7 ms·

No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psycholog

by hapless 11y ago

No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psychology. Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of $1-$2-$10. These are the models that work. It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel. It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or any other platform. It's what's built into your brain. "Pay as you go" is incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers. I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Agreed, strongly. For one of the best arguments, see "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments", written in 1996 by Nick Szabo. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Amazon's recently come up with $10/mo all-you-can-eat book purchase plan.
fraserharris 11y ago
"No micropayment system has ever succeeded" This is wildly incorrect. $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games[1]. The key to their success was bulk purchases of intermediary "currency" that frees players from the mental energy of thinking about actual money (its a sunk cost because the currency can't be redeemed). [1] Distaste for social games and the business model does not invalidate the financial success of their implementation of micropayments. Note: I started a micropayments company.
- hapless 11y ago
  In-app-purchasing in games relies on conditioning the user across many hours of gameplay. 98% of users never take the bait. Roughly 0.15% of users make up 50% of the revenue. In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model is relevant to web content. I can't set up a pain/pleasure response in readers and condition a tiny fraction of them to pay vast sums after 10 to 50 hours of engagement. That's not an option in journalism. (Not that this has stopped the FT from trying it: $1 for a one-month trial, $480 a year for a subscription. I wonder how good the conversion rates are?)
  - MikeTV 11y ago
    IAP in freemium games is often a substitute for time (grinding or waiting). I wouldn't pay 5¢ for an article, but I might pay 1 token for a well-written summary of an article with the main points highlighted, if a quick skim identifies that the article is interesting.
  - fraserharris 11y ago
    Could 98% be an artifact of the 100's of millions of people who have tried social games? 2% is at least in the high millions if not low 10s of millions of people. I (and it appears a significant number of others) ended up paying for the Economist - the 10 articles free / month was conditioning enough.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Social games are a prime example illustrating the parent's point that true micropayments (as in, lots of very small payments) don't work - they all have found that the payment models that actually bring in revenue are "micropayments" only in name, they're exactly as it was said, either "a monthly bill for all you can eat" ... or "discrete payments of $1-$2-$10", or even very high price packages targeted to a few "whales" that still bring in a substantial portion of total revenue. Charging $10 is accepted by the paying consumers, being nickel-and-dimed isn't. Even in the "micropayment" games.
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    So what? Your micropayments platform makes it easy to create an account with a website, put $5 into their payment bucket, and then automatically pay a cent or two every article you read. You're splitting hairs over definitions, but the grandparent's point is simple: The model is already there. Candy Crush bonuses or Journalistic Articles doesn't matter. Give the payers a bucket they can throw five or ten bucks into at a time, that gives them pain-free access for long enough that they don't feel annoyed throwing another five bucks in later.
    - phasmantistes 11y ago
      Which is, in fact, exactly the model of Google Contributor. Puts $5 each month into a bucket, and then each time you visit a site you pay a few cents in order to have an ad-free experience.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > So what? Your micropayments platform makes it easy to create an account with a website, put $5 into their payment bucket... That's it right there. That's the "what". :) Paying 0.01 cents to someone is quite different from paying $5 to that same someone that gets delivered in tiny portions over some span of time. In the first case, you're out a tiny fraction of a cent. In the second case, you're out $5. Because (AIUI) the money movement system makes it prohibitively expensive to move fractions of cents around, micropayments don't happen.
- mahranch 11y ago
  > $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games Web content and gaming aren't remotely the same. Micropayments in gaming is almost akin to gambling for many games. Then there's the whole "pay to win" aspect, and "pay to play" aspect where you have points or stamina that gets eaten/spent as you play. When it reaches zero, you need to wait hours for it to recharge, or pay to recharge. Web content is like buying a magazine in a store, or a newspaper from a gas station. It's nothing like mobile gaming.
warcode 11y ago
Flattr really hit the sweet spot for me in this regard. I set up an account, put some money in it, set a $20 monthly limit, hook it up to soundcloud and github, and then every time I "like" a song or "star" a repo it adds them to that month's list. At the end of the month it divides the $20 between everything I enjoyed most that month. A similar system would probably work for ALL web content. But as always this gives the control directly to the consumer and big companies don't like that at all.
