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> Yes it may cause some business models to disappear, but I feel it's worth it to take back control of our privacy. Good, hopefully we'll see some real innovat

> Yes it may cause some business models to disappear, but I feel it's worth it to take back control of our privacy. Good, hopefully we'll see some real innovation, with wide spread micropayments, rather than brainwashing which costs the viewer of the site far more than the recipient of the site gets.

fabricexpert 8y ago
> wide spread micropayments I see this on HN a LOT, but I am really not sure it's a great model. The thing about ad-supported revenue is that you can still consume the content if you can't afford it. I'm simplifying a little, but the people who convert on ads are basically subsidizing the content for the rest of us. In our society the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy and the people who fall into the latter group may or not be. But the point is that with micropayments only the rich have access, and with ad-supported revenue everyone has access. I think most people prefer the latter.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  With proper browser design, you could support both models. load_ads_unless(payment >= $0.0001) Whether or not sites would suffer the added complexity probably depends on how much money is on the table.
- Nursie 8y ago
  > the people who convert on ads are basically subsidizing the content for the rest of us. Do they? Or is it the people who buy the products, regardless of ad conversion?
  - ankit219 8y ago
    Depends on how savvy or data driven is the marketing team of the advertiser(?).
  - O_H_E 8y ago
    > content I don't think there is a "physical" product here. Mostly Articles and Videos
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    Ha yeah we all pay for the marketing campaigns regardless. Its factored into the price of every product you buy. The money for internet ads doesn't just spawn out of the ether.
- adimitrov 8y ago
  > In our society the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy and the people who fall into the latter group may or not be. [citation needed]. Telemarketing used to target people who could only barely afford it, and well educated, well earning folks from the younger generation tend to be tech savvy. The ones who don't know what's up are either old or uneducated (poor.) That's at least a counter hypothesis if not outright refutation of your claim, since I don't actually know any of the numbers here myself.
  - fabricexpert 8y ago
    Yea but they could afford it, ethically that sucks but they still had the money to spend. Have you ever wanted to buy something small and literally didn't have the money in your account? This is how a huge number of people live, every day, day to day. Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      > they still had the money to spend. you did claim > the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy now you say "yeah okay it sucks ethically", and shift the goal posts to something else entirely, from "wealth" to "they could buy it"? You're playing fast and loose with the exploitation, both financially and mentally, of others. You can't just ignore the costs of exploitation of people who buy shit they can't afford because their life sucks, and the sheer pollution of minds by advertisement, all the needlessly created "needs", too, because they can't be easily quantified. > Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it. So, social services in a country could confirm that a person is actually on welfare. If they are, sites can make certain things free for them, and/or others can donate a small share (10%?) of their micropayments to those who have nothing. That's not a fleshed out suggestion, just the first thing from the top off my head. Allow people to sign up to get a few free articles per month. Before you say it can't be done, show us you thought about it at all. You're also implying that the best or all the essential content would be micropayment content, which is a huge assumption.
  - deleted 8y ago
- LaundroMat 8y ago
  Can you substantiate your claim that "the people that fall in the conversion group are generally wealthy"? My feeling is that the opposite is true, so I'd be happy to see more evidence for one or the other.
  - fabricexpert 8y ago
    When I saw wealthy, I mean they have money to spend on the product they're buying. Money or access to credit or whatever. This is absolutely true as someone is buying stuff driven through marketing. A huge percentage of the people who don't buy are doing so not because the ads aren't effective, but because they don't have money to purchase. With a micropayment model those people just won't look at the content, because they don't have money in their account to do so.
    - tremon 8y ago
      Money or access to credit These are definitely not the same thing.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    He is absolutely correct. Wealthy in that you have access to ten dollars discretionary to spend per month. A friend of mine is from India and got into programming through free content with ads on the page. Imagine people for whom a dollar is a lot, who have no credit card to link into your system, who have no money to buy your stuff and no way to buy it even if they had the money. Even a $0.01 charge would be impossible because they simply don't have the tool necessary to buy your stuff over the Internet. I mourn the Internet that included people like them.
