As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets.
I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a physical object (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4/mo for digital only feels cheap.
I don't mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don't want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.
Suggested Solution:
Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general "content publishers" account with the equivalent of that $3.99/mo? When I get to a paywalled/ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.
Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they're already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?
This is exactly what Readability [1] was doing, really well - from a user's perspective - but they couldn't make the business model work. They got lots of paying readers on-board, but couldn't get publishers involved.
Maybe they were just s few years too early. As you say, now that publishers are slowly awakening from their slumber, they'll be more willing to give it a go.
The publishers can't give up control of pricing. If a third-party gatekeeper gains enough traction they'll control pricing, by making the market, and be able to sway the consumers choices. (Think iTunes with music or Amazon with book publishers.)
If publishers work with any micro-payment system they'll be competing on a penny-per-article basis, and not be able to pressure users into paying $4/mo for what's mostly an unwanted product.
Why wouldn't you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription. When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and providers get credited. It's really pretty simple and invisible. People get to fund what they actually use. Content creators get paid. Content providers can decide whether to paywall for out-of-network requests if they like. There is a paper trail to deal with copyright violations. I just need a huge pile of money to get people to sell it to some key players.
Pitch it as "Spotify for text". Amazon are inching towards it with the royalty-per-pages-viewed option for some Kindle titles.
Unfortunately the obstacle is that publishers would have to give up control, and share with other publishers; and I think many would rather go out of business. The music industry only cooperate due to the threat of piracy eating the entirety of their lunch.
Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.
There is also the 'pyramid' effect you can get by owning signups. If I as a content provider or just a referrer send you in as a paying customer I can get a cut of your monthly without even serving you content.
And there is also well done advertising. Once you have a big group of people that reads articles on specific topics, I bet companies will want to pay a lot to send them (top quality of course) content that is also promotional in some way.
That could work as well. Some sort of normalization would need to occur such that someone visiting 1,000 sites on a $5/mo budget would compare favorably against someone visiting 10 on the same budget. But that would certainly further reduce inaction.
I think some sort of feedback would be important, at least in the beginning, so that people understand how this magic pile of money is being treated.
Who wants to give dexterdog a ton of money to go do this? :)
I am open to talking to anybody about it. I think I've got the core functions and issues mapped out already as I've been mulling it for years and watching a few people take a swing at it on the wrong plane.
There really is no issue with one person doing 1000 paid hits versus another who only does 10 as that all balances out. Sharing of accounts is one thing, but that's pretty easy to track as you just have to keep an eye on the heavy users.
Feedback is definitely part of the package. Users are kept anonymous to the content providers by default, but there is still some good aggregate data available. Content providers won't need to worry about their demographics nearly as much since they mainly want that to sell advertising which they should no longer have to do.
For a site like Wired and many other established publishers this doesn't make any financial sense. There's still a lot of money to be made from plain old ads, as annoying as they may be to most of us. It's obvious by now that one way or the other ads are going the way of the dodo but it's difficult to think what will replace them or if that replacement will leave us better off. The way I see it, in the not so distant future all these publishers will be paywalled and we may have to resort to 'article pirates' in order to read them because I'm not about to pay 60 different $4/month subscriptions for the eventual article posted on one of the aggregation platforms I frequent. I really don't browse most of these sites, which is what would justify the $4/month, in theory anyways.
You will read more there, but you're also going to be more likely to leave if you start seeing articles posted elsewhere that you are paywalled out of. It's likely that most people are interested in certain writers and not certain mastheads. It's very similar to music.
Did you read the same article as me? They are only charging if you block ads. If you whitelist them on your ad blocker, you'll see the content. Its clear they know no one will pay, but need to address the neckbeardy complaints that will come their way about 'being forced to see ads,' 'being forced to be tracked,' etc.
>Suggested Solution:
I see nothing wrong with the solution as is: view ads or pay to block. It seems like the rational middle ground here. Oh and they're committed to 'polite' ads. I don't think I've ever seen a loud ad on their site, ever. So this is a pretty easy commitment for them. I do hope that all this drama is making web publishers reconsider how loud and obnoxious most advertising is on the web, especially the mobile web.
My big fear is that publishing will move into free hosting, namely on Facebook and other walled gardens. I think there are some pretty evil unintended consequences of ubiquitous ad blocking that no one is really considering yet.
While it does seem like they're doing well and they have gotten some very nice backing from the NYT, I would also like to know what their revenue is. They throw out the number of users everywhere, but they don't mention the important numbers like how many are actually paying and how many are paying with regularity. It just feels like they're hiding behind a high user number.
It's two years old and has half a million users in a country of 16 million people? Although it's recently expanded to Germany and growing really quickly there too, so that might skew the percentage a bit.