- onion2k 11y ago
  A similar system would probably work for ALL web content. With the obvious proviso that it would need to be simple enough for everyone to set up in order to get the traction necessary to be useful. Simple enough for everyone means one button with a single 'Yes please' screen (eg OAuth). Anything more complex than that is destined to fail.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Or attached to the ISP bill, similar to how one could buy J2ME games by hitting a link in the WAP browser.
    - exelius 11y ago
      Do you really think it's a good idea to put ISPs in the position of doling out micropayment money? They would need to collect a fee for processing it, and what business rules are in place for transactions smaller than the fee? And similarly, how do you prevent fraud? WAP was a walled garden experience; if I can send money to any site on the Internet by clicking a button, what's to stop a malware author from using their malware to send lots of clicks (and thus money) to a site they run? Technically, micropayments aren't a difficult problem to implement. The business rules around financial transactions (which exist for good reasons) often present an intractable conflict with what would be a viable user experience.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
NH_2 11y ago
> It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel. I agree with the above, but disagree that this makes micropayments for online content a futile venture. There are a couple ways that come to mind to solve the mental fatigue issue: 1. Automate all the payments 2. Automate all the payments w/ a cap 3. Automate payments from whitelisted domains 4. Don't automate payments, but ask to whitelist new domains (similar to: "remember me"). These could all just be user preferences, just as described in the post.
- hapless 11y ago
  I think proposition #2, ala flattr, is the only viable one out of this lot. The other three all fall on the sword of "should I pay $0.05 for this mouse click?". If the user ever has to ask himself that question, the game is up.
- pjc50 11y ago
  TBH, the entities that should be paying sites are the link aggregators like HN, Reddit, and especially Facebook. Reddit lets you give "gold" to individual users if you like what they've said; I wonder what would happen if they allowed the handing out of gold to sites linked from Reddit?
  - manigandham 11y ago
    Why would link aggregators be paying? Who pays them then?
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    I dunno how real the story is, but this bring to mind the exchange between Disney and Microsoft over who should be paying the other. Either Disney for using MS video formats, or MS for using Disney content. The whole thing basically heads face first into net neutrality territory. That said, back during for pay phone services the service got paid by the telco, and then the telco added the cost to the callers bill. So should perhaps my ISP bill me for my Netflix viewing, rather than me paying Netflix directly?
  - 11y ago
Paul-ish 11y ago
Are there studies that show people would not like a micropayment model? As a counter example to what you say, there are plenty of free to play games on mobile that have small in app purchases.
CPLX 11y ago
That's flatly untrue. I've got a good example: SMS When texting started it was almost universally $.25 or $.10 or so per text. One would definitely be aware of that fact when communicating with friends but you get over it because it's useful. Wait I have another example, $0.99 songs via iTunes. That was the model that created the largest music retailer in the world from whole cloth. It's not that complicated, all it would take is for someone (gee I wonder who) to standardize the price (or price tiers) and have a quick modal OK to continue on to the article for one credit, or equivalent.
- Already__Taken 11y ago
  You're describing things that were inconvenient and made convenient with a nominal transaction cost. You couldn't just buy one track before. Now you can for $.99. You couldn't send a text message at all before. Try $.10 per email and see what traction that gets.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    Sure and I used to watch SNL for free over the air, now I pay $8 a month for Hulu. Things change. The market, like all markets, is defined by people's willingness to pay and their next best alternative. Make the transaction cheap and nearly frictionless and it might be the choice with the highest utility.
  - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
    > You're describing things that were inconvenient So... pretty much every web paywall I've ever encountered. Where's my amazon 1-click for news website paywalls? Several of which I encounter using this very site? I don't want to create an account, subscribe, save my details, unsubscribe from services I no longer use, etc. for each individual website.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Average people don't purchase itunes songs all day every day and they have a high replay value. It's worth the mental energy. You don't want to be deciding whether to pay on every little pageview.
JacobJans 11y ago
