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.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
My read is thats because the aggregators wanted to be blind middle men.
These days you need to curate. I would almost pay just to remove the bottomless pit of pseudoscience from my feed.
That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it.
There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all.
Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
I mean you would be "paying" just as much to facey even if the scheme wasn't in place.
Give me 5 or 6 sources of news, maybe in packages, curated for the best reporting on a day to day basis and I would pay 5 bucks a month for that.
That sort of emulates my current pattern which is Guardian for the bulk of my input, but flitting back and forth between BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC and others to pick up highlights or specific stories not carried, or carried briefly by guardian.
Throw it on a scrollable feed and I might even drop facey and masto.