5 ms·

I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.

lbotos 10y ago
In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
- rjtavares 10y ago
  Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.
ttcbj 10y ago
Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content. [1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
- noobermin 10y ago
  Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    Patreon seems to be serving at least a subset of that need.
  - admax88q 10y ago
    Plenty of stories around it, but none of them seem to be gaining widespread adoption. The Brave browser is trying to integrate micropayments into the browser. It blocks ads by default and pays websites directly out of a monthly amount that the user configures. https://brave.com/publishers.html https://brave.com/publishers.html Flattr tries to do a very similar thing even earlier, except you have to click the "Flattr" button on websites that you visit that you want to fund. But still works with the same model where you set yourself a monthly budget and the system pays content producers directly for you. https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/
ghaff 10y ago
That was the hope going back well over a decade. But it never really played out. Clay Shirky's main argument against it was transaction costs. Not payment processing costs (although that was an issue at the time) but simple mental transaction costs. There's a big difference between free and even a penny or two. People get mired down in having to decide if they want to buy something or not.
- BlackjackCF 10y ago
  I would love for some sort of tipping system to exist for Wall Street/NY Times, or something that allowed you to tip quickly and easily based off of something like Apple Pay or Amazon Payments. I realize not everybody would take advantage, but I certainly think it's worthwhile to integrate to supplement revenue.
  - vinay427 10y ago
    I also think it would be interesting to see what publishers would do with the data on which articles actually generate money. I'm not sure I would want news organizations to only print what sells, as I would surmise that's partly how we ended up with less insightful news gaining popularity.
  - jerf 10y ago
    It's been done several times. To a first approximation, nobody uses it. You can theorize it might work, but has an enormous activation energy, but it's hard to move past that theorizing without a few dozen million dollars for marketing. Most things easier than that have been tried.
dinkumthinkum 10y ago
I don't think that works. As someone said, how do you know before hand if it is high quality? You're going to read reviews of an article before you buy it and read it. Furthermore, news organizations need some sort stable business in order to, you know, run a a high quality news organization.
stinkytaco 10y ago
I recall Readability doing something like that a few years ago. You paid a fee to them, then when you bookmarked a page, some would go to the producer. There were many flaws, not the least of which was that they were effectively forcing an opt-in on the part of content creators, but now that "readability" views that strip ads and extraneous content are built into browsers, it seems like the system had some merit.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
No you don't. You think you want micropayment, but you don't. The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. But then again, if you've already consumed it, then you're too late to decide if it's worth reading or not. This is why reputation is important in journalism. If you step back and think about it, your sense of "quality" depends 99% on what other people think. I'm not insulting you, this is how it works. People have better things to do than sitting around reading every single article to figure out if it's high quality or not, and that's why most people regardless of intelligence rely on reputation to judge quality. That's why the successful model will be building a news organization with high reputation. That's what people actually want (so they don't have to waste time trying to decide what to trust or not) and that's what makes sense for the organizations financially. That's why the micropayment model will never replace the subscription model and increasingly so.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  Blendle gives you your money back if you don't like an article, no questions asked. It works quite well I'd say.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    Maybe for you money is more valuable than time, and that's fine, but I was talking about time, not money.
    - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
      They send you daily mails with the best articles and describe their content and why you should read them. Articles can be 'liked', and very popular ones go into a weekly (monthly/yearly) Best Of. Its certainly not uncurated.
      - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
        > The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. If you read my comment above, that's basically what I'm saying. You are delegating your quality judgment to Blendle, so you are not paying for quality articles "regardless of where they come from". You are paying for quality articles that Blendle sent you. You know it's worth your time to go through the list because you trust Blendle's reputation.
CM30 10y ago
Micro payments are an interesting idea, but they just have too many issues at the moment. Like say, being awkward to set up with normal payment processors. Things like taxes and fees mean that genuinely 'cheap' articles (read, a couple of dollars or less) are prohibitively awkward or expensive to set up. They also don't have popular appeal as a concept, since free competition is just too high. Yeah, some people will pay for 'quality'. But a lot of people will just find free alternatives regardless of how accurate or well written the content is. Or if they're like a lot of people now, they'll write off the sources charging for content as 'fake news' and 'propaganda'. And it also doesn't really fix the clickbait issue. It makes it slightly less convenient for some people (since you can't trick the 1% of people that see through your shoddy reporting any more), but most people just want content based on their own biases. Even when the content is something they're paying for. I mean, look at a print newspaper if you need proof of that. Over here in the UK, questionable quality tabloids and gossip rags like the Sun and the Daily Mail sell a whole lot better than the likes of the Telegraph or Guardian. If micro payments caught on as a concept, I suspect the same thing would happen there. People would buy poor quality articles that support their own views and don't challenge any of their beliefs.
baumandm 10y ago
I'm curious about what a micro payments world would be like, but I'm skeptical about their prospects in the near-future. In general, I don't think people like being nickel & dimed, and that's basically what micro payments are. Subscriptions allow one to rationalize the price upfront, then consume without concern. This appeals to heavy consumers, consumers who overestimate their usage, as well as consumers who don't want to think about each purchase. There would need to be a large enough category of people who would be willing to buy a few articles per month, but not want a subscription. And that would need to generate a large enough profit beyond paying for the micro payments implementation, support, etc.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Pay per use sometimes works well and sometimes doesn't. I don't think I've ever seen an intellectually rigorous analysis of what factors may favor all-you-can-eat vs. pay-as-you-go. Pretty much all of us have examples from daily life that are more toward one end of the scale or another. By and large, it seems that once you get to $1+ per unit cost, people are willing to put at least a modicum of thought into whether they want to buy/rent something. For a long period, people had no problem renting a film (or going to a theater) for $5 or so. There wasn't a lot of demand for unlimited passes. (Of course, now we have Netflix as well.) I suspect it's the literal nickel and dime-ing that's the problem. It's too small a transaction to want to fuss with. Think if you had to go through some sort of transaction process every time you flipped on a light switch (which is pay-as-you-go but the financial transaction is largely opaque). And I strongly suspect that, at the end of the day, the dollar amounts involved just wouldn't be large enough to be interesting.
- lefstathiou 10y ago
  Have you watched Twitch by any chance? It's fascinating to see people tip players $2, $3 bucks as they play. Of course not everyone gets tipped and I'm sure the top 1% account for 99% of tips but still worth checking out if you're interested to see how a micro payment model can unfold.