- mtgx 8y ago
  I think the "tip model" could be greatly expanded. The reason it doesn't work as well now is because for one the ad revenue model exists, and when a system already dominates, people tend to stop looking for alternatives or embrace new ones. Why bother to educate people to donate money when you can just put ads on your content? Also, when 99.9% of content-makers use ads, it means you have a much smaller pool of potential donors, too. When most users on the internet can donate and are used to donating, it becomes much easier to receive donations for any random piece of content. And second, there's great friction in the existing micro-tip model, because the payment companies take big portions out of the small tips. Plus, there's quite a bit of fragmentation as not everyone has a PayPal account, or Apple account, or Google Contributor account, or Amazon account, etc. I think cryptocurrencies will eventually solve this issue, if what we've seen so far with Steemit.com, d.tube, and others like them is any indication of that. Once people get into any cryptocurrency at all, the liquidity of tips greatly increases, and it becomes much easier to tip someone with a cryptocurrency. It's still in the super-early stages, though. It could take another 10 years before this becomes more mainstream. I don't really see any other way for this to work. The Google Contributor or even Flattr models will not work because they are not decentralized and interoperable enough with others like them. You'll never see the majority of people on the web use Google Contributor or Flattr. It needs to be an ecosystem of such services that all integrate and interoperate with no friction and content creators can be paid with any of them. The tipping model needs to be more like email than Apple iMessage, so that everyone can have one and use it with any other similar system.
- starbeast 8y ago
  >But the point is that with micropayments only the rich have access, and with ad-supported revenue everyone has access. I think most people prefer the latter. As a a counter to that, I've been watching 3blue1brown's maths videos on Patreon. Payments get you early access to content, but everything gets posted up eventually and it seems preferable to having ads.
apatters 8y ago
I think micropayments are a classic example of a solution that seems sensible to engineering under the assumption that humans are rational beings, but in the real world it falls apart because they aren't. The hardest part of making a sale isn't the price--it's getting the customer to say yes. With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link. This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content. No wonder it hasn't taken off. A better solution from a market psychology standpoint would be to sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites. Monthly auto rebill. Just one purchase decision for life and with enough sites the perceived value is high. Not sure why we aren't seeing more of this -- if anyone works at a media conglomerate feel free to reply :)
- fabricexpert 8y ago
  Which sites go into that list? Who gets the margin on it? Who decides how much the sites get and how much is "spent" on infrastructure? Can't wait to buy my "Internet Pass"!
  - xellisx 8y ago
    Also it would start to feel like paying for cable. 1000 channels, and I only watch maybe 5.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Someone should figure out a way to: - Track how many sites a user visits, without knowing which sites the user visits. Call this number N. - Charge the user for N visits. - Distribute the money to the original websites, without anyone knowing (not even their banks?) Sounds like a nice task for a cryptography researcher.
    - y4mi 8y ago
      way too easy to game. just spread a virus... or chrome extension which keep querying your websites there is no way to implement this with technology in a reasonable manner unless you monitor every action every user does at any time. which would be (at least in my opinion) worse.
ankit219 8y ago
I think something like the concept of reddit gold can work on the content/news sites as well. At its core, its about the ones who liked/found the content useful can reward it with some payment. Usually, in most of the business models, your most heavy users tend to subsidize/bear the cost of not so heavy but casual users. At the very core that is. For adverts it fails, since the heavy users are of less value than the casual ones. (how many times you can show the same ad to a user? Also, they are well trained on how to look past the ads). With gold-like concept, great content is rewarded, and incentivized as well. Also, given the scale of reddit, it works really well (along with ads) but not too sure how well it will work with ad dependent publications.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Micropayments aren't a problem on the user end, they're a problem almost entirely on the distribution end. We have existing successful models of the user side, chief of which is taxes. The problem is that an ideal solution would feature one or a couple of players that would cover the distribution to all creators on the entire Internet. I.e. as a user, I want to set this system up once, and forget about it. But as long as people will keep competing to be a main payment gateway, each starting with their own slice of the Internet, users won't come.
