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Fundamentally, microtransactions will never work because they make browsing a stack of decisions. It doesn't matter how small the price and seamless the infras

by hakfoo 7y ago

Fundamentally, microtransactions will never work because they make browsing a stack of decisions. It doesn't matter how small the price and seamless the infrastructure, it's still a cost you have to make a conscious decision about. Would you pay one satoshi to load this comment? The model that could work would be a large network with a single-sign-on ad-free subscription. Charge $20 per month and slice it to the participating sites based on analytics. This works because it's about eliminating customer risk and burden. * A large network helps to reduce the "what if I do't read a lot of articles from this publisher every month?" risk. * Going for an ad-free subscription instead of a paywall subscription reduces the risk of commitment if you can't preview the content. * A flat monthly fee removes the risk of "what if I get sucked down a rabbit hole and read 500 stories instead of 10 this month" and the burden of having to decide if you're willing to pay for any one individual article.

justsee 7y ago
I don't think anyone would argue that a content payment architecture that demands a user endlessly make a stack of decisions isn't doomed to fail. But that's a criticism of a specific implementation of microtransactions. In a future Brave / BAT world where a variety of microtransaction experiments can play out, I'd imagine a bunch of un/successful experiments that then start to gain wider adoption depending on the industry / publisher. Maybe the transaction is just for specific goods, like ebooks, higher quality video feeds etc, or maybe it's a time spent cost with a standardized market rate up to a maximum amount which reflects a weekly / monthly unlimited subscription. Attention-based microtransactions are much more feasible with something like BAT + Brave (with its on-device machine-learning model). Maybe even with everything planned it still fails, but as the experiments haven't even started it'll be interesting to see what, if anything takes.

by hakfoo 7y ago

justsee 7y ago

I don't think anyone would argue that a content payment architecture that demands a user endlessly make a stack of decisions isn't doomed to fail. But that's a criticism of a specific implementation of microtransactions. In a future Brave / BAT world where a variety of microtransaction experiments can play out, I'd imagine a bunch of un/successful experiments that then start to gain wider adoption depending on the industry / publisher. Maybe the transaction is just for specific goods, like ebooks, higher quality video feeds etc, or maybe it's a time spent cost with a standardized market rate up to a maximum amount which reflects a weekly / monthly unlimited subscription. Attention-based microtransactions are much more feasible with something like BAT + Brave (with its on-device machine-learning model). Maybe even with everything planned it still fails, but as the experiments haven't even started it'll be interesting to see what, if anything takes.