I’ve never seen an option to pay for one specific article. I think I’d be more inclined to do that than to subscribe. The guardian offers the ability to donate but if I recall it was only in amounts that around $10 or more which feels like it would cover several articles. You could just donate that much and personally consider it a down payment on however many articles you think that buys, but psychologically a cheap price to buy the one specific thing you’re trying to read feels more reasonable when you’re making the decision to pay or not.
Another idea I’ve heard is basically getting a subscription to access a big basket of publications with each publication getting paid out of a central pot based on what someone chose to read. I think the various publishers hated this idea from what I heard so it was something of a non starter.
I would absolutely pay $5 a month to get past all the news paywalls, or 10 cents for an article. The big thing is that it would need to be easy. Like “login once and get access to all of them without additional accounts” easy. Or if it’s a pay per article, again not have to make an account and configure a credit card, just use a central service that I can get the article in under 2 clicks (buy and confirm) no matter which paywall it is.
Part of the problem is credit card fees eat up a lot when they deal with small values (less than a dollar) so they are trying to avoid that. But a “big pot” subscription that gets distributed as you use it would alleviate that.
I’ve never seen an option to pay for one specific article. I think I’d be more inclined to do that than to subscribe. The guardian offers the ability to donate but if I recall it was only in amounts that around $10 or more which feels like it would cover several articles. You could just donate that much and personally consider it a down payment on however many articles you think that buys, but psychologically a cheap price to buy the one specific thing you’re trying to read feels more reasonable when you’re making the decision to pay or not.
Another idea I’ve heard is basically getting a subscription to access a big basket of publications with each publication getting paid out of a central pot based on what someone chose to read. I think the various publishers hated this idea from what I heard so it was something of a non starter.
I would absolutely pay $5 a month to get past all the news paywalls, or 10 cents for an article. The big thing is that it would need to be easy. Like “login once and get access to all of them without additional accounts” easy. Or if it’s a pay per article, again not have to make an account and configure a credit card, just use a central service that I can get the article in under 2 clicks (buy and confirm) no matter which paywall it is.
Part of the problem is credit card fees eat up a lot when they deal with small values (less than a dollar) so they are trying to avoid that. But a “big pot” subscription that gets distributed as you use it would alleviate that.