Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future.
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I should just subscribe
Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).
As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.
My suggestion was as follows:
Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"
The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.
I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system.
In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe.
Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.
People already can't be bothered clicking on the paywall busting links to view articles because the friction is too high. Having to decide if something is potentially worth 20 cents seems easy when you have to make that decision in your mind a single time for something you're obviously interested in but in reality it becomes multiple times a day for things that you are maybe only slightly curious about the fatigue will add up very quickly and I double anyone would do a second reload(if they do the first load at all).
That is a correct evaluation of this. I've worked in marketing for a longer while and your instincts are spot on.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
With books, movies, tv shows, music almost everyone is discovering based on recommendations or curation. Very few people are consuming much of that type of content with no outside input on its quality or interest. News is almost always a blind link with just a headline to work from.
The headline is a pretty big clue about what's going to be in the article, I think. (Though maybe headlines will become more coy, to entice readers to pay for the full article? We already see this with questions-as-headlines.)
Most of the news I read comes from the same handful of familiar sites, so I have a good idea of what I'm going to get, especially if they include an author byline and I recognise it. "Niche" news sites would do well to continue offering a small number of freebie articles to entice those who chafe at the thought of spending $0.40 on something they're Not Completely Certain Is Really Worth It.
It's a clue of what its about but it's not the same as a recommendation that its going to contain something you enjoy.
So every click is a decision on an unknown and that's where the problem comes in. You read the headline now you have a decision to make, is it worth spending money to continue. For longer form media your return on good stuff is going to be at least an hour of entertainment. For news you will almost certainly be done the article in 30 seconds on less. So you decide to click, you read the article, it's good, it's now 30 seconds later and you read the next headline and you have another decision to make, do I pay for this? Thats where the decision fatigue comes in and why it's so quick with this model. Even if it's just a penny you're not thinking well clicking this will only cost a penny, you're thinking do I really want to pay to see what the other side says?
And if you're at the point where you're spending a lot of time on a single source even if it costs more it generally makes more sense just to subscribe since then you are making a single decision once a month.
Maybe initially you wouldn’t know if an article would be good. But over time you could probably make reasonable guesses from the author/headline/title combination.
Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.
It isn't with news though. I am a bit of a news junkie and have actually subscribed to multiple news sources over the past year and I can't name a single journalist from any of them and I am almost certainly average in that way.
What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.
absolutely, the problem of the cognitive friction of having to decide what to pay for compounds massively when there uncertainty about the purchase, and the negative experience when the user feels that he or she has been essentially scammed because the purchased product is not what was expected far outweighs positive experiences that are perceived at best as just the expected transaction
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.