Bringing up my quarterly complaint that there isn’t a service that all news services use for micro-payments so I don’t have to subscribe to 100 news sources.
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@Ashedryden there was Blendle since 2014. It failed and now exists as a sort of subscription iirc.
@Ashedryden that was in the Netherlands / EU, and I think they tried to do a USA version, that never happened.
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@Ashedryden there was Blendle since 2014. It failed and now exists as a sort of subscription iirc.
@ton someone needs to try again!
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This is such a low-hanging fruit service that news sites would jump on to increase their revenue, how was the market not created it yet?
Love that the market has instead created a make believe machine to embarrass editors.
@Ashedryden Payment processors. The problem is payment processors. They are one of the reasons we can't have nice things.
I would love to have such a thing, though one wonders what it would do to budgeting for news sources. One month you have a popular article - jackpot! Next month, bupkis.
I feel your pain on both sides -- as a person who reads tons of news sources and somebody who really would like not to have to worry about the business side and just get paid to write.
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Bringing up my quarterly complaint that there isn’t a service that all news services use for micro-payments so I don’t have to subscribe to 100 news sources.
I’d love to give you money to read an article, but I’m not subscribing for one article.
@Ashedryden I think Defector is maaaaybe working on something like this (or it may just be improvements for the staff themselves). I know they've at least discussed it as a hard problem https://defector.com/we-won-a-grant
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@Ashedryden Payment processors. The problem is payment processors. They are one of the reasons we can't have nice things.
I would love to have such a thing, though one wonders what it would do to budgeting for news sources. One month you have a popular article - jackpot! Next month, bupkis.
I feel your pain on both sides -- as a person who reads tons of news sources and somebody who really would like not to have to worry about the business side and just get paid to write.
@jzb but, like, music purchasing works this way? iTunes and Bandcamp act as services that allow micro transactions and then re-distribute them?
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This is such a low-hanging fruit service that news sites would jump on to increase their revenue, how was the market not created it yet?
Love that the market has instead created a make believe machine to embarrass editors.
@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone It only works if all news sites use the same service, and I can see them being reluctant about handing over part of their revenue to some monopolist intermediary.
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@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone It only works if all news sites use the same service, and I can see them being reluctant about handing over part of their revenue to some monopolist intermediary.
@rigrig but think of all the sites that use PayPal. There’s gotta be a way to do this that makes news more accessible and journalists actually get paid for their work.
I wonder how much the ad industry would be against this
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@rigrig but think of all the sites that use PayPal. There’s gotta be a way to do this that makes news more accessible and journalists actually get paid for their work.
I wonder how much the ad industry would be against this
@Ashedryden @rigrig Couldn't media companies collaborate and actually *own* a standard for this, that payment processors would have to link up to? Like tech companies collaborated to create the USB standard. (I hope I am not opening up a wild Fedi can of worms with this analogy...
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@rigrig but think of all the sites that use PayPal. There’s gotta be a way to do this that makes news more accessible and journalists actually get paid for their work.
I wonder how much the ad industry would be against this
@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone I didn't mean payment processing costs, but the expectation that subscribers would cancel to "only pay for interesting articles".
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@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone I didn't mean payment processing costs, but the expectation that subscribers would cancel to "only pay for interesting articles".
@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone Thinking about it, I could see them not wanting that in general. apart from the payment-handling stuff, having subscribers who pay for "good journalism" sounds better than having to write individual maximally-selling articles.
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@jzb but, like, music purchasing works this way? iTunes and Bandcamp act as services that allow micro transactions and then re-distribute them?
@Ashedryden Hmmm. I guess that was not the model I was imagining when you said micro-payments. I was recalling previous proposals around really micro payments, like $0.05 or $0.25 per article.
You'd, like, top off with $5 or $10 and then <waves hands> do something in the browser to allocate a token to the publication.
Having a Bandcamp model would be something... you'd have to get a bunch of publishers on board. It might still have problems with bursty income -- but might solve the payment processor thing if you have a centralized entity that doesn't try to hose everybody once it reaches a certain amount of gravity.
As a news reader I'd love such a thing if it would support writers/publications doing good work. I still see potential problems on the publisher/author side, but perhaps they're surmountable?
We need some sort of small-publisher collective...
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@Ashedryden Payment processors. The problem is payment processors. They are one of the reasons we can't have nice things.
I would love to have such a thing, though one wonders what it would do to budgeting for news sources. One month you have a popular article - jackpot! Next month, bupkis.
I feel your pain on both sides -- as a person who reads tons of news sources and somebody who really would like not to have to worry about the business side and just get paid to write.
@jzb @Ashedryden I continue to root for Europe to create a digital Euro and get Visa/Mastercard to fuck off into the sun.
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