Back in 2014, when they had 100,000 users, roughly 20% was a paying customer.
... with a one-click refund if you don't like the article.
In regular use, you don't go through the process of paying - opening an article automatically pays the price, so it's very easy to do. However, you can always get a refund.
It's a tiny detail, but it changes the whole flow. A nice side-effect is that clickbait is punished very harshly by the customers.
(turns out you have two more clicks: there's one "please tell us why, for statistical purposes" multiple choice question followed by a confirmation - I think that's fair since it will greatly reduce abuse.)
I'd assume it's to keep things easier, especially for a young company. It should be much easier to deal with publishers when you can agree on cost per view, rather than trying to work out some magic subscriptions share model, like the one used by spotify, which is pretty hard to do and keep everyone happy.
I agree, but that variable cost is what makes it variable to the consumer which is generally not accepted. Putting a hurdle before a click to view an article generally destroys your readership.
It's totally true for things like spotify, where you can easily stream thousands of songs just in the background every month. Imagine how silly it would be if you had to make sure that spotify is closed when you leave your computer on for some time :)
However, consuming written content is different. It's much more involved, conscious action. So I am not sure if it is really much worse for the user.
I specifically remember the cries of "just let me pay you so I don't have to see ads!" once this started happening. Now it's "just let me pay some third party and have them handle the logistics of deciding who gets paid what and when but for the same price!"
This is pretty much exactly what the adblocking community has wanted since the beginning. You can get content for free and have ads. You can get content for almost nothing and have no ads.
I agree that it is way too difficult to manage a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and also that having to put my credit card information into a website (and have it bill me every month) is basically as bad if not worse as putting up with the advertisements on a website. However, I think that micropayments/a flattr-style fund for reading articles is doomed to fail because of the psychological shift between "I'm reading this article for free" and "I'm reading this article for $0.01, I only have 1000 of these left this month, maybe this isn't the one I really want to spend this on." My opinion is that a Spotify/Netflix-style subscription model is the best: collect subscription money, then pay per-user that accesses an article. However, the issue with this model is that the "network" of things that you are allowed to read will be really small at first.
That said, here is my proposed business model. Create an app that allows users to load money into the app monthly and issues each user a unique credit card number[1] for subscriptions to other websites, giving a central location to manage subscriptions. Once you build up a number of users on a single site, go to that site and say "Hey, you can save the 1% of the subscription cost from our users that's eaten up by credit card fees[2] by going through us to manage subscriptions. Oh, and it will also increase your conversion rate among our users since it will only take two clicks to subscribe instead of having to enter a bunch of credit card information. Once you have a critical mass, you go around to companies and now create the Netflix-style subscription service. If you're clever, you probably can create article-level bundles, e.g. "every article in our network that was linked to off of Hacker News," but NOW you have the pay-to-read subscription with a critical mass of information that people want to read, instead of "we're launching with these twenty sites from these four companies and we hope to add more."
[1] Yes, there are a bunch of problems with issuing credit card numbers. Yes, I know I complained about having to enter credit card numbers in the first paragraph. This is a big picture thing.
[2] This is kind of wrong, since a credit card fee will be charged to load money into the app, as well as for disbursements. At this point, the startup would probably have to eat that fee or heavily push ACH/lower fee methods of payment (even though I hate companies that push ACH for this reason).
I am a programmer, an advertising hater, and a donor-supported content creator. A couple years ago I had an idea for a product that I feel would address this problem extremely well, filling the gaps that Patreon and Flattr seem to be neglecting.
I've started on it, and it's coming along, but sadly my schedule doesn't have room for another ongoing project, and I can't afford to pay another programmer to build it for me, so progress comes in fits and starts. Maybe once I have a demo-worthy prototype I can seek funding and hire help.
Keep in mind that YT is more like a publisher than an actual content source. The content source is thousands of video producers from all over the world. These content sources normally rely on adverts to profit from their videos, but YT Red suppresses the adverts and instead pays the content producer from a pool of money (e.g. instead of getting 1c/view from the advertiser, they get 1c/view from YT Red).
PS - Yes, "YouTube Red" is a terrible name and sounds like a porn site.
Publisher network with a single sub is a workable idea. This could happen, but from publisher's perspective may lead to further commoditzation of jouranlism as "content" to throw against subs. This is basically what cable TV is now, and I've noticed there's a bit of a race to the bottom in cable TV journalism, as well as advertising.
Publishers will never buy into that. Ever. The ones who are large enough to throw up paywalls will do so. The smaller ones don't have enough margin to let a third party dictate whether they get paid.
I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a physical object (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4/mo for digital only feels cheap.
I don't mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don't want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.
Suggested Solution:
Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general "content publishers" account with the equivalent of that $3.99/mo? When I get to a paywalled/ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.
Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they're already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?