I really dislike ad driven publications. I’m not opposed to paying for quality news publication, but for something like NYT, there’s only a couple articles a month I come across that I’m really interested in reading. There problem is that there’s 4-5 other paywalled publications where I have that same issue. I’m interested in their content, I just can’t justify the subscription price for the small amount of content from them I’ll actually consume, and I really can’t justify paying subscriptions for 4-5 publications at once.
I would pay $5-10 a month for a news aggregator for paywalled publications. It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles, it could be opened up to independent writers as well (e.g. integrate your substack with it). Maybe even an additional fee that includes digital magazine publications as well.
I can’t imagine it would be worse for the industry (unlike Spotify), as it already seems like journalism/news is hovering above collapse. They would be making money off of people who weren’t providing revenue previously.
I think this would actually drive shittier quality.
Current models, like the preceding model of physical paper delivery, have a relatively fixed income stream from the subscriber base. They make the same amount of money whether the news day is “Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor” level or whether the most interesting story is that a German Shepherd won the AKC dog show.
Under a service that aggregates and pays a minor amount per click, how does NYT stand out above WaPo? Or Ap or Reuters? Click bait headlines and incomplete stories so they can write multiple and get more clicks, because each click is not worth very much.
I think the better model for NYT et al would be to offer a punch card like option: 10 articles, $15… or whatever. They should have enough data to determine what the average number of articles read is, per subscriber, to determine what the tipping point is, and capture some new pay-as-you go subscribers.