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There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value conte

There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1] Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it. Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820

mr_toad 7y ago
> are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford So advertising doesn’t work on these people? Seems unlikely. That would imply content providers are giving stuff away, and wasting bandwidth on adds they know will never work. Seems more likely to me that the advertising does work, and people aren’t getting content for free. They’re paying for stuff they don’t need, with money they don’t have.
- eclipxe 7y ago
  How did you draw that conclusion?
- manigandham 7y ago
  No, free in this context meaning they aren't paying upfront with cash. So yes, ads do work, and they allow people without other means to monetize their attention in real-time. They also own their attention and are perfectly capable of spending it however they want, on whatever they want, without any approval of what they need by you or anyone else.
udkl 7y ago
Why wouldn't these two approached work in parallel ? An ad-free experience for those willing to pay and an ad supported one for those who don't. I'm sure there are nuances like the politics you mention in your linked comment. Just curious why.
- manigandham 7y ago
  They can, and some services offer both. Maintaining two systems is resource and support intensive though, especially for payments. It's rarely worth the hassle if you only get 1 in a million to subscribe directly. The cable-bundle approach to content might get more traction but there are too many competing bundles adding fatigue (just like video streaming), on top of the fact that people don't value general content the same as music or movies so the rates are inconsequential compared to ads.
- satyrnein 7y ago
  Companies don't want to advertise to the people with no money.
  - udkl 7y ago
    That's an astute observation, however I doubt it's valid. Not paying a monthly subscription wouldn't indicate poverty. It might just be these people are subscription averse... or they are used to ad supported free content and don't want to pay...
sebastos 7y ago
It sounds like Sterling was some cool work - too bad it didn't work out. If it's going to happen, I think it's going to require a non-iterative step-change to get it right. A far cleaner design for the web would be essentially an underlying payment system that governs all web traffic. You would essentially be paying for bytes, at a fairly low level. The issue is, people want to be completely unaware of the payment process so that their browsing habits are not perturbed. And yet at the same time, they must be able to trust that they won't be hit with a gotcha charge from some rent-collector troll site. You can't have both without some level of oversight, or some seriously negative consequences for people who set their "tolls" too high. One of the biggest advantages of pay-to-play is deterrence of astroturfing and spam. If it costs money to send an email, the losers are the parasites who send millions of unwanted emails at everybody else's expense. But for these types of second-order social effects to take root, you really need a wide rollout. The modern-day web is exactly backwards - it charges bots nothing and real humans everything. When a website is starved for bandwidth because demand for the content is higher than the web's ability to supply that content, it just breaks. It becomes the host's problem. In any other arena, the prices go up, and demand backs off until supply returns. Having tons of people demand the content you're serving from your website should be a _good_ thing, but right now it means you need to scale or die and cut off your revenue stream completely. If it were profitable to be able to serve web content to people, then the decentralized web would become an obvious and inevitable reality, especially over the final mile. Rather than having to sign up for Comcast, they would make their money invisibly, behind the scenes, through the magical internet currency that was used to pay for bytes. You'd never have to talk to some fuck about your xfinity account again. No website would ever have to think about how to pivot into profitability. No youtube streamer would have to shill for products in the middle of their videos - the fact that you're watching it would be making youtube money directly, which youtube would pass on to the creators at a far more transparent way. No more demonetization because some companies might not want to be associated with you. Everything would be better. Everything. Making the web free is actually part of what led to its zombification.
rcpt 7y ago
A big problem with micro payments is that the effort that goes in to figuring out if that article is really worth the $0.27 to read it is often worth more than $0.27 http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayments/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme...

mr_toad 7y ago

> are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford So advertising doesn’t work on these people? Seems unlikely. That would imply content providers are giving stuff away, and wasting bandwidth on adds they know will never work. Seems more likely to me that the advertising does work, and people aren’t getting content for free. They’re paying for stuff they don’t need, with money they don’t have.

eclipxe 7y ago
How did you draw that conclusion?
manigandham 7y ago
No, free in this context meaning they aren't paying upfront with cash. So yes, ads do work, and they allow people without other means to monetize their attention in real-time. They also own their attention and are perfectly capable of spending it however they want, on whatever they want, without any approval of what they need by you or anyone else.

udkl 7y ago

Why wouldn't these two approached work in parallel ? An ad-free experience for those willing to pay and an ad supported one for those who don't. I'm sure there are nuances like the politics you mention in your linked comment. Just curious why.

manigandham 7y ago
They can, and some services offer both. Maintaining two systems is resource and support intensive though, especially for payments. It's rarely worth the hassle if you only get 1 in a million to subscribe directly. The cable-bundle approach to content might get more traction but there are too many competing bundles adding fatigue (just like video streaming), on top of the fact that people don't value general content the same as music or movies so the rates are inconsequential compared to ads.
satyrnein 7y ago
Companies don't want to advertise to the people with no money.
- udkl 7y ago
  That's an astute observation, however I doubt it's valid. Not paying a monthly subscription wouldn't indicate poverty. It might just be these people are subscription averse... or they are used to ad supported free content and don't want to pay...

sebastos 7y ago

It sounds like Sterling was some cool work - too bad it didn't work out. If it's going to happen, I think it's going to require a non-iterative step-change to get it right. A far cleaner design for the web would be essentially an underlying payment system that governs all web traffic. You would essentially be paying for bytes, at a fairly low level. The issue is, people want to be completely unaware of the payment process so that their browsing habits are not perturbed. And yet at the same time, they must be able to trust that they won't be hit with a gotcha charge from some rent-collector troll site. You can't have both without some level of oversight, or some seriously negative consequences for people who set their "tolls" too high. One of the biggest advantages of pay-to-play is deterrence of astroturfing and spam. If it costs money to send an email, the losers are the parasites who send millions of unwanted emails at everybody else's expense. But for these types of second-order social effects to take root, you really need a wide rollout. The modern-day web is exactly backwards - it charges bots nothing and real humans everything. When a website is starved for bandwidth because demand for the content is higher than the web's ability to supply that content, it just breaks. It becomes the host's problem. In any other arena, the prices go up, and demand backs off until supply returns. Having tons of people demand the content you're serving from your website should be a _good_ thing, but right now it means you need to scale or die and cut off your revenue stream completely. If it were profitable to be able to serve web content to people, then the decentralized web would become an obvious and inevitable reality, especially over the final mile. Rather than having to sign up for Comcast, they would make their money invisibly, behind the scenes, through the magical internet currency that was used to pay for bytes. You'd never have to talk to some fuck about your xfinity account again. No website would ever have to think about how to pivot into profitability. No youtube streamer would have to shill for products in the middle of their videos - the fact that you're watching it would be making youtube money directly, which youtube would pass on to the creators at a far more transparent way. No more demonetization because some companies might not want to be associated with you. Everything would be better. Everything. Making the web free is actually part of what led to its zombification.

rcpt 7y ago

A big problem with micro payments is that the effort that goes in to figuring out if that article is really worth the $0.27 to read it is often worth more than $0.27 http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayments/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme...