6 ms·

There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. If I had to pay $4/mo

There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. If I had to pay $4/mo each for all the random sites I visit each month... I wouldn't visit those sites any more. What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically. (And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)

bobajeff 11y ago
That sounds like Brave's bitcoin protocol they are working on. Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?
- ssharp 11y ago
  Well, there's really no reason why Bitcoin should/would be a part of it. Bitcoin is no better at microtransactions than any other payment solution, it's actually worse. So you're left with solutions that involve "off-chain"-type transactions and even then, you have a MAJOR adoption hurdle with Bitcoin that you don't have with credit cards and ACH.
  - bobajeff 11y ago
    I guess the reason Bitcoin is used is because the payments are to be decentralised and without opt-in from the site's that are getting paid. As opposed to services like Flattr that require signup from the site's before hand.
- parenthephobia 11y ago
  It doesn't. Does it need to? I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link. But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
  - dave2000 11y ago
    I don't see how clicking on click bait means you pay/nearly pay. You're only paying if money leaves your bank account. You're just wasting a little time (not much though; just click the back button) and feeling a little stupid for falling for it. Just don't click on linkbait, and make a note not to ever visit that site again. Actually, it'd be nice if adblockers let you blacklist sites and turned their urls into the text "linkbait url removed". I think people DO hate linkbait generally because nobody likes being lied to, which is essentially what's happening.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross. Just that? "People", "Cosmo", "Men's Health", all the most succesful print titles are hardly better than BS clickbait...
- dave2000 11y ago
  Bitcoin? Uh, no thanks. Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc. Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  How about they are not? Radical I know, but what about having a button on the bottom of the page where you could click to say "this was a good article, flattr it"? Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button. That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?
ssharp 11y ago
I think Google's "pay not to get ads" service is a good first step. Handling contnet at the ad-server level makes a ton of sense, given that they are already in the business of maximizing CPC/CPM. If users could "bid" on NOT seeing an ad against an advertiser bidding to show you an ad, you disrupt the content creators as little as possible. Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies. Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold. A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I love Google's Contributor program and i'm actually at the max contribution now (I started at $1 a month, and over the last 6 months or so gradually increased it because i liked the results i was seeing) The problem is that i've found most people want an "all or nothing" system. They want to see NO ads for their payment, and not have the possibility for some ads. For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead. Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".
  - sewercake 11y ago
    man, why isn't this advertised (ha) more heavily? This sounds fantastic!
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      There was some pretty big pushback when it was first announced and i think they went into "let's fix this before trying again" mode. Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that? Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it. Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.
ghaff 11y ago
>What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically. You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content. One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off. In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only. True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  > Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine. That's because magazines are heavily advertiser-supported, the very thing you're trying to not have online.
hammock 11y ago
That is exactly how Spotify Premium's payment model works. The nearest equivalent in journalism might be a wire service like the AP.
CM30 11y ago
I'd say there's an even more obvious reason than that; most content simply isn't valuable enough that people would pay for it. Can you support high quality journalism with a subscription model? Possibly, but the audience will be far lower than the audience on todays ad supported sites, and perhaps not even big enough to support two or three seperate ones. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get. And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.
- petra 11y ago
  The core of the problem is that's easy and cheap to copy content(while rephrasing, for legality). So unless you need the content right now(or need it from a reliable source, say for your job/investments/etc), you could probably find most of what you're interested in offered for free, or something similar to it, which is good enough.
rakoo 11y ago
> What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically. It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution
coldtea 11y ago
>There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media). Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.
- petra 11y ago
  >> They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]: "we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works." Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities. [1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platform-the-correspondent-reaches-milestone-of-40-000-paying-members-a203251c2de2#.n5sasb9sy https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself. Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this: https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/ That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US. But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.

bobajeff 11y ago

That sounds like Brave's bitcoin protocol they are working on. Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?

ssharp 11y ago
Well, there's really no reason why Bitcoin should/would be a part of it. Bitcoin is no better at microtransactions than any other payment solution, it's actually worse. So you're left with solutions that involve "off-chain"-type transactions and even then, you have a MAJOR adoption hurdle with Bitcoin that you don't have with credit cards and ACH.
- bobajeff 11y ago
  I guess the reason Bitcoin is used is because the payments are to be decentralised and without opt-in from the site's that are getting paid. As opposed to services like Flattr that require signup from the site's before hand.
parenthephobia 11y ago
It doesn't. Does it need to? I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link. But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
- dave2000 11y ago
  I don't see how clicking on click bait means you pay/nearly pay. You're only paying if money leaves your bank account. You're just wasting a little time (not much though; just click the back button) and feeling a little stupid for falling for it. Just don't click on linkbait, and make a note not to ever visit that site again. Actually, it'd be nice if adblockers let you blacklist sites and turned their urls into the text "linkbait url removed". I think people DO hate linkbait generally because nobody likes being lied to, which is essentially what's happening.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross. Just that? "People", "Cosmo", "Men's Health", all the most succesful print titles are hardly better than BS clickbait...
dave2000 11y ago
Bitcoin? Uh, no thanks. Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc. Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
tomjen3 11y ago
How about they are not? Radical I know, but what about having a button on the bottom of the page where you could click to say "this was a good article, flattr it"? Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button. That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?

ssharp 11y ago

I think Google's "pay not to get ads" service is a good first step. Handling contnet at the ad-server level makes a ton of sense, given that they are already in the business of maximizing CPC/CPM. If users could "bid" on NOT seeing an ad against an advertiser bidding to show you an ad, you disrupt the content creators as little as possible. Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies. Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold. A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.

Klathmon 11y ago
I love Google's Contributor program and i'm actually at the max contribution now (I started at $1 a month, and over the last 6 months or so gradually increased it because i liked the results i was seeing) The problem is that i've found most people want an "all or nothing" system. They want to see NO ads for their payment, and not have the possibility for some ads. For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead. Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".
- sewercake 11y ago
  man, why isn't this advertised (ha) more heavily? This sounds fantastic!
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    There was some pretty big pushback when it was first announced and i think they went into "let's fix this before trying again" mode. Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that? Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it. Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.

ghaff 11y ago

>What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically. You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content. One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off. In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only. True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.

sokoloff 11y ago
> Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine. That's because magazines are heavily advertiser-supported, the very thing you're trying to not have online.

hammock 11y ago

That is exactly how Spotify Premium's payment model works. The nearest equivalent in journalism might be a wire service like the AP.

CM30 11y ago

I'd say there's an even more obvious reason than that; most content simply isn't valuable enough that people would pay for it. Can you support high quality journalism with a subscription model? Possibly, but the audience will be far lower than the audience on todays ad supported sites, and perhaps not even big enough to support two or three seperate ones. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get. And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.

petra 11y ago
The core of the problem is that's easy and cheap to copy content(while rephrasing, for legality). So unless you need the content right now(or need it from a reliable source, say for your job/investments/etc), you could probably find most of what you're interested in offered for free, or something similar to it, which is good enough.

rakoo 11y ago

> What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically. It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution

coldtea 11y ago

>There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media). Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.

petra 11y ago
>> They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]: "we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works." Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities. [1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platform-the-correspondent-reaches-milestone-of-40-000-paying-members-a203251c2de2#.n5sasb9sy https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself. Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this: https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/ That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US. But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.