zlacker

>>uptown+(OP)
"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage"

Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc.

Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.

>>tyingq+Nb
Yeah, somebody really needs to solve the micropayments problem for real. I have no problem paying for content, but there is no way in hell I'm paying $35 a month for a Reuters subscription just to read one or two articles a month. And same for NYT, WSJ, yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean... if we all paid for monthly subscriptions for every news site we read a couple of articles a month from, we'd be paying $600 / month just for news. I think that merits a "C'mon, man" response.

If nothing else maybe these sites could have plans that are tiered somehow, instead of going from "5 free a month (but you have to register and give us your info)" straight to "35.00 a month for unlimited." Give us "$3.00 a month for 10 articles, or $8.00 a month for 20 articles" tiered plan options or something.

>>mindcr+Uh
Why not just offer a preview (headline and first paragraph) and pay a small fee per article; maybe something like a quarter? They could also include an unlimited tier for avid readers. A decade ago this model would probably be a non-starter because it would require the inconvenience of maintaining an account everywhere and going through an awkward checkout flow for every transaction. SSO payment providers make this a lot easier now. Anecdotally, Apple Pay is a joy to use, for example.

>>CSSer+Gq
That is the micropayments problem. You have to make it easy enough, like taking a quarter out of your pocket, for people to actually do it. And low enough fee where it's worth it. I believe most micro transaction providers still charge at least a flat 10c fee, which is a hefty portion of any micropayment.

>>Apollo+aC
So why not pass that along to the consumer? If we were talking about a quarter an article before, now it's thirty five cents. I'd still pay it. My point was that the technology seems good enough now. I'll admit I could be way off on the price for it to be economically feasible, but I'm still very curious what that is. Based on what I read, see and hear, many of us have "subscription fatigue".