lbotos 10y ago

In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?

Eridrus 10y ago
Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
rjtavares 10y ago
Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.

ttcbj 10y ago

Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content. [1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...

noobermin 10y ago
Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Patreon seems to be serving at least a subset of that need.
- admax88q 10y ago
  Plenty of stories around it, but none of them seem to be gaining widespread adoption. The Brave browser is trying to integrate micropayments into the browser. It blocks ads by default and pays websites directly out of a monthly amount that the user configures. https://brave.com/publishers.html https://brave.com/publishers.html Flattr tries to do a very similar thing even earlier, except you have to click the "Flattr" button on websites that you visit that you want to fund. But still works with the same model where you set yourself a monthly budget and the system pays content producers directly for you. https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/

ghaff 10y ago

That was the hope going back well over a decade. But it never really played out. Clay Shirky's main argument against it was transaction costs. Not payment processing costs (although that was an issue at the time) but simple mental transaction costs. There's a big difference between free and even a penny or two. People get mired down in having to decide if they want to buy something or not.

BlackjackCF 10y ago
I would love for some sort of tipping system to exist for Wall Street/NY Times, or something that allowed you to tip quickly and easily based off of something like Apple Pay or Amazon Payments. I realize not everybody would take advantage, but I certainly think it's worthwhile to integrate to supplement revenue.
- vinay427 10y ago
  I also think it would be interesting to see what publishers would do with the data on which articles actually generate money. I'm not sure I would want news organizations to only print what sells, as I would surmise that's partly how we ended up with less insightful news gaining popularity.
- jerf 10y ago
  It's been done several times. To a first approximation, nobody uses it. You can theorize it might work, but has an enormous activation energy, but it's hard to move past that theorizing without a few dozen million dollars for marketing. Most things easier than that have been tried.

dinkumthinkum 10y ago

I don't think that works. As someone said, how do you know before hand if it is high quality? You're going to read reviews of an article before you buy it and read it. Furthermore, news organizations need some sort stable business in order to, you know, run a a high quality news organization.

