In the WSJ, David Pierce writes,
For $10 a month, you get access to what Apple says is more than 300 titles. I counted 251 magazines in the library, from “ABC Soaps in Depth” to “Zoomer.” Every popular magazine I looked for was available in some form. Besides Wall Street Journal articles, the rest of News+ includes content from the Los Angeles Times plus digital publications like Vox and theSkimm.
This sounds like what I argued for 18 years ago.
Pierce concludes,
As it is now, though, News+ feels like a product several years too late.
My search engine is much smarter, relative to me, then their blog index. My search engine tracks tens of thousands of sites, and the search is via semantics adapted to my tastes.
My essay of one week ago says we need Penny Clicker, my mouse wants to flick a couple of digital pennies right at you, Arnold, to read your essay. In return, you cut the ad links.
Go through the tech a bit.
Instead of a news aggregation service, I sign up to a Penny service. The service maintains secret keys that only it knows, and it issues penny valid public keys in stead. So, I buy $10 of pennies, they get dumped onto my secure desktop, and can be shipped via mouse which has secure mouse clicks. When I buy a blog post, I ship one or more of these public key sequences to the author, and they can be redeemed by the service, which maintains bank account.
Low risk, hard to cheat, centralized ledger works. If the service runs a scam, or gets hacked; maybe I am out $10.
Links to your essay? To Penny Clicker?
Reasons to not like it?
Does look interesting.
It would be good to know why it feels several years too late. Market exchanges happen in the here and now. No one has conquered this problem yet.
Micro-payments are doomed because they are micro-payments. The exchange of value must be accountable. Creating a value exchange too small to pay attention to is intrinsically problematic.
An aggregation/subscription model seems to make the most sense given the choices. Its just a question of who can force the required aggregation. If Apple fails, it will be because they have become too fond of taking bigger margins.
It’s not too late, but it might be too little.
Arnold’s old article is pretty good on clubs over micro-payments:
A club would provide content aggregation, recommendation, and annotation services.
The YouTube “subscriber” model is almost an ad-funded club – those who like that type of video support the YouTuber with subscriptions, which become an ad-metric.
My 13-yo watches YouTubers for his games: Hearts of Iron IV-WWII; Minecraft; League of Legends; old MS Age of Mythology/ Age of Empires (we had a 5 person family game yesterday!).
He told me about the battle to reach 100 million subscribers.
https://www.digitbin.com/pewdiepie-vs-t-series/
https://medium.com/@meganhoins/everyone-is-wrong-about-pewdiepie-vs-t-series-f7320c7058df
PewDiePie started by uploading games and commenting on them, now he’s commenting on memes. Fun, some music, pretty silly.
While not too late, when compared to YouTube & video, for the mass audience it might be too little.
For more serious infotainment addicts of the reading kind, it might be the model of something good. But it seems unlikely to remain free of the “anti-hate speech” PC-Klan thought police, especially if done by Apple or any big Sili Valley tech giant.
Medium (already too Dem?) & Quilette provide some possibilities. Yet there are also other conservative news aggregators, including Glenn at Instapundit, PJ Media, Breitbart, Tea Party News, Whatfinger news … plenty to choose from.
My bookmarks bar is full, and if I comment on a few sites, my day goes by quickly. More aggregators & linking commenters is good.