Comment by II2II
7 hours ago
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.
> How do you price articles?
The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear.
> And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views?
Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example.
> but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half.
Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled.
That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers.
(As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.)
> On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
> They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.