  - ankit219 8y ago
    Micropayment does not work on user end because the number of times it prompts the users. Example[1]. For me, it hinders the experience of reading. This would be even more problematic on the sites I have been on for the first time. The problem with one player covering costs for all publishers is the monopoly it brings. Also, sounds more like cable, where there is a cost to access 100s of sites on the internet. Moreover, the users are not convinced to pay for one site they use, do you think they will be convinced to pay/donate for 100s of sites they have not even heard of? If it is forced as a package, then it is exactly like cable. I am not saying it cant work, but would require a lot of work to convince the users to pay. Also you are covering for not just the server costs, but publication's staff costs, business costs, which vary over time. With just one time lifetime payment, they are in a bound themselves. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/21/is-indias-biggest-ever-urban-redevelopment-too-good-to-be-true-bhendi-bazaar https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/21/is-indias-big...
tzs 8y ago
> Good, hopefully we'll see some real innovation, with wide spread micropayments Micropayments raise difficult tax issues, especially for small sites. In the United States, for example, if I've counted correctly 34 states require or will require by early 2019 out of state sellers of goods or services into the state to collect, report, and remit that state's sales tax. Another 13 states could do so, but have not yet amended their laws to require it [1]. 4 have no sales tax at all. (I'm counting DC as a state here). Whether or not a state actually can force this on a given seller depends on whether or not the seller has a "nexus" with the state. 24 states' laws say you have a nexus if you have 200 sales a year in the state or sales in a year totaling $100k. With micropayments, a site could hit 200 sales in a state easily and have to deal with sales tax, while only earning a small amount of revenue. For example, suppose your site accepted micropayments for reading articles. Say you did $0.05 per article. If 200 people in a "200 or $100k state" bought articles, that would $10 revenue. Congratulations...you have to collect tax on that! Worse, tax depends on exactly where the person lives in the state. You have to get their address, and lookup the tax based on that. Going just by state, or even just by zip code within the state, is not sufficient as you might collect too little [2]. You also have to file quarterly tax reports, which have a filing fee in most states, which will almost certainly swamp your $10 revenue. There are services you can use to do this for you. 24 states have banded together and formed a Streamlines Sales Tax group (SST), letting you register and file and remit taxes for all 24 through a single entity, and they have agreed to provide tax data (rates and tax district boundaries) in a common file format. Even better, if you agree to collect tax for all 24 of those states, then the states will pay the costs of you using any of several third party tax services companies (Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, and a few others), including the costs of using those company's APIs to handle all the lookups up and calculation, and the costs of preparing and filing the reports. Unfortunately, there are some big states that are not part of SST. California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, New York for example. CA, TX, and NY don't collect on out of state sellers (yet), but those others do. Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, etc., can handle those states for you too, but that won't be free. TaxCloud, for example, if you use their "automatic compliance" plan, which requires collecting tax in all the SST states (so that the SST states pay TaxCloud), you can add non-SST states for 0.5% (less for large volume sellers) of your revenue in each such state, and that will cover address verification, tax lookups, reports, and filing. (No affiliation with TaxCloud. I just happen to be using them for my first attempt to get our site at work to handle out of state US sales taxes--before we had just been collecting for sales in our own state and collecting VAT for EU sales. VAT is vastly simpler since it is per country, and the EU has something equivalent to the US Streamlined Sales Tax called VAT MOSS, so VAT was pretty trivial to deal with without needing an outside service). Anyway, all of the above probably will dampen interest at a lot of sites. Especially having to collect address information to calculate the tax. That raises privacy issues that I think many will find more troubling than the current ad site privacy issues. [1] It was only in the middle of this year that it became legal for states to require out of state sellers to collect. In 1992, the Supreme Court had ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to do so, unless Congress specifically authorized them to do so. Congress never did so. But this year, the Supreme Court revisited that issue and decided that it is OK, after all. [2] Realistically, the state probably won't come after you for the difference or penalties, but it is a risk you need to evaluate.