Micropayments are fundamentally bad for websites. It is an inferior business model. Think about it this way. Businesses need stable, predictable income. If they depend on "micropayments," then they would depend on producing consistently high quality articles. I am a subscriber to the New Yorker. They have some of the best writing out there -- but some of it is just not that good, in my opinion. And yet, I still pay for it. A subscriber is willing to forgive bad content -- and still give you money. You're able to build a relationship, and ask for the money once (a year), not constantly. $70 * 1,000 subscribers = $70k a year. Plenty to support the livelihood of a good writer. How many "micropayments" would they need? What if they struck out a few months in a row? They'd have to find another job.
- justizin 11y ago
  All of this is true of the existing advertising system, which is a micropayment system, but instead of taking money from me, it takes resources and information about me and gives them to advertisers for a fraction of a cent.
- manicdee 11y ago
  What about a two-tier system: flattr/contribution for casual visitors, and a monthly/annual subscription which removes all ads (including Contributor fillers)? As a new visitor I might click the flattr/contributor button (equivalent to "+1"), then when reviewing a statement I realise that I am visiting your site a lot, so switch to subscription instead. The core issue is people recognising the value of good journalism or tech writing in terms of dollars, and being willing to pay for stuff that is worthwhile. After that the problem is only removing "friction" in getting a payment to the publisher.
exelius 11y ago
This is called "friction", and you're right -- it's the core reason microtransactions have never taken off. Now, you can remove the friction by devising some automated system that pays sites some amount of money based on how long you spend there, but then you have to build an entire fraud-detection system to make sure people don't try to game the system and take more money than they are owed. This would add significant transaction costs -- and these costs would be high enough that very small transactions would no longer make sense to process. Keep going down this road and you'll eventually realize that you're just another credit card payment processor and have a similar cost structure. Bitcoin solves none of this, btw - you still want to make sure whatever micropayment scheme you use doesn't hand over your Bitcoin to a fraudster. So now we're back at the user being the "filter" for good vs. bad transactions by making them explicitly authorize those transactions. And the friction problem you describe is very real: something like 90% of buy flows are abandoned at the credit card entry page. Micropayments are an intractable problem in my mind; they would solve a lot of business model problems but I don't know that they're very attractive to consumers.
- c22 11y ago
  > something like 90% of buy flows are abandoned at the credit card entry page I'm interested in this statistic, do you have a source? Are you saying that 90% of all buy flows are abandoned at the payment stage while x% are abandoned at another stage and <10% are completed or are you saying that 90% of all abandoned buy flows were terminated at this stage? In case of the latter it seems like knowing what percent of all buy flows become abandoned would be relevant to your point. Also, was this data collected from one vendor/industry or from multiple sources? I'm also curious if the study examined cases where the "pay now" screen already had the customer's payment information (e.g. for a pre-existing customer).
  - david-given 11y ago
    I've abandoned a lot of payments at that stage --- mostly because frequently, the only way to find out how much shipping is going to cost is to almost complete an order! I bought some electronics today; I ended up almost placing an order at three different distributors until I found the one I wanted.
pbreit 11y ago
I tend to agree but I'd like to see a frictionless system in the 5c-50c per article range. There would need to be a decent preview so you have a decent idea what you're getting (like Benedict's newsletter or The Information). And one-click.
larrys 11y ago
"it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel." Related in a way: How people can easily waste "energy" because it takes no "mental energy" to do so. Each time you turn on a light or decide to leave a light on (or even drive to a store) you are not confronted with "going to drugstore, cost 1.23, proceed?". ".10 to turn light on for 1 hour, proceed?" The cost is hidden and given to you in bulk. You just have to decide generally that spending $35 per week for gas is "worth it". (Along with other fixed type expenses). It's interesting that the opposite of netflix was the video store, even with a monthly plan and no cost per DVD. You would have to get to the store, review the available movies, and then decide which one to rent. All along knowing that if you got home and didn't like the movie, you'd have to trek back to the video store and repeat the process. In that case, and even assuming the cost was $9.99 per month, you are closer to having a "cost" and energy (physical and mental) than you do on netflix. On netflix the mental energy requirement is there as well but not the same as a video store obviously. You still have to cue up the movie, watch some of it, and then decide when to stop watching (3 minutes in, 20 minutes in etc/) if it doesn't appear to be what you like. This is after spending some thought to what you want to watch in the first place. Which brings me to my point. One of the things that I have learned in business is to not make people have to think, that is to make it easy for them to make a decision. Instead of giving them 20 choices only give them 3 or 5 choices. People I have found, at least with things that I have sold, like this a great deal.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by hapless 11y ago

