Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
58 comments
·June 25, 2025donatj
nlawalker
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
greyface-
In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
salawat
Congratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer?
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
SpaceNoodled
BRB gonna make Superman 3 money
cco
I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay.
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
jdminhbg
> Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
sandspar
This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
shafyy
Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
protocolture
We really just need a good aggregator.
Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.
Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
re-thc
> Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become
No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
ProllyInfamous
I was just discussing this, earlier today, with a fellow on HackerNews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368...
Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
mgiampapa
Why not just have an extension on your phone's browser that does this automatically for you? Firefox still lives!
creinhardt
Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
bruce511
Very much this.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
Spivak
Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
hereme888
Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias. Still others will tip based on quality. However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
MarkusQ
If that's what's bothering you, I can put your mind at ease by pointing out the absurdity of our world today. Half the news you read is, in fact, part of a coordinated political agenda.
Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
usefulcat
> Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
usefulcat
> Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait?
We already have exactly that, via ads. This proposal may or may not be better, but it's far from clear that it's any worse..
> At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
By tempting you with more rage bait? Again, not seeing a significant difference either way.
Simulacra
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
calebh
There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
ggm
The value proposition shifted. I subscribed to print paper and they had a model: hook you in on a dollar a week, move you up to a dollar a day.
Now. .. the model is "subscribe to our mega package for $29.95" and I'm nup. And when I did hit up wapo on $1 the nag was endless. So much spam.
Guys, the field is huge, do $1 a month and then work me to $1 a week. And cut the spam.
CSSer
I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
ggm
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
kevin_thibedeau
I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
Cerium
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
mertd
California has this and it's great. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202320240ab...
MrDrMcCoy
I use privacy.com proxy cards for this. Don't even bother unsubscribing most of the time, I just cancel the card and let nature run it's course :)
apical_dendrite
You can subscribe to The NY Times through the App Store and then cancel painlessly just like any other app subscription.
grogenaut
very agreed, they have tons of good articles which is about as many times as I've been warned never to sign up with them because you cancel.
teeray
Nobody wants a subscription to the Podunk Nowhere Times—they just want to read the one damn article they published this decade that is actually interesting.
grogenaut
having been screwed by multiple peridocials when I wanted to cancel I'm very suspect on signing up again. and when I did It was such a pain to stay logged in. Archive.is is easier. If they fixed that and allowed simple cancellation I'd actually consider it.
and as others have said I don't need to be contacted by you. The amount of unasked for marketing emails I get is insane these days. yes I can opt out but every baseball game I go to I get enrolled without asking. Every purchase I make, that's 5 emails a weeek.
usrusr
In the ad-fundeed years, we got used to not feeling tied to the opinion bias of one or two publishers. Even if effectively we are tied, not really routine-checking more than one of two news sources, it would feel like a huge loss loving ourselves down by a subscription or two, as we did in the paper age (those of us old enough to remember).
Publishers need to find some way to recreate that universal access feeling of the ad years with a subscription. Everything else feels like a downgrade from freeloading and nobody wants to pay for a downgrade.
One model that could work, I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication" mechanism: you subscribe on your "home news source", but it also gets you some form of "paying visitor" access on other sites that are completely unrelated except for being on the same "inverse syndication" network. That network would then do some crude redistribution based on views, like how (I think?) the Spotify subscription gets distributed: a view by a user with few cross-publisher views would give more redistribution than a view by a user that spends the entire day consuming "inversely syndicated" content. Distribution rules would be something end users would not have to be concerned with, same for defining what exactly publishers are expected to include in "paying visitor" access (I think it should be allowed to be a little worse than "home news source" access?).
The key requirement would be that participating sources would have to be all shades of claiming neutral (instead of just one side of the aisle), and ideally also regional, from all regions (just like adtech gave us the possibility to "pay" with local ads on a regional news site half a planet away).
So why not "Spotify for news"? Because no trade wants to give away the keys to their entire effective market. I'm looking not only at Spotify's (+Apple, Google, Amazon) grip on the music industry, also at booking.com's (+AirBnN) grip on lodging. Journalism absolutely cannot want that. They need to get their stuff together and federate a coop.
lazyasciiart
I would pay double my local newspaper subscription if it would get me access to a couple dozen articles from other newspapers each month, especially regional papers where I’m never going to subscribe for that one-off piece about a friend but I want them to survive.
timewizard
> I think, is if there was some "inverse syndication"
Or just a clearinghouse model. I buy a "news pass" loaded with some amount of credits. When I go to a site I can choose to use these credits to read full articles. Perhaps just having the pass gives me a longer preview than non pass holders.
> grip on the music industry
It's the other way around unfortunately.
creinhardt
Isn’t this basically Apple News? It would be great if you could select your local news source, and it funneled part of your subscription their way.
joshka
ProllyInfamous
Hilariously enough, this Pew article would not have been worth having paid any subscription term to have read.
I would, however, have donated a nickel.
cypherpunks01
Did all the pay-per-article services fail (like Blendle) or are there any decent ones remaining?
MathMonkeyMan
I don't want to read the news often enough that I'd pay for a subscription. Not anymore, anyway.
Maybe I should go back to paying [7 bucks](https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers) every time I want to sit down and read the news.
warkdarrior
I subscribe to a print newspaper every day, it's about $2.35 per day, delivered to my house.
asimpletune
I sincerely believe many of our societal issues could be resolved if, somehow, people started paying for stuff again.
_wire_
Who wants to pay to be told what to think?
PaulHoule
Lies are free but the truth costs money.
crabmusket
Yep, because the truth is hard to vary but lies have few constraints.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
By this logic, Twitter is truth?
jasonfrost
>nyt is truth
ludicrousdispla
"all news is views"
I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.
The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.