fabricexpert 8y ago

> wide spread micropayments I see this on HN a LOT, but I am really not sure it's a great model. The thing about ad-supported revenue is that you can still consume the content if you can't afford it. I'm simplifying a little, but the people who convert on ads are basically subsidizing the content for the rest of us. In our society the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy and the people who fall into the latter group may or not be. But the point is that with micropayments only the rich have access, and with ad-supported revenue everyone has access. I think most people prefer the latter.

ForHackernews 8y ago
With proper browser design, you could support both models. load_ads_unless(payment >= $0.0001) Whether or not sites would suffer the added complexity probably depends on how much money is on the table.
Nursie 8y ago
> the people who convert on ads are basically subsidizing the content for the rest of us. Do they? Or is it the people who buy the products, regardless of ad conversion?
- ankit219 8y ago
  Depends on how savvy or data driven is the marketing team of the advertiser(?).
- O_H_E 8y ago
  > content I don't think there is a "physical" product here. Mostly Articles and Videos
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  Ha yeah we all pay for the marketing campaigns regardless. Its factored into the price of every product you buy. The money for internet ads doesn't just spawn out of the ether.
adimitrov 8y ago
> In our society the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy and the people who fall into the latter group may or not be. [citation needed]. Telemarketing used to target people who could only barely afford it, and well educated, well earning folks from the younger generation tend to be tech savvy. The ones who don't know what's up are either old or uneducated (poor.) That's at least a counter hypothesis if not outright refutation of your claim, since I don't actually know any of the numbers here myself.
- fabricexpert 8y ago
  Yea but they could afford it, ethically that sucks but they still had the money to spend. Have you ever wanted to buy something small and literally didn't have the money in your account? This is how a huge number of people live, every day, day to day. Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > they still had the money to spend. you did claim > the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy now you say "yeah okay it sucks ethically", and shift the goal posts to something else entirely, from "wealth" to "they could buy it"? You're playing fast and loose with the exploitation, both financially and mentally, of others. You can't just ignore the costs of exploitation of people who buy shit they can't afford because their life sucks, and the sheer pollution of minds by advertisement, all the needlessly created "needs", too, because they can't be easily quantified. > Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it. So, social services in a country could confirm that a person is actually on welfare. If they are, sites can make certain things free for them, and/or others can donate a small share (10%?) of their micropayments to those who have nothing. That's not a fleshed out suggestion, just the first thing from the top off my head. Allow people to sign up to get a few free articles per month. Before you say it can't be done, show us you thought about it at all. You're also implying that the best or all the essential content would be micropayment content, which is a huge assumption.
- deleted 8y ago
LaundroMat 8y ago
Can you substantiate your claim that "the people that fall in the conversion group are generally wealthy"? My feeling is that the opposite is true, so I'd be happy to see more evidence for one or the other.
- fabricexpert 8y ago
  When I saw wealthy, I mean they have money to spend on the product they're buying. Money or access to credit or whatever. This is absolutely true as someone is buying stuff driven through marketing. A huge percentage of the people who don't buy are doing so not because the ads aren't effective, but because they don't have money to purchase. With a micropayment model those people just won't look at the content, because they don't have money in their account to do so.
  - tremon 8y ago
    Money or access to credit These are definitely not the same thing.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  He is absolutely correct. Wealthy in that you have access to ten dollars discretionary to spend per month. A friend of mine is from India and got into programming through free content with ads on the page. Imagine people for whom a dollar is a lot, who have no credit card to link into your system, who have no money to buy your stuff and no way to buy it even if they had the money. Even a $0.01 charge would be impossible because they simply don't have the tool necessary to buy your stuff over the Internet. I mourn the Internet that included people like them.
mtgx 8y ago
I think the "tip model" could be greatly expanded. The reason it doesn't work as well now is because for one the ad revenue model exists, and when a system already dominates, people tend to stop looking for alternatives or embrace new ones. Why bother to educate people to donate money when you can just put ads on your content? Also, when 99.9% of content-makers use ads, it means you have a much smaller pool of potential donors, too. When most users on the internet can donate and are used to donating, it becomes much easier to receive donations for any random piece of content. And second, there's great friction in the existing micro-tip model, because the payment companies take big portions out of the small tips. Plus, there's quite a bit of fragmentation as not everyone has a PayPal account, or Apple account, or Google Contributor account, or Amazon account, etc. I think cryptocurrencies will eventually solve this issue, if what we've seen so far with Steemit.com, d.tube, and others like them is any indication of that. Once people get into any cryptocurrency at all, the liquidity of tips greatly increases, and it becomes much easier to tip someone with a cryptocurrency. It's still in the super-early stages, though. It could take another 10 years before this becomes more mainstream. I don't really see any other way for this to work. The Google Contributor or even Flattr models will not work because they are not decentralized and interoperable enough with others like them. You'll never see the majority of people on the web use Google Contributor or Flattr. It needs to be an ecosystem of such services that all integrate and interoperate with no friction and content creators can be paid with any of them. The tipping model needs to be more like email than Apple iMessage, so that everyone can have one and use it with any other similar system.
starbeast 8y ago
>But the point is that with micropayments only the rich have access, and with ad-supported revenue everyone has access. I think most people prefer the latter. As a a counter to that, I've been watching 3blue1brown's maths videos on Patreon. Payments get you early access to content, but everything gets posted up eventually and it seems preferable to having ads.

