5 ms·
20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article. Why does it take us so long?
by ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article.
Why does it take us so long?
- jakeinspace 3y agoI don’t think the economics of that would work for big publications. Maybe at 5-10 cents per article they would.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- levitate 3y agoHow easy the transaction is is almost more important to me than the actual cost. As long as it can be one click, I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read a good article
- Hackbraten 3y agoNews vendors don't want you to pay for individual articles you're interested in. They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.
- eastbound 3y agoAnd then cram down their bias down your throat, with you paying. Whether it’s sponsored placements or interest group’s lobbying. I mean, there is no money to make in neutrality anyway.
- amazingman 3y agoYou think the bias is bad now? It'd be 10x worse if readers paid by the article. Have we not learned about audience capture by now?
- shric 3y ago> 20 years of World Wide Web 30.
- jmull 3y agoOne reason: it wouldn't be a penny. You're off by a factor of probably 100.
- Nextgrid 3y agoAds pay pennies though. So maybe he's merely off by a factor of 5?
- jmull 3y agoHow many ads will there be, though? Also, ads aren't paying everyone's bills -- hence the paywalls -- so that number must be too low. (Not to mention the other issue with this: in general it's not ads or micropayments/paywalls -- it's ads and micropayments/paywalls. Hell, if micropayments were feasible, it would probably be all three.)
- dns_snek 3y agoOn the VERY high end the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is what, $2? That's 0.2 cents per view. I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read the article, even up to $1 if it's a really good investigative/well-researched piece. I'm not paying $5/outlet/month though, ever!
- Yizahi 3y agoHumans pay more though. Nobody will be interested in collecting 1c from hundred million of unloyal readers, prone to changing information providers because then they aren't chained with a yearly sub which can be only cancelled via an international 2-3 hour call to the USA for the price of a whole sub. Journal would sooner get that money from the loyal 100000 readers who will pay 1$ per article. But wait, why do that when they can change 10-20$ per article from 10000 and throw some meaningless loyalty program to them? Even better, do the american healthcare trick - set a price at say 1000$ per article but allow only big corpos to have some opaque bulk discounts for their employees. Thus maximizing money extraction from richest customers.
- candiddevmike 3y agoBecause all payment processors want 2% + 0.x per transaction.
- NeoTar 3y agoWhich is why you need either a roll-up system, or pre-payment.
- seydor 3y agocontrol of money. It's not a lack of solutions but the people who control money make the solutions illegal , because taxation / terrorism / child porn / the usual
- bastard_op 3y agoI'm still trying to get reimbursement for the first 20 years of my life watching shitty commercials having grown up in the 70's.
- high_5 3y agoThere's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.
- insanitybit 3y agoThis is seemingly what Brave wants to do.
- methou 3y agoAcademic press let's you do that, but it's insanely expensive for each article you want to read. Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.
- Yizahi 3y agoNobody will accept real micro payments. It is a pipe dream. As soon as such monetization system is deployed the prices will start at 5$ to read an article and will increase even more in the subsequent years. Why? Because people will pay. Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).
- rakkhi 3y agoThis only works with: 1. Common authenticated and identy system 2. That system makes the payments, already linked to your source eg card or bank I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks