff out there.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by Derferman on Friday July 24, 2009 @11:38PM (#722931)

The problem I see with a setup like this is piracy. It only takes one person to pay $0.25 and put the text up on github/scribd/pastie or any of the hundreds of services available.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by natrius on Saturday July 25, 2009 @03:27AM (#723081)

Google indexes the internet in near real time. Pay Google to monitor for copyright infringement for you.

Regardless, I don't think the random copies are that big of a deal. The only time something material is lost is when a copy gets posted to reddit or digg instead of the original. Few people are going to come across random copies of articles in obscure corners of the internet without direction.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by chollida1 on Saturday July 25, 2009 @10:42AM (#723305)

> Google indexes the internet in near real time.

Technically Google only index's top sites in near real time. CNN might be walked many times a day, but if you think that every blog or torrent site gets walked even close to a fraction as often then your mistaken.

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Re:Daring Fireball: Pay Walls by natrius on Saturday July 25, 2009 @05:44PM (#723731)

I'm assuming many newspapers are among those top sites.

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