apatters 8y ago

I think micropayments are a classic example of a solution that seems sensible to engineering under the assumption that humans are rational beings, but in the real world it falls apart because they aren't. The hardest part of making a sale isn't the price--it's getting the customer to say yes. With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link. This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content. No wonder it hasn't taken off. A better solution from a market psychology standpoint would be to sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites. Monthly auto rebill. Just one purchase decision for life and with enough sites the perceived value is high. Not sure why we aren't seeing more of this -- if anyone works at a media conglomerate feel free to reply :)

fabricexpert 8y ago
Which sites go into that list? Who gets the margin on it? Who decides how much the sites get and how much is "spent" on infrastructure? Can't wait to buy my "Internet Pass"!
- xellisx 8y ago
  Also it would start to feel like paying for cable. 1000 channels, and I only watch maybe 5.
- amelius 8y ago
  Someone should figure out a way to: - Track how many sites a user visits, without knowing which sites the user visits. Call this number N. - Charge the user for N visits. - Distribute the money to the original websites, without anyone knowing (not even their banks?) Sounds like a nice task for a cryptography researcher.
  - y4mi 8y ago
    way too easy to game. just spread a virus... or chrome extension which keep querying your websites there is no way to implement this with technology in a reasonable manner unless you monitor every action every user does at any time. which would be (at least in my opinion) worse.

ankit219 8y ago

I think something like the concept of reddit gold can work on the content/news sites as well. At its core, its about the ones who liked/found the content useful can reward it with some payment. Usually, in most of the business models, your most heavy users tend to subsidize/bear the cost of not so heavy but casual users. At the very core that is. For adverts it fails, since the heavy users are of less value than the casual ones. (how many times you can show the same ad to a user? Also, they are well trained on how to look past the ads). With gold-like concept, great content is rewarded, and incentivized as well. Also, given the scale of reddit, it works really well (along with ads) but not too sure how well it will work with ad dependent publications.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Micropayments aren't a problem on the user end, they're a problem almost entirely on the distribution end. We have existing successful models of the user side, chief of which is taxes. The problem is that an ideal solution would feature one or a couple of players that would cover the distribution to all creators on the entire Internet. I.e. as a user, I want to set this system up once, and forget about it. But as long as people will keep competing to be a main payment gateway, each starting with their own slice of the Internet, users won't come.
- ankit219 8y ago
  Micropayment does not work on user end because the number of times it prompts the users. Example[1]. For me, it hinders the experience of reading. This would be even more problematic on the sites I have been on for the first time. The problem with one player covering costs for all publishers is the monopoly it brings. Also, sounds more like cable, where there is a cost to access 100s of sites on the internet. Moreover, the users are not convinced to pay for one site they use, do you think they will be convinced to pay/donate for 100s of sites they have not even heard of? If it is forced as a package, then it is exactly like cable. I am not saying it cant work, but would require a lot of work to convince the users to pay. Also you are covering for not just the server costs, but publication's staff costs, business costs, which vary over time. With just one time lifetime payment, they are in a bound themselves. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/21/is-indias-biggest-ever-urban-redevelopment-too-good-to-be-true-bhendi-bazaar https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/21/is-indias-big...