dredmorbius 11y ago

Agreed, strongly. For one of the best arguments, see "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments", written in 1996 by Nick Szabo. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Amazon's recently come up with $10/mo all-you-can-eat book purchase plan.

fraserharris 11y ago

"No micropayment system has ever succeeded" This is wildly incorrect. $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games[1]. The key to their success was bulk purchases of intermediary "currency" that frees players from the mental energy of thinking about actual money (its a sunk cost because the currency can't be redeemed). [1] Distaste for social games and the business model does not invalidate the financial success of their implementation of micropayments. Note: I started a micropayments company.

hapless 11y ago
In-app-purchasing in games relies on conditioning the user across many hours of gameplay. 98% of users never take the bait. Roughly 0.15% of users make up 50% of the revenue. In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model is relevant to web content. I can't set up a pain/pleasure response in readers and condition a tiny fraction of them to pay vast sums after 10 to 50 hours of engagement. That's not an option in journalism. (Not that this has stopped the FT from trying it: $1 for a one-month trial, $480 a year for a subscription. I wonder how good the conversion rates are?)
- MikeTV 11y ago
  IAP in freemium games is often a substitute for time (grinding or waiting). I wouldn't pay 5¢ for an article, but I might pay 1 token for a well-written summary of an article with the main points highlighted, if a quick skim identifies that the article is interesting.
- fraserharris 11y ago
  Could 98% be an artifact of the 100's of millions of people who have tried social games? 2% is at least in the high millions if not low 10s of millions of people. I (and it appears a significant number of others) ended up paying for the Economist - the 10 articles free / month was conditioning enough.
PeterisP 11y ago
Social games are a prime example illustrating the parent's point that true micropayments (as in, lots of very small payments) don't work - they all have found that the payment models that actually bring in revenue are "micropayments" only in name, they're exactly as it was said, either "a monthly bill for all you can eat" ... or "discrete payments of $1-$2-$10", or even very high price packages targeted to a few "whales" that still bring in a substantial portion of total revenue. Charging $10 is accepted by the paying consumers, being nickel-and-dimed isn't. Even in the "micropayment" games.
- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  So what? Your micropayments platform makes it easy to create an account with a website, put $5 into their payment bucket, and then automatically pay a cent or two every article you read. You're splitting hairs over definitions, but the grandparent's point is simple: The model is already there. Candy Crush bonuses or Journalistic Articles doesn't matter. Give the payers a bucket they can throw five or ten bucks into at a time, that gives them pain-free access for long enough that they don't feel annoyed throwing another five bucks in later.
  - phasmantistes 11y ago
    Which is, in fact, exactly the model of Google Contributor. Puts $5 each month into a bucket, and then each time you visit a site you pay a few cents in order to have an ad-free experience.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > So what? Your micropayments platform makes it easy to create an account with a website, put $5 into their payment bucket... That's it right there. That's the "what". :) Paying 0.01 cents to someone is quite different from paying $5 to that same someone that gets delivered in tiny portions over some span of time. In the first case, you're out a tiny fraction of a cent. In the second case, you're out $5. Because (AIUI) the money movement system makes it prohibitively expensive to move fractions of cents around, micropayments don't happen.
mahranch 11y ago
> $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games Web content and gaming aren't remotely the same. Micropayments in gaming is almost akin to gambling for many games. Then there's the whole "pay to win" aspect, and "pay to play" aspect where you have points or stamina that gets eaten/spent as you play. When it reaches zero, you need to wait hours for it to recharge, or pay to recharge. Web content is like buying a magazine in a store, or a newspaper from a gas station. It's nothing like mobile gaming.

warcode 11y ago

Flattr really hit the sweet spot for me in this regard. I set up an account, put some money in it, set a $20 monthly limit, hook it up to soundcloud and github, and then every time I "like" a song or "star" a repo it adds them to that month's list. At the end of the month it divides the $20 between everything I enjoyed most that month. A similar system would probably work for ALL web content. But as always this gives the control directly to the consumer and big companies don't like that at all.

