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Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

(www.pewresearch.org)
157 points mooreds | 5 comments | 25 Jun 25 02:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.323s | source
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donatj ◴[25 Jun 25 03:15 UTC] No.44373354[source]▶
I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.

The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.

The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.

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nlawalker ◴[25 Jun 25 03:20 UTC] No.44373377[source]▶
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.

I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?

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1. sandspar ◴[25 Jun 25 04:10 UTC] No.44373549[source]▶
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
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2. close04 ◴[25 Jun 25 07:36 UTC] No.44374582[source]▶
> This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them

Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.

When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.

Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.

Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.

3. horsawlarway ◴[25 Jun 25 08:34 UTC] No.44374950[source]▶
This is not at all what ads are...

Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.

That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.

All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.

4. JohnFen ◴[25 Jun 25 13:41 UTC] No.44377248[source]▶
And it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
5. Workaccount2 ◴[25 Jun 25 15:08 UTC] No.44378224[source]▶
Let me remind people that ABP (ad block pro) the OG ad blocker, collapsed and gave rise to uBlock because ABP understood that the internet would go to shit if no one viewed ads, so they tried to strike a truce between users and ad companies.

The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.