I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?
How do you know what is "one good article" and what isn't until you actually read it?
There is already an increasing problem with clickbait as sites have to fight for eyeballs to get ad revenue. Making online journalism microtransaction based will completely kill whatever is left of the industry.
If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.
Think of the number of links you click on in a regular day. The front page of HN itself contains 30 articles. Browsing a few pages of it at 25c each is already $40+ in costs. Is that something you are willing to spend?
The signal given by articles that make it to the top of news aggregators would be even stronger if they were all paid content. No one is going to post or upvote something they didn’t like and lost money on. It also sounds like it would be a healthy limit on your media consumption if you’re reading 160 articles per day right now.
How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?
The general idea with micro transactions is that you have some small number of service providers that you use to pay the individual retailers with. You know like how credit cards work.
And that’s the real reason micropayments haven’t caught on—there is no universal one-click payment system for the web. Every payment processor requires at least one redirection away from the content at hand. A micropayment transaction needs to be as easy as clicking “Continue {Reading,Watching,Listening}” and the content resumes without skipping a beat.
I mean Apple and Google have prepared users for it with the mechanism built into apps when someone wants to upgrade to a premium version or add a subscription. I think the lowest I've seen is 99c but a smaller micropayment using the same system/interface is simple.
Will it, though? What's the likelihood that people stop visiting because the clickbait is both unrewarding and financially impactful?
I guess that's the unanswered question. If the likelihood is zero or closer to it, then yeah, clickbait suddenly directly upticks revenue, but if the likelihood is high enough, it might actually force the tide against clickbaiting.
That’s not the case with other paid products. I’d argue it would reduce click bait since the whole idea of click bait was created as a solution to drive more impressions on a page regardless of the quality of the material. Impressions matter because revenue comes from ads so you don’t give a shit if someone actually reads the article, you just want them to click on it or share it based on the headline. If your main revenue source was being paid by people who wanted to read the full article then you would succeed by creating articles people wanted to read. You have to show a small preview to do this but that’s standard practice now. You could also prorate by number of pages read or number of words if you wanted to be fancy.
Even then I don’t subscribe to any news sites. I want to just roll up and say “I’d like one article today please, here’s a quarter” I refuse to sign up to something I’ll barely use.
I think news is a public good, and much like paying for educating our kids, there has to be a sustainable funding model to educate the adults as well. But thats my view, and we may have a disagreement. I don't wish to convince you otherwise.
That’s already been gamed: author just makes sure the actual information you came for is past the wall, and then writes the top of the article like it’s a cliffhanger episode.
This exactly IS the paywall model, except aggregated. I doubt how expensive this kind of aggregator would be to REALLY allow these media to survive. I heard media on Apple News+ doesn’t get enough money from them.
because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite.
It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.
Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (carefully) and find out if they'd be willing to take a monthly check from 12ft that is less than they'd get if your N customers were paying the full subscription fee, but far more than the 0 you're currently getting from those customers. I think it's a good idea. Actually a great idea.
The key is going to be dealing with narrow-minded execs irrationally attached to their current business model(s), and they will argue that this product removes their leverage to get more full-subscription customers. But if they can be rational and at least do the experiment, they'd get an easy OOM improvement in revenue.
Sure, all it took was the complete decimation of their existing governments. I think the equivalent action would be the 12ft.io domain gets transferred to a different owner with a different business plan.
Maybe. I surely can't be the only one that avoids otherwise interesting articles because of a clickbait title? I know if I click it, it's likely to be BS, and I'm likely to get more of them because wherever I'm reading it goes "Ah-hah!"
I will admit that this venture has user-related problems, in that similar to ads on a website, it relies on an honest userbase that's willing to give/pay BAT to the creator of the website's content.
The infrastructure for such a system is still not fully developed, but it is technically possible to do so right now by minting an article-exclusive NFT in response to a user's micropayment, and then using SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to link a session with said address that has paid for the article. In order to facilitate cheap transactions, it'll have to be performed on a rollup like Arbitrum or Optimism, or on a sidechain like Polygon PoS.
It does still suffer from the archive.is problem where a cached version of the unlocked article can be shown to everyone else, but such an endeavor will have to be funded out of pocket and is orders of magnitude more expensive than current archive.is bypasses.
My bank sends me a 1099 when I earn $0.14 of interest on my checking account. There is no reason this hypothetical crypto company couldn't do the same.
It wouldn’t even need crypto, you just need a company with a ledger that has some big partners in news and entertainment. Apple could do it with their existing Apple Pay system. It makes me think the real difficulty might be regulatory.
