The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
alt Hacker News
The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.