It’s sad that a proper payment system was never developed for this kind of content. I’d be perfectly happy to pay $x/month for all the news I get, but I won’t sign up for an ongoing subscription to a site I might only look at once.
I agree. If you're a large media org, the best way to monetise articles is to let people browse for free and buy tokens, one token per article. The more they read, the more tokens they buy, and if they're spending $30 a month the site says, "Hey, why not subscribe for $29.99 a month and get unlimited access?"
Problem is enough persons likely won't be fading enough to get to that threshold, and the business isn't sustainable on tokens. The model is inherently broken.
True. I know of a company that added a pay‑as‑you‑go option. In the first year, more people signed up, but over time subscriptions dropped, so they scrapped it.
That said, pay‑per‑post is becoming more popular, and platforms like Substack are already experimenting with it.