The whole point of decentralization is to stop centralized power from abusing their ledgers. Yes crypto is a record of transactions (a ledger) and yes any single company can provide the same service by “simply” recording transactions in a digital ledger, but then you end up with exactly the situation we’re in: companies devaluing balances or making them expire (air miles), companies freezing accounts to save themselves (paypal), and all sorts of other feckery.
At their best, regulations stop the outright theft that companies are capable of (let’s not talk about the worst of regulations). The point is that any central authority can and will use their position to further their own profit margins at the cost of their “customers”.
The gas fees can be mitigated by moving the process over to a rollup scaling solution like Arbitrum or Optimism, or to a sidechain like Polygon PoS: I mentioned it as a necessity for cheap transactions with ETH-level security in another child comment to GP.
Is there a proposed solution that’s both low/no-fee (like $0.0001 for a transaction of $0.01, and <$0.01 for a transaction of $100) AND properly sustainable?
That’s where I think we’ll start opening the door for all the transformative microtransactions.
Moving to PoS is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for reducing transaction fees. The Ethereum merge will reduce them slightly (as it will reduce the block time from 16 seconds to 12 seconds, or something like that) but it won't make any big difference. In the coming year, there probably will also be general ZK-rollups on Ethereum mainnet that will reduce transaction fees substantially. (You can already use ZK-rollups for some limited things like transactions, but not for arbitrary Ethereum operations.) Also, way out in the future, there will be data sharding which will reduce fees on mainnet significantly, look up "proto-danksharding".
Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.
> Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?
In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with <1 min block times.
I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much.
> Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots).
The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.
(Today, the landing page loaded in Dutch for me for some reason. No idea why, probably some 'very smart' lang detection gone wrong? Either way, it _is_ available in english, so don't be deterred if that happens to you as well. After logging in, I saw eng again.)
Most publishers let members "gift" articles. But only so for members.
I think the worry is that 12ft.io can "buy" the article and then have the legal claims to also distribute it as an owner through this model? I'm totally guessing
Totally agree here, I'd pay a quarter to read most of the articles I click away from right now because they are paywalled. The pain of unsubscribing from some of these places is obscene, and a major reason I avoid subscribing to many of them. That and it's hard to pay $10 for a site I might read an article on a month, or I might read 10.
Isn't the Brave browser trying to build in micropayments? I keep hoping that will get some traction.
I love reporters and investigative journalism. It's worth funding and I hate seeing it die off. But I also don't have many good ways to pay for it. Though a couple days ago I did read a good investigative piece, without paywall, so I sent the place $10 via one-time payment.
I've worked in paywall industry previously and microtransactions never work out due to the fact that for the newspaper it's not a predictable source of income that you need to manage your budget as an organization. It doesn't build loyal subscriber bases.
The other issue is that this only promotes click-bait journalism. If you want investigative journalism the newspaper needs to invest and they need to invest before the revenue happens. How can you afford that without a predictable revenue stream.
I would happily pay for well researched information and that is not on a website overencumbered with advertisements. And has a useable blog like experience.
Is this the collective action problem? We cannot have nice news websites due to the profit from subscriptions is too low to afford business so they add adverts everywhere.
I think microtransactions could work. But people need to be willing to pay and people aren't willing to pay the same as me. I don't want to subscribe to one newspaper I want a mixture of information available.
Besides simply being unwilling to pay, I think most people just don't want to spend the mental effort evaluating the potential value of an article they haven't read yet. When the question arises, "is this article worth $1?" it's much easier to just click away and read something else. We are spoiled by a wealth of free information, even if it's mostly low quality.
I recently bought the film Contact as it's my favourite film.
But I don't usually buy film or music and I use Spotify. So the advertless model works with me.
When it comes to seeing if you want to buy something that's pretty difficult. I like the bandcamp model of Pay what you want, so you can try someone's music and if you like it you can give them money to reward them. Spotify has PayPal links on artists pages.
What I want is an all you can eat subscription where I can direct what content gets created. So I would be responsible for the content that is produced as I funded it.
What's that community of Linux kernel developers that you pay for articles?
In my opinion if we keep popularizing technologies like this we will lose them.
Look at the number of websites that are now blocking ad blockers because we all installed ad blockers on our parents machines and popularized the technology.
We should keep some technology under the radar and just for hackers.
No useful technology can be kept under the radar. In fact I think ad blocking is a good example of something that got so widespread that it became impossible to block. The "disable your adblocker to read this site" banners are quickly disappearing from the internet now that a critical mass of users has adopted them and companies are realizing they can't give up all that traffic.