stinkytaco 10y ago

I recall Readability doing something like that a few years ago. You paid a fee to them, then when you bookmarked a page, some would go to the producer. There were many flaws, not the least of which was that they were effectively forcing an opt-in on the part of content creators, but now that "readability" views that strip ads and extraneous content are built into browsers, it seems like the system had some merit.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

No you don't. You think you want micropayment, but you don't. The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. But then again, if you've already consumed it, then you're too late to decide if it's worth reading or not. This is why reputation is important in journalism. If you step back and think about it, your sense of "quality" depends 99% on what other people think. I'm not insulting you, this is how it works. People have better things to do than sitting around reading every single article to figure out if it's high quality or not, and that's why most people regardless of intelligence rely on reputation to judge quality. That's why the successful model will be building a news organization with high reputation. That's what people actually want (so they don't have to waste time trying to decide what to trust or not) and that's what makes sense for the organizations financially. That's why the micropayment model will never replace the subscription model and increasingly so.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
Blendle gives you your money back if you don't like an article, no questions asked. It works quite well I'd say.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Maybe for you money is more valuable than time, and that's fine, but I was talking about time, not money.
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
    They send you daily mails with the best articles and describe their content and why you should read them. Articles can be 'liked', and very popular ones go into a weekly (monthly/yearly) Best Of. Its certainly not uncurated.
    - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
      > The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. If you read my comment above, that's basically what I'm saying. You are delegating your quality judgment to Blendle, so you are not paying for quality articles "regardless of where they come from". You are paying for quality articles that Blendle sent you. You know it's worth your time to go through the list because you trust Blendle's reputation.

CM30 10y ago

Micro payments are an interesting idea, but they just have too many issues at the moment. Like say, being awkward to set up with normal payment processors. Things like taxes and fees mean that genuinely 'cheap' articles (read, a couple of dollars or less) are prohibitively awkward or expensive to set up. They also don't have popular appeal as a concept, since free competition is just too high. Yeah, some people will pay for 'quality'. But a lot of people will just find free alternatives regardless of how accurate or well written the content is. Or if they're like a lot of people now, they'll write off the sources charging for content as 'fake news' and 'propaganda'. And it also doesn't really fix the clickbait issue. It makes it slightly less convenient for some people (since you can't trick the 1% of people that see through your shoddy reporting any more), but most people just want content based on their own biases. Even when the content is something they're paying for. I mean, look at a print newspaper if you need proof of that. Over here in the UK, questionable quality tabloids and gossip rags like the Sun and the Daily Mail sell a whole lot better than the likes of the Telegraph or Guardian. If micro payments caught on as a concept, I suspect the same thing would happen there. People would buy poor quality articles that support their own views and don't challenge any of their beliefs.

baumandm 10y ago

I'm curious about what a micro payments world would be like, but I'm skeptical about their prospects in the near-future. In general, I don't think people like being nickel & dimed, and that's basically what micro payments are. Subscriptions allow one to rationalize the price upfront, then consume without concern. This appeals to heavy consumers, consumers who overestimate their usage, as well as consumers who don't want to think about each purchase. There would need to be a large enough category of people who would be willing to buy a few articles per month, but not want a subscription. And that would need to generate a large enough profit beyond paying for the micro payments implementation, support, etc.

ghaff 10y ago
Pay per use sometimes works well and sometimes doesn't. I don't think I've ever seen an intellectually rigorous analysis of what factors may favor all-you-can-eat vs. pay-as-you-go. Pretty much all of us have examples from daily life that are more toward one end of the scale or another. By and large, it seems that once you get to $1+ per unit cost, people are willing to put at least a modicum of thought into whether they want to buy/rent something. For a long period, people had no problem renting a film (or going to a theater) for $5 or so. There wasn't a lot of demand for unlimited passes. (Of course, now we have Netflix as well.) I suspect it's the literal nickel and dime-ing that's the problem. It's too small a transaction to want to fuss with. Think if you had to go through some sort of transaction process every time you flipped on a light switch (which is pay-as-you-go but the financial transaction is largely opaque). And I strongly suspect that, at the end of the day, the dollar amounts involved just wouldn't be large enough to be interesting.
lefstathiou 10y ago
Have you watched Twitch by any chance? It's fascinating to see people tip players $2, $3 bucks as they play. Of course not everyone gets tipped and I'm sure the top 1% account for 99% of tips but still worth checking out if you're interested to see how a micro payment model can unfold.