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michaelt • 12/08/2024 • 3 replies • view on HN

I buy a magazine where $3 gets you 114 short articles, each about 1/3rd of a page. So I'm paying 2.6¢ per article, if I read every single one.

Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.


Replies

Retric • 12/08/2024

My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.

ghaff • 12/08/2024

And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers.

For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.

cadamsau • 12/08/2024

True, but that’s made possible by the aggregator (the publisher who’s printed the magazine)

This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.