4 ms·

The problem with this seems to be the nonexistence of micropayments. As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. Which is a pitty, because $0.

by mg 4y ago

The problem with this seems to be the nonexistence of micropayments. As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. Which is a pitty, because $0.01 per page would be a CPM of $10 which is crazy high. For most publishers, that would be a big increase in their earnings.

mstipetic 4y ago
Why couldn't I load up my account with $10 or so every month, and have a centralized solution tally up all my consumption and distribute it to all publishers.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  That solution would probably also charge a lot, like the credit card companies. Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.
- briffle 4y ago
  honestly, I would probably subscribe to apple news if they did this. Or another similar tool I want to support good journalism, but I don't want to have multiple subscriptions to manage and deal with.
- 5560675260 4y ago
  Brave browser does this. Unfortunately I don't think that they have great adoption.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Last time I asked if they could offer this, they said no. Instead they were pushing their cryptocurrency scam while blocking site owners' advertising.
sbarre 4y ago
I feel like a few companies have tried this over the years.. The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites. Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher.. But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..
g_p 4y ago
For an org that has an enduring billing relationship with the customer (think the large tech companies and platform providers), they already are handling transaction aggregation internally to an extent - just not to the extent of micro-transactions (where they need to handle the edge case of a tiny single transaction in a day or week or month). If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).
carlosjobim 4y ago
Anything under 50c is ridiculously low. If some content is not worth even 50c, why would it be worth your time spent consuming it?
- gpvos 4y ago
  $0.01 is too low, but $0.50 is way too high except for longer articles. I read so much on a day that paying 50c for every article would ruin me.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    If you need to read them for your job, that is just a business expense. If you read them for your leisure and they're not even worth 50c to you, then that sounds like you are wasting your time.
    - gpvos 4y ago
      For leisure / keeping up with the world (you know, democracy and such), and wow are you judgmental.
      - carlosjobim 4y ago
        I am not judging you, I'm trying to understand why you want to spend your time on content that you yourself consider not even worth a pittance?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        mkr-hn 4y ago
        Their comment appears to be about ability to pay, not value.
martin_a 4y ago
Well, there was flattr, not sure what they're doing these days, though.
mandmandam 4y ago
> As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
There's a viable model: credits. You don't pay $0.01, you pay say $10 for 1,000 pages. Most web companies usually provide a lowest offering that's geared towards reasonably heavy users and provide nothing other than ads and the like for light users. Hence the ongoing war between blasting us with ads and sometimes malicious ads vs keeping from destroying our experience and risking getting infected by the latest 0-day.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The thing that killed micropayments back in the early 2000s (when Scott McCloud was calling for them) was transaction costs. Putting a paywall on every click is a sales and user experience nightmare. Keep in mind that the reason why everyone uses subscription billing nowadays is that you never have to bug the user to ask for more money. You just ask once and get paid indefinitely. There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason. What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives. On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.

by mg 4y ago

mstipetic 4y ago

Why couldn't I load up my account with $10 or so every month, and have a centralized solution tally up all my consumption and distribute it to all publishers.

wkat4242 4y ago
That solution would probably also charge a lot, like the credit card companies. Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.
briffle 4y ago
honestly, I would probably subscribe to apple news if they did this. Or another similar tool I want to support good journalism, but I don't want to have multiple subscriptions to manage and deal with.
5560675260 4y ago
Brave browser does this. Unfortunately I don't think that they have great adoption.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Last time I asked if they could offer this, they said no. Instead they were pushing their cryptocurrency scam while blocking site owners' advertising.

sbarre 4y ago

I feel like a few companies have tried this over the years.. The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites. Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher.. But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..

g_p 4y ago

For an org that has an enduring billing relationship with the customer (think the large tech companies and platform providers), they already are handling transaction aggregation internally to an extent - just not to the extent of micro-transactions (where they need to handle the edge case of a tiny single transaction in a day or week or month). If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).

carlosjobim 4y ago

Anything under 50c is ridiculously low. If some content is not worth even 50c, why would it be worth your time spent consuming it?

gpvos 4y ago
$0.01 is too low, but $0.50 is way too high except for longer articles. I read so much on a day that paying 50c for every article would ruin me.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  If you need to read them for your job, that is just a business expense. If you read them for your leisure and they're not even worth 50c to you, then that sounds like you are wasting your time.
  - gpvos 4y ago
    For leisure / keeping up with the world (you know, democracy and such), and wow are you judgmental.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      I am not judging you, I'm trying to understand why you want to spend your time on content that you yourself consider not even worth a pittance?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mkr-hn 4y ago
        Their comment appears to be about ability to pay, not value.

martin_a 4y ago

Well, there was flattr, not sure what they're doing these days, though.

mandmandam 4y ago

> As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01. There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.

LorenPechtel 4y ago

There's a viable model: credits. You don't pay $0.01, you pay say $10 for 1,000 pages. Most web companies usually provide a lowest offering that's geared towards reasonably heavy users and provide nothing other than ads and the like for light users. Hence the ongoing war between blasting us with ads and sometimes malicious ads vs keeping from destroying our experience and risking getting infected by the latest 0-day.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The thing that killed micropayments back in the early 2000s (when Scott McCloud was calling for them) was transaction costs. Putting a paywall on every click is a sales and user experience nightmare. Keep in mind that the reason why everyone uses subscription billing nowadays is that you never have to bug the user to ask for more money. You just ask once and get paid indefinitely. There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason. What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives. On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.