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Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

(www.pewresearch.org)
157 points mooreds | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 02:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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rgavuliak ◴[25 Jun 25 11:58 UTC] No.44376265[source]▶
You are wrong. There have been multiple attempts at micro-transactions - and they all failed. One of the biggest was Blendle - https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...

Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.

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lovelearning ◴[25 Jun 25 13:49 UTC] No.44377334[source]▶
Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?

I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.

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1. rgavuliak ◴[25 Jun 25 18:30 UTC] No.44380454{3}[source]▶
It is essential, but the ones I mention are something that is very hard to do without. While there are alternatives they're not widespread and require significant shift in operating style to roll out. Newspaper content is not a necessity so it doesn't work the same way.