3 ms·

I was a cofounder of a micropayments paywall / subscription startup that operated for about 3.5 years, several years ago. (We shut down due to lack of growth an

by godot 6y ago

I was a cofounder of a micropayments paywall / subscription startup that operated for about 3.5 years, several years ago. (We shut down due to lack of growth and running out of money) We mostly tried to sell to news/magazines publishers. The points that the article author brought up are all good points; but what we kept seeing was that it wasn't the consumers who were unwilling to pay, it was the publishers who were unwilling to try a new model. Whenever a site with quality content integrated with us, the percentage of visitors who paid was more decent than you'd imagine. What we couldn't do was convincing a sizable national-level publisher to use us. We had various niche content sites and some local region newspapers integrate with us and they actually saw a pretty good payers to visitors ratio. Some niche content sites even made pretty good revenue using our paywall product.

doctor_eval 6y ago
I would love to hear your story as I am doing something in this space. Would you be willing to drop me a line at mark-at-commandquery.com? Hearing other's experience would really help me validate what I'm working on.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Some advice: if you don't have a compelling brand name, make sure you have a relative, close friend or PR rep who works for a micropayments client. Large companies have absolutely no reason to partner with an unknown. Worse than NIH, is "why fund a parasite on top of our business model?"
artpi 6y ago
Hey, I am the author of the above tiny rant and what prompted me to write is exactly the case you are describing. I am working on monetization features for WordPress.com and Tumblr users. Micropayments are one of the cases we are considering and this post came out of our internal discussions. There is a TON of context I am omitting in that post. In particular, I think that niche sites can run micropayments because early adopters WILL use them. But the economics of it means that you need to cross the chasm to the early majority in order to break even. But the early majority will be more conscious about these tiny amounts of cost. Alternatively, I can be totally wrong, but this whole thread is an awesome discussion :)

by godot 6y ago

doctor_eval 6y ago

I would love to hear your story as I am doing something in this space. Would you be willing to drop me a line at mark-at-commandquery.com? Hearing other's experience would really help me validate what I'm working on.

redis_mlc 6y ago
Some advice: if you don't have a compelling brand name, make sure you have a relative, close friend or PR rep who works for a micropayments client. Large companies have absolutely no reason to partner with an unknown. Worse than NIH, is "why fund a parasite on top of our business model?"

artpi 6y ago

Hey, I am the author of the above tiny rant and what prompted me to write is exactly the case you are describing. I am working on monetization features for WordPress.com and Tumblr users. Micropayments are one of the cases we are considering and this post came out of our internal discussions. There is a TON of context I am omitting in that post. In particular, I think that niche sites can run micropayments because early adopters WILL use them. But the economics of it means that you need to cross the chasm to the early majority in order to break even. But the early majority will be more conscious about these tiny amounts of cost. Alternatively, I can be totally wrong, but this whole thread is an awesome discussion :)