There's only one way this all goes.<p>People will donate/subscribe to journalism which claims it faces an existential threat. They will only subscribe to journalism they think is most antagonistic to the political entity they despise (as those are now the TOE for having political views now). They aren't subscribing for news, they are paying to shore up a vaguely legitimised view of their prejudices.<p>This will mean journalism will have to become more biased, more unsound, more toxic and more representative of the various political echo chambers on social media as they court donations.<p>I see no other way this evolves.
I've started subscribing to journalists I like on Substack. I feel pretty good about giving a serious journalist $5 a month. No advertisers to please. Long form, highly researched articles. I don't know if it scales, but it's pretty great for me at the moment.
If an ad subsidized dead tree periodical can sell for < $5 why am I expected to pay $10-$20 for the same content online with lower distribution costs?
Nick Szabo has an interesting take on it. Essentially when the mental cost of deciding if the article is worth paying for exceeds the actual price you'd pay you lose from the start.<p><a href="https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs/" rel="nofollow">https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/micropayments-and-m...</a>
I'll just say short sighted article, the main problems are news paper organizations who want to maximize profits no matter what and non operational payment processors who can't process real micropayments. One of the reasons why Bitcoin was made is "casual transactions" like news article access. Micropayments will come sooner or later.
What an actual joke of an article. An overly academic way to say that "we don't want users to pick and choose what they pay for, we want them to spend extra money on unlocking all content, regardless of its subjective quality".<p>How about this... make the content free and put a tip jar. If you don't like that approach, don't be mad when people don't pay to unlock.
Why does no one talk about brave’s approach to micro payments. It makes micro payments effortless. One doesn’t even need to use their ad based model. Instead, just buy some of the BAT tokens and use them.<p>Is there some inherent flaw in there approach that it’s not more widely discussed.
journalism just doesn't know how to adapt. One thing they don't get is "social" when it comes to news, individualization, and from games, they just don't get micropayments are often not for your core thing, so don't try to charge for articles. I think there's so many opportunities for them to reinvent their world and make money.