Mastodawn

Windy city Mar 4

I have never come upon a paywall while casually browsing the news and thought, "Let me get my credit card out."

It's always, "I don't need to know that badly."

@pheonix @minego In a few months, my very affordable digital subscription to my local newspaper will jump to over $20 per month. It often has news I haven’t seen elsewhere, but my dude, that price seems excessive for what it is! Streaming services are almost half that.

@AncTreat5358 @pheonix @minego either you get your news subsidized by advertisers or by readers. Can you think of other options?

@Loucovey @pheonix @minego No it does make sense to support news. It is more of sticker shock for someone on a small fixed income that still wants to know what is going on in the community.

It’d feel better if it were still a local paper, but it’s part of a large conglomerate.

Flesh & bone by the telephone Mar 4

@AncTreat5358
@Loucovey @pheonix I agree, paying a subscription is reasonable.

Paywalls, constant popups, and ads all over every page are not reasonable.

@Loucovey @pheonix @minego I wish there was an option to pay per article read instead plus overhead. I recall that was a thing a few decades ago.

@AncTreat5358 @pheonix @minego there are options like that. Depends on the publication. I find subscribing to Apple News gets by most of them. But I get more annoyed by opinion articles behind paywalls. I don’t think most opinions are worth 2 cents

@Loucovey @pheonix @minego Totally concur on opinion pieces. Apple News subscriptions give a lot of value, but I wish they’d dial down the in-interface ads if you pay.

@AncTreat5358 @pheonix @minego Of course, Apple rapes the news providers monetarily, but at least they get something

Stryder Notavi Mar 5

@AncTreat5358 @Loucovey @pheonix @minego This.

There's too many news sites out there for subscribing to all or even most of them to be a viable option.

Let me pay per article. If you want me to consider a full subscription give me a way to see how much I've spent on articles from you to date - a subscription becomes a lot more compelling if I already know your reporting is solid.

@StryderNotavi Great idea of being able to see article purchases over time.

Stryder Notavi Mar 5

@AncTreat5358 A related idea would be the ability to pay a bit after reading the article to create a gift link.

Since people will want to share good reporting, the outlet benefits both monetarily and in reputation from good articles / coverage

I suspect the harder nut to crack will be administering the micropayments themselves. Presumably you'd need some intermediary where people pay into a "wallet" and can then nominate sites to pay (with the actual payments being batched to manage transaction costs).

@StryderNotavi @AncTreat5358 you don’t need to subscribe to all of them. Pick one. You will get what you need

Stryder Notavi Mar 6

@Loucovey True, but there's two challenges here:
* Figuring out which outlets are doing good quality work that I should consider subscribing to (vs those who aren't doing proper fact checking and/or are just cribbing from others original reporting).
* Sometimes theres a single article that's of interest but the outlet in general isn't relevant to me (mostly covers a different geographical area, or focuses mostlt on topics that I don't have an interest in).

In both cases, some way of paying a small fee for a single article would be quite useful.

@StryderNotavi can’t disagree, but that’s why I use Apple News and ground news. That gives me variety and comparison. I also get Al Jazerra and Sky News.

@StryderNotavi These are great ideas. I like the suggestion paying a certain amount for gift links that will also benefit the newsfeed.

And the micropayments does sound tricky. If not done properly, they could easily lose money from the transaction fees imposed.

@AncTreat5358 @pheonix @minego ground news is a good option. $5 a month and you get distillates and bias reviews of multiple views

Flesh & bone by the telephone Mar 4

@Loucovey
@AncTreat5358 @pheonix Do they show ads if you subscribe? I've heard good things about them...

@minego @Loucovey @pheonix They do. It seems as many ads as elsewhere, except it unlocks a huge number of articles, which are peppered with small ads.

@Loucovey @pheonix @minego Thanks; will check it out!

@Loucovey @pheonix @minego One interesting thing is that a perk of my library is to have unlimited access to this paper. But it didn’t seem to work. I think I’ll follow up to see if I misunderstood.