Comment by piva00
1 day ago
The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
> The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from.
Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them).
But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles.
Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.
That's what I'm suggesting. If music streaming services can offer both gangster rap, classical music, heavy metal and pop, then surely a news/article syndicator should be able to offer access to papers from vastly different perspectives. I want both extreme right and extreme left, and everything in between in the same subscription.