Comment by FloorEgg
6 hours ago
Hi Ronan,
I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.
I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.
You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).
You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy
Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of specific article permissions.
You could hit up a public library...
Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)
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