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Ask HN: Would you pay per article rather than Bundle subscription?

4 points by SITZ ↗ HN
Recently, this piece from John Oliver has reinvigorated the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ

Two major points:

- Traditional print media has continued to decline in terms of revenue and hasn't been able to fully evolve into sustainable digital media, clickbait articles are filling the social media feeds. Catchy content with catchy titles from publishers like Buzzfeed etc continues to garner people's attention and hence pulling away from think pieces, op-eds, editorials etc.

- People are unwilling to pay for news.

Is it possible a pay per article will solve both sides of the problem? i.e. Increase the willingness of individuals to pay for good content in their POV and increase overall revenue streams for news organisations?

Here is how the crux of solution might look like:

- Articles embed a key unique to them (org, publisher, author)

- Users require a browser extension (Desktop) / app (Mobile) with unique key to user.

- Based on the amount of active time spent on the article, auto deduct a minimal amount ($0.02) on crossing a threshold (>50%)

- Users are incentivised for sharing articles, via unique trackable social media links and are fed back in terms of real currency to their accounts.

- Price incentive on a per user basis is dynamic based on current popularity of the content so early adopters have more reasons to be loyal to publisher.

What do you think?

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] thread
brudgers
To me, the problem is not technical. It's that most of what we call 'news' has no direct economic value to the reader. A story about Aleppo might make me better informed but there isn't really a dollar amount associated.

Whatever value it has, little of it arises from time sensitivity, high accuracy, or coming from a particular source: which is to say that reading it today at the New York Times or in a week at the Economist or sometime in between at USA Today is pretty much the same.

News sources for ordinary news are largely fungible. The typical story behind a paywall can be replaced by one that isn't. What isn't fungible is the quality of the reporting. That's why individual sites can collect subscriptions.

Anyway, a service with many sources and an app is back to selling on the aggregate model with the additional complexity of negotiating with the sources and the risk of users avoiding payment using the open web.

Good luck.

Freak_NL
News as such is fungible, but good newspapers and magazines provide their unique value through op-ed pieces, columns, research journalism, thought pieces, etc. That kind of writing is not interchangeable.

I have a subscription to a newspaper (on real paper!) not for the daily news (which as you say is fungible) but for these in-depth articles that go beyond the news, and provide some background and perspective.

brudgers
I agree. I see part of the value in a newspaper [irrespective of material form] is as an aggregate. It filters against hard and soft criteria and that's what is worth paying for [for some people]. The pay-per-article model might work if it can meet that function and offers better value than a 'newspaper subscription' and offers better value than the free internet to some market segment.

The question is not 'Are there profits to be had when I can charge a penny every time someone reads an article on the internet?'. The hard question is 'How do I show people it is worth paying me a penny to read an article on the internet?'

SITZ
I agree with the long held role of newspapers in aggregating a set of articles based on their criteria.

But in the current age, bundling seems to be broken for 2 particular reasons:

- Most people discover content via their social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc) where they have invested a long time to curate a set of individual journalists, public figures and acquaintances rather than orgs.

- Diversity of audience expects a rather focussed content curation from different view points rather than all encompassing single identity.

This makes me believe that going forward in future, people should be able to show appraisal to unique pieces rather than a wrapper organisation, based on their quality. This might be encourage grass root level curation by people who are incentivised for their effort rather than association with an existing brand.

brudgers
The hurdle is inconvenience. Using a special news reading app and maintaining an account are inconvenient relative to just reading for free. On top of that, reading an article becomes a decision of both time [to read it] and money [the price of the article], that's also [mentally] less convenient.

To me, the difficulty is that there is no obvious win for the pay by article model and my experience is that people hate being nickeled and dimed. Charging is not necessarily the best route to build the goodwill necessary for donated effort toward curation and curation that relies on goodwill tends to attract players with financial motivations in addition to people with voluntarism in their hearts.

Freak_NL
This is a hard problem to solve for a long list of reasons. For example, what kind of party should facilitate this system of remuneration? One of the big boys (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) or some start-up in publishing? If we want a system that works for any publisher, that will become a really important player with access to some really interesting information (what kind of thought pieces someone reads; that's a data mining gold mine!) and a lot of influence.

Also, wouldn't providing users with incentives to share articles get us back to the clickbait articles we want to avoid?

SITZ
I agree with the influence part. Although, Given tracking of users by Facebook, Twitter (Clicked items, Time spent, browsing & sharing patterns) & Google (Chrome history, Android), I doubt people should act surprised to find such even in current state.

And, given most of the content is curated based on people we follow in our social media feeds, I wonder if it will encourage individual contributors to work on their unique content and help in capturing majority share of a focussed set of readers value rather than being a part of narrative.