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.

  • schaeferpp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    This. Is. Exactly. What. I. Wish. For. A. Very. Long. Time.

    Nowadays every news site has paywalls. I’m willing to pay for good work, but if I pay a single news provider, I’m missing too much. Nobody is willing to pay for every publisher. Even if an article is just a few cents I neither want to be annoyed with the payment process nor do I want to manually keep track of how much I spent for news in a month.

    We really need a platform providing a news flat rate, aggregating most larger publishers.

    • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      No they can fuck off with the charging me money to read their article thing. I would prefer that they load that shit up to the gills with ads that I then block

        • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Nope you’re spot on, of course they don’t. Something something ability something something need, gating information except to those who can afford to support their organization should classify them as something other than news media.

        • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Clearly people are willing to pay for it. They’re profiting 50 million a year split between a handful of people

          My buck a week isn’t going to have any impact on whether or not they can run the paper, I can’t fathom making the argument that someone who can’t afford to contribute to the already massively successful paper should have zero access to it.