4 ms·

The text in full: > Dozens of startups spent years building over-engineered micropayments products to monetise blogging. > Turns out all you needed to do was

The text in full: > Dozens of startups spent years building over-engineered micropayments products to monetise blogging. > Turns out all you needed to do was ask people nicely to pay a monthly sub and email them the blog post. > Lesson in there. OK, that's fine, it's pointing out that people are willing to pay. The question is still how will they pay? If my blog/website/whatever has a visitor, and that visitor is willing to pay $1 (for example) ... how will that money get from them to me? There are people who visit my blog, or use some of the facilities I've set up, and they have asked: How can I pay you? What do people propose? The quoted text, the submitted tweet, seems to be dissing people's attempts to solve the problem, and seems to imply that it's a solved problem. If so, what's the solution?

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Bring back MMS? It had convenient carrier billing since the 1990s used for all kind of crap such as ringtones and whatnot, but is perfect for simple paid content publishing. It's even acceptable from a privacy PoV, since the carrier has your customer details already, so you're basically sending content anonymously. But it was kindof killed by Google due to the Android "stagefreight" bug, and really never recovered. Like for so many information channels it has closed, Google had no incentive to fix or enhance it when it doesn't contribute to their core business of forcing every point of contact into the fscking analytics-heavy web.
jfengel 6y ago
It sounds like they're pointing to Patreon and related sites. You give them a credit card, they mail you the content. It's not a "blog" in the original "web-log" sense, since it's email. It's not pay-to-read, but at least pay-for-content. Maybe old content goes up for free, to encourage people to pay to subscribe. There's also the Medium model, though I'm not sure how that works. I gather that it's some kind of pay-to-read-all-you-can model. It would be nice to solve the real micropayments "if you liked this page tip me a few cents" problem, which is still unsolved.
- ColinWright 6y ago
  > It would be nice to solve the real micropayments "if you liked this page tip me a few cents" problem, which is still unsolved. Absolutely ... that's the point. I don't know if anyone is still working in this space, or if everyone has simply given up. I'd be interested to know what the real problems are.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    There are still a few working on it, but nobody seems to be making any headway. The overhead of dealing with money is just too high. There are so many ways for it to go wrong -- theft, fraud, contested charges, hacking, connectivity failure, to name just a few. The transactions are small, but to be profitable you have to move a ton of money, and that makes you a target of every possible failure mode. I'd love for it to be as simple as a digital check: "You have my permission to take $.05 out of my account" cryptographically signed with my very private key. It would cost basically $0 to validate, and the server would move money from database A to database B. But that server has to be hyper-secure, and the app doing the signing has to be hyper-secure -- all for a nickel of money. And now I'm running a bank, so I need to actually prove to the government that I'm not going to abscond with their money and that I'm not being used for money laundering -- which means checking IDs by hand. And customers will complain, so I have to run a help desk. It's just too much hassle. You can try to piggyback it off the efforts banks are already putting in, but they still won't see it profitable for a nickel at a time, or even a dollar. I think everybody hoped that somehow cryptocurrency would solve it, but it doesn't -- security requires burning too much electricity. Maybe there's an answer out there somehow, but nobody has found it yet.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Bring back MMS? It had convenient carrier billing since the 1990s used for all kind of crap such as ringtones and whatnot, but is perfect for simple paid content publishing. It's even acceptable from a privacy PoV, since the carrier has your customer details already, so you're basically sending content anonymously. But it was kindof killed by Google due to the Android "stagefreight" bug, and really never recovered. Like for so many information channels it has closed, Google had no incentive to fix or enhance it when it doesn't contribute to their core business of forcing every point of contact into the fscking analytics-heavy web.

jfengel 6y ago

It sounds like they're pointing to Patreon and related sites. You give them a credit card, they mail you the content. It's not a "blog" in the original "web-log" sense, since it's email. It's not pay-to-read, but at least pay-for-content. Maybe old content goes up for free, to encourage people to pay to subscribe. There's also the Medium model, though I'm not sure how that works. I gather that it's some kind of pay-to-read-all-you-can model. It would be nice to solve the real micropayments "if you liked this page tip me a few cents" problem, which is still unsolved.

ColinWright 6y ago
> It would be nice to solve the real micropayments "if you liked this page tip me a few cents" problem, which is still unsolved. Absolutely ... that's the point. I don't know if anyone is still working in this space, or if everyone has simply given up. I'd be interested to know what the real problems are.
- jfengel 6y ago
  There are still a few working on it, but nobody seems to be making any headway. The overhead of dealing with money is just too high. There are so many ways for it to go wrong -- theft, fraud, contested charges, hacking, connectivity failure, to name just a few. The transactions are small, but to be profitable you have to move a ton of money, and that makes you a target of every possible failure mode. I'd love for it to be as simple as a digital check: "You have my permission to take $.05 out of my account" cryptographically signed with my very private key. It would cost basically $0 to validate, and the server would move money from database A to database B. But that server has to be hyper-secure, and the app doing the signing has to be hyper-secure -- all for a nickel of money. And now I'm running a bank, so I need to actually prove to the government that I'm not going to abscond with their money and that I'm not being used for money laundering -- which means checking IDs by hand. And customers will complain, so I have to run a help desk. It's just too much hassle. You can try to piggyback it off the efforts banks are already putting in, but they still won't see it profitable for a nickel at a time, or even a dollar. I think everybody hoped that somehow cryptocurrency would solve it, but it doesn't -- security requires burning too much electricity. Maybe there's an answer out there somehow, but nobody has found it yet.