Would you pay 2 cents to read an article?

I’ve been using ad blocking for a long time. I wrote about that in an earlier post. I do realize that media companies need revenue and journalists need to be paid. I was wondering how a page view actually brings in revenue-wise and found this interesting analysis.

If you do the numbers, a page view brings in up to 2 cents per page view. That’s really not a lot of money. If you read 10 articles a day, it’ll cost you $6 / month. That’s less than half of what I pay for my subscription for the Economist.

Brave is trying to tackle this problem with Basic Attention Tokens (BATs), but it’s still early days. Blendle is doing the same with micropayments per page view – their average costs is 10 – 20 cents per article. It’s very expensive, but they do offer premier news and publishing outlets and they’re worth more than a buzzy article by HuffPost. 10 articles per day would set you back $45 which is just too much. The cost here is creating friction. Do I really want to read that article? You don’t really want to make that decision.

I think media subscriptions services for music and TV have determined that $10-15 / month is a good price point here in the US. And that’s for all you can eat.

There’re rumors that Apple is trying to launch something similar like Blendle but with a fixed subscription fee. We won’t know until it launches if it ever launches. Their live TV subscription never materialized either.

I do hope for a future where I can switch off my ad blocker and still have a good internet experience. I’m open to pay for that – please take my money.