tzs 8y ago

> Good, hopefully we'll see some real innovation, with wide spread micropayments Micropayments raise difficult tax issues, especially for small sites. In the United States, for example, if I've counted correctly 34 states require or will require by early 2019 out of state sellers of goods or services into the state to collect, report, and remit that state's sales tax. Another 13 states could do so, but have not yet amended their laws to require it [1]. 4 have no sales tax at all. (I'm counting DC as a state here). Whether or not a state actually can force this on a given seller depends on whether or not the seller has a "nexus" with the state. 24 states' laws say you have a nexus if you have 200 sales a year in the state or sales in a year totaling $100k. With micropayments, a site could hit 200 sales in a state easily and have to deal with sales tax, while only earning a small amount of revenue. For example, suppose your site accepted micropayments for reading articles. Say you did $0.05 per article. If 200 people in a "200 or $100k state" bought articles, that would $10 revenue. Congratulations...you have to collect tax on that! Worse, tax depends on exactly where the person lives in the state. You have to get their address, and lookup the tax based on that. Going just by state, or even just by zip code within the state, is not sufficient as you might collect too little [2]. You also have to file quarterly tax reports, which have a filing fee in most states, which will almost certainly swamp your $10 revenue. There are services you can use to do this for you. 24 states have banded together and formed a Streamlines Sales Tax group (SST), letting you register and file and remit taxes for all 24 through a single entity, and they have agreed to provide tax data (rates and tax district boundaries) in a common file format. Even better, if you agree to collect tax for all 24 of those states, then the states will pay the costs of you using any of several third party tax services companies (Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, and a few others), including the costs of using those company's APIs to handle all the lookups up and calculation, and the costs of preparing and filing the reports. Unfortunately, there are some big states that are not part of SST. California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, New York for example. CA, TX, and NY don't collect on out of state sellers (yet), but those others do. Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, etc., can handle those states for you too, but that won't be free. TaxCloud, for example, if you use their "automatic compliance" plan, which requires collecting tax in all the SST states (so that the SST states pay TaxCloud), you can add non-SST states for 0.5% (less for large volume sellers) of your revenue in each such state, and that will cover address verification, tax lookups, reports, and filing. (No affiliation with TaxCloud. I just happen to be using them for my first attempt to get our site at work to handle out of state US sales taxes--before we had just been collecting for sales in our own state and collecting VAT for EU sales. VAT is vastly simpler since it is per country, and the EU has something equivalent to the US Streamlined Sales Tax called VAT MOSS, so VAT was pretty trivial to deal with without needing an outside service). Anyway, all of the above probably will dampen interest at a lot of sites. Especially having to collect address information to calculate the tax. That raises privacy issues that I think many will find more troubling than the current ad site privacy issues. [1] It was only in the middle of this year that it became legal for states to require out of state sellers to collect. In 1992, the Supreme Court had ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to do so, unless Congress specifically authorized them to do so. Congress never did so. But this year, the Supreme Court revisited that issue and decided that it is OK, after all. [2] Realistically, the state probably won't come after you for the difference or penalties, but it is a risk you need to evaluate.