We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.
You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.
What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.
I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.
I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.
But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.
The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future.
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
absolutely, the problem of the cognitive friction of having to decide what to pay for compounds massively when there uncertainty about the purchase, and the negative experience when the user feels that he or she has been essentially scammed because the purchased product is not what was expected far outweighs positive experiences that are perceived at best as just the expected transaction
This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of.
What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"
Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.
You're going to put all the work into finding the news and doing the leg work. I'm going to make a site called NewsTheft.info that just says "YourNewsSite.com is reporting that <your content rewritten by an LLM>" and it's going to be free and people are going to use my thing. Then I'm going to shut it down when you all go bust. I am a rapacious eater of worlds. You can't stop me and the people love me because, since it's free, I can give them a better experience than you.
No one reads print anymore. Most people nowadays consume their news either through a Youtube broadcast or a podcast. The news is produced for free and completely paid for through advertising. The folks using this site, we're in the (rather extreme) minority.
I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more.
I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.
I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.
I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile.
Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.
Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
> For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.
> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work
I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)
Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.
Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.
* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.
P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.
P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.
> who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit
It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.
Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
I want a lie bounty. If I pay for an article and find a lie in it, I should get a refund plus a bug bounty. That would make fact-checking pay off.
A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.
I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that does not reward clickbait).
If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.
It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
who the hell wants to think about micropayments every time they read an article? microtransactions just suck outright, they create a ton of overhead for everyone involved — both use and implementation
not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly
I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.
That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.
It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.
You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.
This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.
> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.
People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.
iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).
It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.
Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.
What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.
I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.
I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.
In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.
The title bar of the browser should report how much you've spent in the time frame you select, and the cost of a given article in both absolute and percentage terms.
Along with silly privacy/cookie flags
Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.
Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)
Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.
It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.
As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...
You know who isn't arguing for micropayments for news articles?
Pretty much every damn publisher.
Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.
Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)
We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.
Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.
Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.
And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.
83 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] threadWe already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.
You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.
What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.
I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.
I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.
But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"
Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?
Information wants to be free.
I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.
I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.
Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.
Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.
> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work
I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)
Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.
Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.
* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.
P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.
P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.
It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.
Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
The news is toxic propaganda, and nothing more. Nothing actionable.
Avoid at all costs.
A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.
If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.
What about iTunes, and money transfer apps like Venmo and Zelle, which people use widely for microtransactions (and more)?
(in French, however)
It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly
What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.
That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.
It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.
You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.
This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.
Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.
People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.
iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).
It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.
https://www.x402.org/
https://www.8004scan.io/networks
https://www.x402scan.com/
Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.
What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.
I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.
That's not what this is about though.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
Along with silly privacy/cookie flags
Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.
Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)
Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.
It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.
As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...
Pretty much every damn publisher.
Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.
Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)
We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.
Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.
Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.
And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.
- give up capitalism for information, and rely on UBI and gov grants for art and media
- make the market great again with micropayments and subscriptions
Both of these have problems, but also both are better than ads, which have been an unmitigated disaster.