F*** Paywalls(1ft.io) |
F*** Paywalls(1ft.io) |
Why does it take us so long?
They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.
Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.
Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).
I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks
30.
So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.
Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.
Thoughts?
Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.
Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners. Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.
The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)
1) Anything that was done for monetary gain on the internet was inherently bad and it's no loss if it goes away
2) People will just magically decide to keep creating content out of the goodness of their own hearts
They're not. If no one wants to pay for it then it's not supposed to exist, speaking in terms of how the capitalist system is supposed to work
I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.
It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that
The other factor is corporate influence. Most of the media is owned by the add dollars that drive it, so it's not the truth, often its what helps or at least doesn't harm the Corp that passes the filters.
Please name one website whose paywall can be bypassed using this proxy.
https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%...
Typically news sites rate limit how much a particular IP can be used to read articles. I assume the proxy IP is different each time.
There is no shortage of brilliant people who are happy to share their creative work for free. Remember blogs and RSS? They were great. Static pages don't cost anything to host either.
I reject your false choice.
Really? Who's hosting static pages for free? Github? Because they certainly still make money, they're just hoping to upsell people. If static sites for Github become a major cost you can bet they'll find a way to subsidize, such as advertising.
One person writes the article and 1000 people copy it.
The only way to solve that would be for Google to be smart enough to only link to original sources and not reposts.
Then at least we are rewarding original thinkers and could concentrate our attention (and money) there.
> And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time,
Where? Sites like Wordpress or Medium are ad-driven. Or you have to create your own site, which means paying for hosting.
Internet content is largely non exclusive and infinitely replicable.
Even the RIAA gave up and embraced the web, if begrudgingly.
Single edition single article news is simply a different type of good/product on the web. When publishers realise this and do what Spotify/QQ have done for pop music, then they'll get the additional revenue they seek.
Maybe not in its current form where faang gets to make billions loads of services are free, but fundamentally it can exist
Also the analogy is flawed because many people will stick to a few different meals they like from a restaurant. This would make no sense at all for information/articles.
At least Google News and Artifact lets you block sources and with Artifact it understands paywalls, so stops recommending you posts after a while.
The one thing both of them are missing is the ability add a new source. E.g. if I stumble upon an interesting blog post or newsletter, let me add that blog to the mix, but use the same algorithm to incorporate the post intelligently into the algo feed.
Even better, do the american healthcare trick - set a price at say 1000$ per article but allow only big corpos to have some opaque bulk discounts for their employees. Thus maximizing money extraction from richest customers.
Also, ads aren't paying everyone's bills -- hence the paywalls -- so that number must be too low.
(Not to mention the other issue with this: in general it's not ads or micropayments/paywalls -- it's ads and micropayments/paywalls. Hell, if micropayments were feasible, it would probably be all three.)
I'm not paying $5/outlet/month though, ever!