Not Netflix for News — but Something
tl;dr So sick of news paywalls
Yes, I am willing to pay. No, I do not want to have to set up a subscription to every news outlet on the planet. Can someone make an aggregator/paywall that I can pay per article (maybe with a cap) that will send my money to the appropriate place, please? 🙏
I don’t like ads. But I also don’t like having to sign up to every single website I visit. Particularly when I’m visiting the site to get news.
I work at a startup, so I absolutely understand the need to charge for services. Media outlets have staff and overheads. I want them to continue running sustainable businesses. In fact I want them to run GREAT businesses, because the media needs financial freedom to write well-researched and detailed articles. (Please, no more slap-it-together-and-get-it-out-the-door articles.)
I’m a big fan of publications like The Saturday Paper for this reason…..BUT. Here’s the thing. Sometimes, I want to read an AFR article. Or a New York Times article. Or a Wired article, or something from the SMH. I’m fairly publisher-agnostic — I want to read good content on topics that I’m specifically interested in. I definitely don’t want to subscribe to each service! Subscriptions for a particular service are only valuable if you’re accessing a lot of their content. And I’m typically not. I might read 5 or 10 articles in a month, split across a number of publications.
Some publishers have a freemium threshold — you can access X articles for free per month. So far so great, except when you hit the cap and REALLY REALLY REALLY want to read the article. I’m happy to pay for it! But I don’t want to sign up for a larger priced subscription and give you all my personal and payment details, just to read this ONE article. Not to mention the fact that doing so will probably take longer than reading the article. So I don’t — and the publication gets zero money from me.
**Edit** I think I should clarify here that when I say “news”, I’m mostly talking about long form journalism — investigations, essays, opinions, etc. Articles that are more than just a daily “what’s happening in the world”. I suspect those different forms of “news” need very different business models.
What’s the solution?
Here are my priorities:
- Read great content on demand (publisher-agnostic — well ok, not agnostic, but more options than subscribing to 1 or 2)
- Limit the number of organisations that have access to my personal details and payment details (digital security)
- No ads or marketing — I’m paying you in dollars (don’t monetise my data)
So here’s my idea of the day: a single point-of-contact paywall for news.
Maybe it’s an aggregator with syndication from other services (one subscription to rule them all). Or maybe it’s a payment service that is enabled on individual news sites — eg. a Paypal button “Pay $1 to access this article” (is this already feasible? why doesn’t anyone do it??). Or perhaps a hybrid of those would be better, so you can create caps and bundles.
The UX would be exactly the same as now — find an article, click the link to read. But instead of the pop-up “You’ve reached your free limit for the month”, it would say “Pay $1 to access this article”. You’ve already got an account with the payment service, so it’s easy to approve the payment and keep reading seamlessly. #winning
Micropayments profitability
When I discussed this idea amongst friends, the main objection raised was the profitability for content creators. I agree that’s an important criteria. It’s plausible that news services rely on regular subscriptions where users (a) don’t “use” the full value each month, and (b) often forget to unsubscribe.
Let’s put aside the morality of a whole industry relying on people paying more than they are receiving for a second (but also — eww, right?).
It doesn’t have to be $1. Whatever the amount is to make it worthwhile. I think pay-per-view is a simple model from a consumer perspective, and actually has the potential to come out ahead, because people typically are terrible at estimating how small frequent amounts add up. Ask someone to pay $4 for a coffee — NBD, right? Tell that same person they spend $1,460 per year on coffee and all of a sudden they are shocked¹. In some cases at least, people do spend more via micropayments than they would spend if it was presented as a lump sum.
But if we model pay-per-view and it doesn’t come out ahead, that’s not the only option. You could still do a subscription model where the money is split and distributed to whatever content you accessed that month. I mean — we used to pay for physical newspapers, no? Have a button for “You haven’t purchased this newspaper yet — it’s $5 and you can read any of the articles in this week’s issue.” Just give me a way to pay that doesn’t force me into a live-in relationship with your specific publication. That’s not a decision I’m ready to commit to when all I wanted to do was read an article.
Netflix for News
One of the obvious options — a subscription service on a news aggregator — would essentially be Netflix for News. I’m not sure it’s the best model, but it’s an option. Some reasons why a Netflix model is less than ideal in this scenario.
Personally I think the payments gateway model is more compelling, because any individual news service can implement and test it — you don’t need a whole bunch of publications to get on board before it’s worthwhile for one.
The bottom line
Right now, news services are getting exactly zero money from me and people like me. In some cases they are monetising our data (if you’re not paying, then you’re the product). In others, are we just written off as not “real” customers?
Surely there are enough of us willing to pay small amounts that this could work. I live in hope 💜.
- Ironic that I found a relevant WSJ article but couldn’t read it to confirm because it’s behind a paywall. This one will do as a source instead: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/20/kevin-oleary-and-other-money-experts-on-buying-coffee-every-day.html
- PS. A note to The Guardian: I admire your stance on this. I’m not a subscriber currently — see point 1 and 2 in my priorities. But if you had a way to pay-per-article that didn’t involve me committing to an ongoing subscription or giving you my details, I’d do it.
- PPS. There seem to be some options out there — Scribd, Blendle, Agate. Everyone is going for a new app (aggregator) model though. Why not a payment gateway model?