Would you use LA Times if we'd convince them to implement the following user experience:

https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm-core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com...

NOTE: Above article is from NY Times and is ONLY for demo purposes :)

Ugh, no. Blurring the text not only kills performance but since it happens after page load is incredibly irritating.

Nevermind all the irrating navigation that suddenly appeared around the edges of the page.

Quora does this and it's why I will never, ever sign up for an account with them.

Imagine it's not blurring, but random replacement of alphanumeric characters that quickly replaces the original text in the article. Would you use it that way and which route: micro-payments or ads?

Still just as annoying. (And no.)

It does both; it not only replaces the characters with "random" ones (it may be rot13?) but it also blurs the text with a CSS effect of some type.

The typical article I spend <1 min reading. Navigating this mess to display an ad to watch a video is just not worth it and would be an instant close.

The donate 5 cent thing might work for some but I'd never want to tie a payment method to my browser.

Agree on short reading articles. How about longer size content? And have a direct correlation / Math formula between how much time you need to "invest" consuming the content vs how much time you need to "spend" up-front in unlocking the content: micro-payments vs ads. Would that work for you?

And, regarding the payment, would you connect with Apple Pay or Amazon Payments or PayPal instead of providing publishers your card directly?

I just wouldn't do it. If these were the options, I'd go somewhere else.

What I would do is pay for a subscription if it included all the major news outfits and was cheap, say $10 a year unlimited access.

That is significantly better than a site filled with banner ads, and a small fee like 5 cents is something I'd actually be willing to pay for an article like that, if the payment process were that seamless.

Thing is though, unless and until we have a standardized web payments API, I'm not sure it can be. If doing this required me to create accounts with every ad tech provider who wanted to offer something like this... no thanks.

It might not be very helpful in this context, but I'm an engineer and our company aims to empower publishers and content providers offer the best reader experience by building this solution white labeled, with low barrier of entry.

If this will evolve into a standardized web payments API, I'm on the same page with you (I don't think so). But quality journalism is struggling and solo micro-payments won't work, we all agree on that, so how can we help the freedom of speech remain free? Think about it ;)

P. S. By the way, like in software engineering, we target to reuse existing e-commerce (or m-commerce) processes for both authentication and payments, so in theory you should not be asked to create a new account. Instead reuse existing ones.

No, that demo really doesn't feel respectful of readers:

  - The headline loads, then flashes off, then reappears when a webfont finishes loading
  - A "Support quality journalism" popover jumps in front of the content I opened.
  - A fifth of the screen height is taken up with a permanent fixed-position header nav
  - When I scroll to the bottom, the page gets jumpy and scrolling lags as it tries to on-demand load a bunch of related / recommended articles

Thanks a lot for your feedback. This demo is not ideal and I agree there is more space for improvements. Would you like to help? :)

I thought when I first saw that page that it could be defeated with a simple inspect element, but it looks like when the atm-blurry is removed from the paragraph id's that the paragraphs themselves were all gibberish! I wonder if the text is randomly generated or if it's some kind of text-cypher.

Either way, this type of paywall experience is significantly less annoying than a pop-up, but I personally would still be unlikely to pay for a subscription

Interestingly the text is garbled after it's loaded. So if you view the page with JavaScript disabled, the original text is completely readable (no blur effect either). I assume this is an attempt to make the page accessible to robots but not to humans.

Cool feedback. Thank you! This approach doesn't get you to subscription (although technically it could), but rather allow you to read without unblocking or whitelisting adblockers, and without subscribing or sharing your personal data.

Nicely done - that was my first time experiencing "micro-payments". I'd be happy to pay on 5c per article as opposed to being tied to a subscription.

+1 :)

No. why not just show some reasonable, small ads instead of slowing my page load time with 20 trackers and ad auction scripts.

If you host the ads on the original site and show them without JavaScript you can easily make it almost impossible to block.

Nickel and diming users isn't going to work either, if you want to get paid for the content you'll have to do an all-in deal like Netflix and hope people sign up.

I use uBlock Origin and NoScript and your link looks identical to the original NYT link. So, no change for me.

Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, I don't think we got that far :)

I would rather read the article first, and leave a tip if the article was noteworthy.

Fair point, but it's not a restaurant and educating readers this etiquette would be really tough. How about pay for reading and refund if you think it's not worth your money? Would you do that?

I'm not sure that educating readers would be that difficult if you cater to a well-cultured audience, personally I like the approach of Smashing Magazine when you use an ad blocker:

http://i.imgur.com/YpuvdlX.png

If I ran a blog I would include the same element, some wording like "you know, creating quality content requires more effort than spewing clickbait, mind leaving us a tip to let us know that you appreciate our efforts?" and a flattr button.

Although your idea sounds like a good starting point for a website which caters to a massive audience (basically, every news website).

A simple method for that could be if the user closes the tab or navigates away before a fixed time period passes, such that it's clear they didn't have time to read much of the article, automatically cancel the payment.

I love this idea :) I hope you don't mind if I'll implement it ;)

Of course not. I dream of the ad-free web.

It's not a bulletproof idea of course, can be gamed. Users could take a screencap, or copy-paste, before the timer is up. But that's probably not worth worrying about until the model becomes widespread.

That seems reasonable.