Many websites just fail to load/work when an adblocker is enabled. Sometimes it's subtle like pressing a button does nothing, other times it's just a white page because React fails to initialise.
The intention of blocking the traffic was to get users to disable ad-blockers. If they are not going to do that and just close the page, then the sites would rather have the views. The additional traffic costs them nothing.
Well you are the one who brought it up. Do you have a source to show that more of them are being added? Anecdotally I used to run into them all the time, but can't remember having seen a single one in like a year (or more) now.
The federated paywall ideas were supposed to work with publishers.
They'd go to media company A and sell them something and when they negotiated with company B the requirements were completely different or they wanted different revenue shares, etc.
It was a pretty common startup idea in the early to mid 00s.
> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge.
Cool. So remind me how anyone can survive creating high quality content online?
Ads? Nope. Privacy nightmare.
Subscriptions? Nope. "Offensive".
What next? Tips? Please. We already know most people won't pay for content if they don't have to.
Micropayments? Just tips dressed up as technology.
Because the financial incentives don't reward it[1].
The only way you'll get what you're describing is via government regulation.
[1]: There's actually a much much longer-winded answer that gets into the complexities of advertising across hundreds of millions of small publishers that is too much to cover here. Honestly, you could probably write a book about the topic (and odds are someone already has).
Yeah, it's a problem. I suppose badly implemented paywalls that tech savvy people can get around but others can't is almost worse...
I think we should keep searching for solutions.
I'm not a huge fan of advertising, but I also don't think they have to be a privacy nightmare. I don't think there's actually strong evidence that intimately targeted advertising works significantly better than simple context-based advertising (put an advert for bicycles in an article about bicycles). I think that's a myth that's been propagated by the tech giants who depend on it (Google & Facebook, obviously). So maybe non-invasive advertising could work quite well?
At the end of the day, I accept we're going to have a mix of models. A bit like tackling climate change - we need a mix. Some ads sponsored, some donation-based, some with affiliate links, some with billionaire patrons, some state-sponsored.
But to my mind, models that literally block those who can't pay, or are disadvantaged in some other way (not tech-savvy enough) are the worst models of all.
> So maybe non-invasive advertising could work quite well?
You'll never get that without government intervention. At a bare minimum, ignoring targeting, tracking to enable conversion analysis--which necessarily requires deanonymizing users and connecting advertising engagements with purchases--is nirvana for advertisers and they'll never want to give that up without a fight.
And that's ignoring the fact that users install ad blockers because ads are also "offensive".
> But to my mind, models that literally block those who can't pay, or are disadvantaged in some other way (not tech-savvy enough) are the worst models of all.
Why? Until the internet came along, for folks not privileged enough to be able to pay for content, there was the library, and that remains an option today (many libraries offer free access to both physical and digital newspapers, among other things).
Given that, unless the content is sponsored by the government in some way (e.g. BBC, CBC, etc), what gives individuals the right to benefit from others' work for free?
I'm not sure how much longer I really want to entertain this discussion, but I'll have one more crack.
The number of people using and blockers is still quite low, not nearly critical mass. The "conversion analysis" stuff is mostly pseudoscience. Most companies just don't know what to do with the mountain of data they have access to. Data collection is just an addiction at this point.
But the more important thing is the "why". The library has very limited information. Sharing of information, having a voice and engagement in the conversation are all essential to the growth of mankind. Our ideas evolve as a species by including everyone, sharing honestly, increasing access to quality information and standing on the shoulders of giants.
If you believe that preserving people's ability to make money in a free market is more important than that, I really have nothing further to say to you.
> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge.
That is some Grade-A willful ignorance. Professional writers who perform their due diligence get paid. Professional photographers who travel and document important causes get paid. Editors who ensure accuracy and good writing get paid.
Good, shareable knowledge costs money to produce and you're supposed to pay for it.
Piracy is a usability problem. People want to read one article, not subscribe for a year. This is just like pirating one song instead of buying the album.
Spotify is an anomaly. We should have a bunch of services with names like Sony+, Universal Now, Warner Music Stream, and Atlantic Listen at this point.
Piracy is a business problem. They'd happily sell you one article a year if you're willing to pay more to offset the lack of a predictable revenue stream. Feast or famine tends to be a big problem for sustainability though, and it's one reason companies like Adobe moved Photoshop to a subscription model.