onion2k 11y ago
A similar system would probably work for ALL web content. With the obvious proviso that it would need to be simple enough for everyone to set up in order to get the traction necessary to be useful. Simple enough for everyone means one button with a single 'Yes please' screen (eg OAuth). Anything more complex than that is destined to fail.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Or attached to the ISP bill, similar to how one could buy J2ME games by hitting a link in the WAP browser.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Do you really think it's a good idea to put ISPs in the position of doling out micropayment money? They would need to collect a fee for processing it, and what business rules are in place for transactions smaller than the fee? And similarly, how do you prevent fraud? WAP was a walled garden experience; if I can send money to any site on the Internet by clicking a button, what's to stop a malware author from using their malware to send lots of clicks (and thus money) to a site they run? Technically, micropayments aren't a difficult problem to implement. The business rules around financial transactions (which exist for good reasons) often present an intractable conflict with what would be a viable user experience.
    - digi_owl 11y ago

NH_2 11y ago

> It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel. I agree with the above, but disagree that this makes micropayments for online content a futile venture. There are a couple ways that come to mind to solve the mental fatigue issue: 1. Automate all the payments 2. Automate all the payments w/ a cap 3. Automate payments from whitelisted domains 4. Don't automate payments, but ask to whitelist new domains (similar to: "remember me"). These could all just be user preferences, just as described in the post.

hapless 11y ago
I think proposition #2, ala flattr, is the only viable one out of this lot. The other three all fall on the sword of "should I pay $0.05 for this mouse click?". If the user ever has to ask himself that question, the game is up.
pjc50 11y ago
TBH, the entities that should be paying sites are the link aggregators like HN, Reddit, and especially Facebook. Reddit lets you give "gold" to individual users if you like what they've said; I wonder what would happen if they allowed the handing out of gold to sites linked from Reddit?
- manigandham 11y ago
  Why would link aggregators be paying? Who pays them then?
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I dunno how real the story is, but this bring to mind the exchange between Disney and Microsoft over who should be paying the other. Either Disney for using MS video formats, or MS for using Disney content. The whole thing basically heads face first into net neutrality territory. That said, back during for pay phone services the service got paid by the telco, and then the telco added the cost to the callers bill. So should perhaps my ISP bill me for my Netflix viewing, rather than me paying Netflix directly?
- 11y ago

Paul-ish 11y ago

Are there studies that show people would not like a micropayment model? As a counter example to what you say, there are plenty of free to play games on mobile that have small in app purchases.

CPLX 11y ago

That's flatly untrue. I've got a good example: SMS When texting started it was almost universally $.25 or $.10 or so per text. One would definitely be aware of that fact when communicating with friends but you get over it because it's useful. Wait I have another example, $0.99 songs via iTunes. That was the model that created the largest music retailer in the world from whole cloth. It's not that complicated, all it would take is for someone (gee I wonder who) to standardize the price (or price tiers) and have a quick modal OK to continue on to the article for one credit, or equivalent.

Already__Taken 11y ago
You're describing things that were inconvenient and made convenient with a nominal transaction cost. You couldn't just buy one track before. Now you can for $.99. You couldn't send a text message at all before. Try $.10 per email and see what traction that gets.
- CPLX 11y ago
  Sure and I used to watch SNL for free over the air, now I pay $8 a month for Hulu. Things change. The market, like all markets, is defined by people's willingness to pay and their next best alternative. Make the transaction cheap and nearly frictionless and it might be the choice with the highest utility.
- MaulingMonkey 11y ago
  > You're describing things that were inconvenient So... pretty much every web paywall I've ever encountered. Where's my amazon 1-click for news website paywalls? Several of which I encounter using this very site? I don't want to create an account, subscribe, save my details, unsubscribe from services I no longer use, etc. for each individual website.
manigandham 11y ago
Average people don't purchase itunes songs all day every day and they have a high replay value. It's worth the mental energy. You don't want to be deciding whether to pay on every little pageview.

