andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2018-03-21 10:01 am
andrewducker) wrote2018-03-21 10:01 am
How you should pay for newspapers in the 21st century
I saw yesterday that Google had announced a News Initiative, to make it easier for people to support newspapers. And that they were working with numerous newspapers in partnership to manage this.
Great, I thought, finally someone is going to drag newspaper funding into the 21st century.
But no. They're making it easier for you to sign up to individual newspapers online, using your Google login.
The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month, and probably over a hundred over the course of a year, and paying for that number of subscriptions for the occasional article makes no sense.
The solution I want is to pay a standard amount per month which gives me access to _all_ of the newspapers* - and then divides up the subscription between the different newspapers based on how many articles I read from each one. A Spotify for newspapers, if you like.
I'd be fine with this having limits. If I'm reading 20 articles per day from The Guardian then fair enough, tell me I need to upgrade my subscription to cover that. Access to the deep archives might be an add-on. But in general, take £20/month** out of my account, give me access to all of the papers, ad-free, and make sure they all get their fair share.
(With thanks to Mike Scott, who pointed out this obvious solution a fair while ago. It's been going round in my head since then.)
*And I mean all. There are some which I don't want to read, and some that frankly I'd rather didn't exist, but generally I'd be in favour of this approach including all of them. Obviously newspapers who didn't want to take part in this wouldn't be forced into it. But I'd hope that once it started to snowball it would be an obvious win.
**£20/month is a finger-in-the-air number. I'd be happy to pay more than that. Looking at various newspapers it looks like £2-£3/week is what most charge for access (although The Times is £6/week).
Great, I thought, finally someone is going to drag newspaper funding into the 21st century.
But no. They're making it easier for you to sign up to individual newspapers online, using your Google login.
The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month, and probably over a hundred over the course of a year, and paying for that number of subscriptions for the occasional article makes no sense.
The solution I want is to pay a standard amount per month which gives me access to _all_ of the newspapers* - and then divides up the subscription between the different newspapers based on how many articles I read from each one. A Spotify for newspapers, if you like.
I'd be fine with this having limits. If I'm reading 20 articles per day from The Guardian then fair enough, tell me I need to upgrade my subscription to cover that. Access to the deep archives might be an add-on. But in general, take £20/month** out of my account, give me access to all of the papers, ad-free, and make sure they all get their fair share.
(With thanks to Mike Scott, who pointed out this obvious solution a fair while ago. It's been going round in my head since then.)
*And I mean all. There are some which I don't want to read, and some that frankly I'd rather didn't exist, but generally I'd be in favour of this approach including all of them. Obviously newspapers who didn't want to take part in this wouldn't be forced into it. But I'd hope that once it started to snowball it would be an obvious win.
**£20/month is a finger-in-the-air number. I'd be happy to pay more than that. Looking at various newspapers it looks like £2-£3/week is what most charge for access (although The Times is £6/week).
no subject
There have been so many Spotify for News businesses, and so far, none of them have worked. I see pitches for the model all the time. There’s actually a behavior change inherent to it that’s pretty tough to crack, let alone the organizational gymnastics needed to get every publisher in the world on board with the same system. (Blendle is the most successful but even they are not doing that well. They did do a fascinating study that shows people are more willing to pay for long form journalism than news, perhaps unsurprisingly.)
I’m the world’s biggest blockchain skeptic, but this really is somewhere where a distributed, ownerless ledger could help. One company I know is building distributed access control - and that starts to be more interesting as a model for paywalls. In that situation you “just” have to work with an open standard, rather than make deals with a central company. I think payment would likely break down as fixed unit economics rather than proportional allocation though.
It’s hard and there are a lot of intertwined issues that make it even more so. Hey, if anyone’s working on something better, I’ve got money for them.
no subject
Didn't know anyone had actually tried that before.
I'd expect that to start with local newspapers, who would be happy to outsource their billing/subscription management.
no subject
I like to think so, at least.
We've got more than 7,000 of the world's biggest publishers on board and more are signing on every week. (We just signed a deal to get Chinese news content...so that's a few more thousand)
The trick is to work WITH established behavior. Not against it. PressReader can auto deliver newspapers right to your phone or your tablet if you want it to. And - every publisher gets paid a royalty when someone reads their stuff.
no subject
I’m at ben@matter.vc. Let’s set something up?
no subject