zlacker

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+(OP)
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.

>>mindcr+(OP)
Micropayments are the way to go. But as the intermediate solution, I would be in favor of (non-expiring) credit-based microtransactions. E.g. you buy $20 of NYT credit. After that, it is $.25 for a single article <3y old, $1 for any number of today's articles, $3 for any number of articles from the past 7 days, $10 for full access for the following 30 days.

I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!

It's all gain for the sellers. But from the customer's perspective, one still has to give their credit card number, and may still end up paying for content they won't use.

>>CSSer+M8
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.

>>m000+fa
I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!

That's a fair point. And I definitely favor a real micropayments option in the long-run. But I could settle for a tiered plan in some cases as an interim step, especially if the only other option is the "unlimited plan" which just doesn't (in most cases) make sense for my usage patterns.

>>mindcr+(OP)
Micropayments have a 50 year history of consistently and precisely perfectly failing to work.

The grail you seek is not the holy sort.

>>Apollo+gk
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".