JacobJans 11y ago

Micropayments are fundamentally bad for websites. It is an inferior business model. Think about it this way. Businesses need stable, predictable income. If they depend on "micropayments," then they would depend on producing consistently high quality articles. I am a subscriber to the New Yorker. They have some of the best writing out there -- but some of it is just not that good, in my opinion. And yet, I still pay for it. A subscriber is willing to forgive bad content -- and still give you money. You're able to build a relationship, and ask for the money once (a year), not constantly. $70 * 1,000 subscribers = $70k a year. Plenty to support the livelihood of a good writer. How many "micropayments" would they need? What if they struck out a few months in a row? They'd have to find another job.

justizin 11y ago
All of this is true of the existing advertising system, which is a micropayment system, but instead of taking money from me, it takes resources and information about me and gives them to advertisers for a fraction of a cent.
manicdee 11y ago
What about a two-tier system: flattr/contribution for casual visitors, and a monthly/annual subscription which removes all ads (including Contributor fillers)? As a new visitor I might click the flattr/contributor button (equivalent to "+1"), then when reviewing a statement I realise that I am visiting your site a lot, so switch to subscription instead. The core issue is people recognising the value of good journalism or tech writing in terms of dollars, and being willing to pay for stuff that is worthwhile. After that the problem is only removing "friction" in getting a payment to the publisher.

exelius 11y ago

This is called "friction", and you're right -- it's the core reason microtransactions have never taken off. Now, you can remove the friction by devising some automated system that pays sites some amount of money based on how long you spend there, but then you have to build an entire fraud-detection system to make sure people don't try to game the system and take more money than they are owed. This would add significant transaction costs -- and these costs would be high enough that very small transactions would no longer make sense to process. Keep going down this road and you'll eventually realize that you're just another credit card payment processor and have a similar cost structure. Bitcoin solves none of this, btw - you still want to make sure whatever micropayment scheme you use doesn't hand over your Bitcoin to a fraudster. So now we're back at the user being the "filter" for good vs. bad transactions by making them explicitly authorize those transactions. And the friction problem you describe is very real: something like 90% of buy flows are abandoned at the credit card entry page. Micropayments are an intractable problem in my mind; they would solve a lot of business model problems but I don't know that they're very attractive to consumers.

c22 11y ago
> something like 90% of buy flows are abandoned at the credit card entry page I'm interested in this statistic, do you have a source? Are you saying that 90% of all buy flows are abandoned at the payment stage while x% are abandoned at another stage and <10% are completed or are you saying that 90% of all abandoned buy flows were terminated at this stage? In case of the latter it seems like knowing what percent of all buy flows become abandoned would be relevant to your point. Also, was this data collected from one vendor/industry or from multiple sources? I'm also curious if the study examined cases where the "pay now" screen already had the customer's payment information (e.g. for a pre-existing customer).
- david-given 11y ago
  I've abandoned a lot of payments at that stage --- mostly because frequently, the only way to find out how much shipping is going to cost is to almost complete an order! I bought some electronics today; I ended up almost placing an order at three different distributors until I found the one I wanted.

pbreit 11y ago

I tend to agree but I'd like to see a frictionless system in the 5c-50c per article range. There would need to be a decent preview so you have a decent idea what you're getting (like Benedict's newsletter or The Information). And one-click.

larrys 11y ago

"it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel." Related in a way: How people can easily waste "energy" because it takes no "mental energy" to do so. Each time you turn on a light or decide to leave a light on (or even drive to a store) you are not confronted with "going to drugstore, cost 1.23, proceed?". ".10 to turn light on for 1 hour, proceed?" The cost is hidden and given to you in bulk. You just have to decide generally that spending $35 per week for gas is "worth it". (Along with other fixed type expenses). It's interesting that the opposite of netflix was the video store, even with a monthly plan and no cost per DVD. You would have to get to the store, review the available movies, and then decide which one to rent. All along knowing that if you got home and didn't like the movie, you'd have to trek back to the video store and repeat the process. In that case, and even assuming the cost was $9.99 per month, you are closer to having a "cost" and energy (physical and mental) than you do on netflix. On netflix the mental energy requirement is there as well but not the same as a video store obviously. You still have to cue up the movie, watch some of it, and then decide when to stop watching (3 minutes in, 20 minutes in etc/) if it doesn't appear to be what you like. This is after spending some thought to what you want to watch in the first place. Which brings me to my point. One of the things that I have learned in business is to not make people have to think, that is to make it easy for them to make a decision. Instead of giving them 20 choices only give them 3 or 5 choices. People I have found, at least with things that I have sold, like this a great deal.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]