Right, the problem is nobody cares about the business at all. They care about the content. The same problem exists for streaming services and cable TV channels before them. People want one or more specific shows, they don’t think Netflix is any better than Hulu, and are happy to cancel and move their streaming dollars from service to service when something else interests them.
How about login walls for free content? Most news sites allow for a limited number of free articles a month except that their version of free requires I create an account and log in. So a major news site like the nytimes will always surface to the top of Google search results and if I select their article I am met with:
>"Thanks for reading The Times. Create your free account or log in to continue reading."
And even should you go through with creating an account and logging in, you are stuck with an ever present creeping footer that advertises a paid subscription as well as advertisements that are inserted between paragraphs of the article.
That content isn't "free". It's a sample, given away at cost by the Times, intended to engage you just enough to become a paying customer. Remember that all this stuff costs money to make, so when it's "free" its purpose is still to make money, one way or another.
The ad model is becoming unsustainable, people are catching on to the "we sell your personal information" approach, so businesses are now exploring the free + friction model in greater depth.
I'm not sure what you expected with the creeping footer. As a free user you don't drive enough revenue for them to sustain their business, so they're forced to introduce friction into the user experience to convert you into a real customer.
This is all true. Paywalls are a reasonable method to pay content makers and there is nothing wrong with them per se.
What I find offensive is paywalls which lower themselves selectively in order to SEO Google and Bing. That is, they're inserting their walled gardens into my searches of the open web in the hopes of manipulating me into subsidizing them. This is simply unethical.
Also people posting paywalled articles on HN is very irritating.
I've been getting less and less success with 12ft.io. I mostly use it on my phone. On my computer I use Bypass Paywall Clean[0] (chrome/firefox addon) which uses different tricks to access the full article.
bypass paywall clean is excellent. And you can use it on your phone, at least if you have the relative freedom of Android. You need firefox nightly, which allows any extension to be added; other versions of Firefox limit add-ons to a curated list. There are other builds of Firefox for Android that allow any add-on, but Firefox Nightly is an easy install from the Play Store.
Then you need to make a personal collection of addons at the firefox addon site, link firefox nightly to your Add-On collection, and as long as you added bypass paywall clean (custom) to your collection, you're off the races. The "custom" version of the add-on has a simplified UI with better defaults for a mobile phone. This is not a tutorial, but it's not too hard to get this addon working on Android. Firefox nightly despite the name is stable on my Pixel 6 pro.
This has greatly improved my browsing experience on my phone.
For the record, I subscribe to the Economist, Wired, NY Times, Telegraph (UK), the Guardian, The Age, lwn and the Conversation (via repeating donation) so I don't think I am much of a free-loader.
I’ve been using 12ft since beta. They’ve been hit by some legal notices and no longer work on some sites like NYT. It’s just a game of whack-a-mole. Ideally these workarounds are open source so they can’t just shut a domain down.
> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge.
Then who the hell is going to pay for the people that write articles all day for you? What makes you entitled for free information? How will the writers pay their bills and raise their families? Either we can complain about advertisements or we can shut up and pay for things.
Now that's off my chest, I think there should be a pooled version of news sites. One subscription to rule them all. No, not Apple news or Google news+ or whatever. Something that is sort of like Patreon but for news sites. I am totally happy to pay up to $20/month for them all.
But I fundamentally and morally disagree with the author of this site. If they framed it as "No, we cannot have $120/month for 12 different news subscriptions, until that is resolved, we built a paywall solution". But, instead they feel entitled to access premium content that requires funding and financing to produce, for free.
I don't mind paying for content but not all content is worth paying for. If micro-payments ever become viable I'd be game for that but the paywall options of today are far too onerous!
I sometimes clear cookies, use Brave in private mode, edit the html to remove a fade out etc. But 12.io makes all that BS a thing of the past.
+10 12ft.io
BTW speaking of billionaire owned news... doesn't work on washingtonpost.com
When this was first posted on HN it seemed to work without issue - however since then I have attempted to use it on numerous occasions and get a server error, or just a blank page with the window "is the paywall gone? Y/n".
>"Most sites block content with a simple JavaScript-generated facade, and bypassing them is as simple as disabling JavaScript. The Firefox Reader View is fantastic for bypassing paywalls of this type."
Is this also how "Reader View" on iOS works? Would using no-script or disabling JS in Chrome or Firefox produce the same result then?
>"The FT is the most interesing one. Many of their articles are blocked right away. But the trick here is to copy the title of the article, paste it into google.com, click on the link from Google and presto - the article is visible."
Can someone say how this works? Does this work on the HTTP Referer header?
