Good luck. We've spent 6 figures investigating all this over 2 years. The problem isn't payment, it's human behavior and the lack of value associated with content.
Interested in hearing more about the results of your investigations.
I think people value good content, but not all content is the same. Certain creators or agencies have intrinsic "quality" associated with their reputation, and if there is an interesting story or video that I can't find anywhere else, I'd pay a few cents to read or view it.
For general stuff, like current news and affairs, where I'm just wanting to learn about an event or happening, I'd most likely Google around searching for a free synopsis somewhere that will get me gist of the "thing" versus pay the NYT or someplace else 25¢ for the same information.
Original, high quality content has value. I just don't want to spend $20 a month hoping to get my money's worth.
I think part of the problem is there is usually an all-or-nothing approach taken.
I pay for a number of things and I'm ready to pay for more things. Here are the rules that almost nobody seems to be able to get right:
- I'll not pay monthly unless I have to. Everyone and their dog wants recurring revenue but the only ones I'm happy to pay constant recurring fees to are: hosting providers, email providers and all-you-can-listen/-watch services that contains everything [0]. Especially bad are local newspapers that are all paywalled - but won't sell me access to that one article someone linked but instead wants to sell me a subscription.
- Blendle: I'll be happy to pay for more articles on Blendle (Computer magazines, this one goes to you.)
- Blendle-like services from other actors.
- I'd even be happy to pay for ads to disappear. I'm a nice guy and I'm looking for ways to support the places I visit. Sadly Google closed that experiment before I could even try it.
[0]: At the moment this list contains just one entry, Spotify.
People don't want to pay per article. It's too much friction to decide every time they read something (or worry about refunds after the fact), and many users spend hours on these sites going through hundreds of pages. Easy discovery of other stories is a major part of publisher value. Blendle pricing doesn't work at scale for mainstream users and they say that themselves, but they have a beta in the US if you still want to use it: https://launch.blendle.com/
That seems to imply that the products people are selling aren't products people are willing to buy. Spending millions trying to figure out how to get people to buy things they don't want can only go so far.
We had an extension (web and mobile) called Sterling with monthly subscription tiers. It would automatically block ads on all sites and signin for paywalled sites that joined the network, or we would use some sneaky techniques to gain access to the article anyway (api/reader views, etc) to at least test the viability.
Each users money was split by time spent on each domain monthly which was the only collected data. Held in escrow until publishers claimed each domain. Biggest problem was getting people to consider that subscriptions were worth it, even if they were spending 10s of hours on these sites. $0.99 had interest but was not viable. $9.99 had some uptake but under 1% conversions.
Overall didn't make enough money and pubs also too scared/proud to work on anything other than their own subscriptions. Lots of politics in this industry and lack of cooperation is a major obstacle.
