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Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

(www.pewresearch.org)
157 points mooreds | 6 comments | 25 Jun 25 02:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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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shafyy ◴[25 Jun 25 06:47 UTC] No.44374282[source]▶
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
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tacker2000 ◴[25 Jun 25 07:59 UTC] No.44374732[source]▶
Actually i saw bloomberg doing this a couple of days ago, it was “subscribe for 1.99 a month” and you could use apple pay. [1]

I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.

But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...

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dyauspitr ◴[25 Jun 25 08:06 UTC] No.44374772[source]▶
It would have to be $0.05 an article. 50 cents is way too high.
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1. carlosjobim ◴[25 Jun 25 11:34 UTC] No.44376073[source]▶
How is your reasoning? If an article isn't even worth 50 cents, then why is it worth your time to read it? We only have limited time in this world, death is approaching swiftly.
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2. dyauspitr ◴[25 Jun 25 19:03 UTC] No.44380794[source]▶
The reasoning being that at that price you make your profits on volume. Not a lot of people are going to buy an article unless the price is pretty much throwaway.
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3. carlosjobim ◴[25 Jun 25 19:28 UTC] No.44381022[source]▶
Can you give some examples of purchases for 5 cents that you have made?
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4. dyauspitr ◴[26 Jun 25 01:36 UTC] No.44383463{3}[source]▶
A physical copy of the daily newspaper is $2. There’s no way I’m paying $0.50 for one article in the entire newspaper. It should probably be less than $0.05 an article.
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5. carlosjobim ◴[26 Jun 25 12:42 UTC] No.44386863{4}[source]▶
But you can't pay 5c to read just an article in the physical newspaper either. You'd pay $2 for the entire newspaper if there's an article there that you really want to read. Likewise you don't get a 5c discount in McDonalds for removing the pickle.
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6. carlosjobim ◴[26 Jun 25 17:41 UTC] No.44389556{5}[source]▶
And now Google today has launched "Offerwall", which lets publishers accept payments of 50 cents for one-day access to their websites. Exactly like buying a physical newspaper.