Comment by cedws
8 hours ago
Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing?
I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscriptions for websites that I might only visit twice a year.
Which payment processor will charge less than 10c per transaction?
Nope, not going to happen. Any per use micro transaction isn't going to work. If anything it's going to require a huge amount of workarounds to get the content for free via alternative means
Presumably, nobody would offer the 10c per page unless they were making more than the $20 / month or whatever previously. So people will be paying more. Then add all the sites that currently just get what they can with advertising, and now they can become pay-per-view.
They weren't getting the $20 / month from users who bounce off.
Seems more likely that subscriptions, advertising, and microtransactions will coexist.
They have to get almost 200 more conversions to make up for the single subscriber. Given a lot of these services offer $1 entry subscriptions and people still bounce it's unlikely you'll have a mass market excited to pay $0.10 everytime they want to read an article to make up for the person paying $20 to read a handful everyday.
Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail to find take up because the mental load in deciding to pay or not is higher than the value receive.
Maybe ideal for agents but how many people are going to trust their agents with enough of a balance.
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The $20/month model is exclusionary as you are excluding people who are not interested in regularly reading a single newspaper. Pay-per-page is more reasonable. I have rarely paid for news subscription (partly because I find news here which comes from many sources). Obviously, I am not going to pay hundreds in subscriptions, so I am essentially paying $0.
With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my coffee spend). That's money that was previously unlocked. Also, being able to pay some random writer/journalist outside the mega-news-corps, has a special feel to it and this gives me the option to do that.
Random writer/journalists outside the mega-news-corps sometimes have a page for donations. You could donate to one once per month if you want to get rid of your $20-30.