Comment by rrradical
16 hours ago
I've always wondered why I can't pay some small fee (20 cents? $1?) to read an article. Why it have to be an entire subscription? If I put $20 / month into an account and then spend that bit by bit on high quality articles from different sites I'd gladly do that.
1. You can be sure that most people still won't pay to read the article, so it might not be worth doing at all
2. "Number of subscribers" is a real, meaningful metric used across the industry for various purposes, including informing advertisers and calculating recurring revenue. Your proposal, on the other hand, is somewhat odd and questionable that people probably don't know how to make use of.
because payment processors hate small payments and punish accordingly (with flat fee +%)
That shouldn't really be a problem if there's an intermediary that takes the payment and distributes it.
We had a service that did this in the Netherlands (Blendle). They had a lot of the big Dutch media titles on-board. It failed and they pivoted to a crappy subscription service.
The model just doesn't work at this point.
3 replies →
The math doesn’t work out:
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
Throwing up hands and saying: internalizing the externalized cost is "ridiculously expensive" is not proof it doesn't work.
The examples of the a la carte exercise brands referenced (SoulCycle, etc) are quite ineffective arguments -- those are successful businesses with loyal, high retention users because they provide specific, high value products to the users.
If you’re looking for concrete examples of why it doesn’t work why not study the various companies that have tried this and failed?
It would be cheaper for you but not very profitable for them.
It's only extra money for them because I'm never ever going to subscribe a monthly sub to a site I read one or two articles a month from. So they're not losing anything from me, only gaining. It's basically free money.
Right now I use archive.ph because I can but if I couldn't (if they make it a hard block) I would just ignore links to said outlet.
I sub to a few outlets which I read daily. But I couldn't possibly sub to every single outlet I see a link from. And I wouldn't anyway.
However if I could click '€0.50 to read this article' then yeah I would if it seemed interesting. Especially real journalism, not reuters copy/paste.
And for a regular reader who reads said site daily, it still makes sense to take out a 10-20 bucks a month sub. Still cheaper than paying per read.
It really depends, there are so many peoole who just don't want more than a couple subscriptions.
The subscriptiin model only favor the giants like netflix, spotify and NYTimes but not necessarily the smaller players.