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Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that d

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere else, do not feel the kind of loyalty to that might make you subscribe to something.

infecto 3y ago
Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
- colesantiago 3y ago
  > still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this. To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flattr or something along those lines. I could definitely see this working at scale.
  - eknkc 3y ago
    I come across paywalled articles at least a couple of times a week. I’d gladly pay $0.50 for most of them to access the single article. It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
    - infecto 3y ago
      Thats the boat I am in. I don't even care if they show me ads too, I just want to get around the paywall but I don't want to pay for a subscription.
  - dageshi 3y ago
    We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work. I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of. Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
    - infecto 3y ago
      Since most news publications are failing businesses I would not immediately assume they have considered all avenues of monetization. I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using on a NYT level publication. Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to consume it.
      - amadeuspagel 3y ago
        The NYT is very much not a failing business.
        infecto 3y ago
        Thanks for the downvote but I said most not all. If you look at the news/magazine industry though it has not made a good transition to the internet age. Lots of closures and consolidations with some of the major outlets acquired as almost toys for the rich. It’s very much a shell of what it once was.
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      > We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work. Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term. If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    The $0.50 weekly price for NYT is a teaser rate. The full price for digital only was recently raised to $195/year. I imagine they make too much money from people who subscribe at the teaser rate and forget to cancel (like all newspapers/magazines) to make it worth exploring other business models.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  Since we have to assume that they assessed it, I suspect that they concluded the math would not work out. A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is important, even though it might not click)
  - rchaud 3y ago
    News websites are not independently owned. NYT is publicly traded, Wash Post is owned by Bezos, Time Magazine is owned by Benioff, etc. They survive on patronage outside of their subscriber base.
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  There is, or anyways there was, but the model didn’t work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it’s all in Dutch now, and doesn’t work on a pay-per-article model anymore, it’s unclear to me what their model is now, since I don’t speak Dutch. In any case, what you’re asking for exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that’s why you can’t do it - it was tried, and people didn’t use it.
  - infecto 3y ago
    This is one of those things where I wonder if it was too early for its success? I don't know the answer but it feels like it could have been. I have never seen it used on US based media unfortunately.
    - LadyCailin 3y ago
      It was. You could read newspapers like NYT and Washington Post, New Yorker (maybe not those exactly, it’s been a while), but there was a large number of US publications. I guess it could have been too early, but I just feel like the demand wasn’t really there. People didn’t link to Blendle articles, they linked to NYT articles, and I didn’t really think about Blendle, and instead just found the archive.to link or whatever. But I dunno. I too would love a model like this to take off, but it just didn’t.
- vintermann 3y ago
  You want to be nickeled and dimed? That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You decided up front how much you could afford to spend supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early user. However, they had the problem that most of the people who you might want to support, were not on Flattr. And Flattr made a poor move early on: in a bid to avoid getting spammed by low effort/beggars, they demanded that you give and take: If you wanted to be able to receive, you had to use the service yourself. This was eminently fair. It was also a disaster, because it exposed a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but which is a crush to most "creatives"' ego: The vast majority of us are net consumers! We watch way more than we create ourselves. Most minor bloggers/youtubers/podcasters wouldn't want to admit that, they'd just see "I pay more than I get out of this? This sucks!" Later they backed down from this demand, and then they got the problem with low effort/begging. All along they had the problem that some influential people really wanted to see them fail, due to their association with The Pirate Bay.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Yes, I want to be nickeled and dimed for content. There's no way I'm going to sign up for any more subscriptions. But I would be happy to pay a few cents for individual articles or videos or podcasts if it was a single click process. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
- rchaud 3y ago
  Are you able to purchase anything for 10 cents today? The price of a short self-published ebook on Amazon is 30x that, $2.99, and plenty of people buy those. I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like what Substack has, which is semi-longform stuff that doesn't need to be padded with "blog" style posts.
  - infecto 3y ago
    Hope the price was not hanging you up. I don’t know what the price is and it’s certainly variable depending on the content length and publication. Maybe for a long Journal/NYT expose it’s a $1…
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal! The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.
  - apantel 3y ago
    Content just isn’t worth a lot because nobody really needs any particular piece of information all that much; and if they do really need a piece of information, chances are it is available in many places.
  - Thrymr 3y ago
    Sure, but we all have subscription fatigue. Say I subscribe to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But sometimes I like to read articles in the Washington Post or the New Yorker. How many subscriptions are enough? It's just like streaming fragmentation with Netflix, Apple+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, ad infinitum.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    That "works", somewhat, if you want to get all your news from one place. That's the traditional newspaper model: most people don't get a dozen papers delivered. But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world. Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.
  - infecto 3y ago
    Don’t get hung up on the price I listed, it’s just an example which is dependent on publication and article length/content. Your argument is pretty weak too. Of course I could subscribe but obviously I don’t for any number of reasons. I am saying I wish I could pay on a per article price. Sorry for wanting to pay for the content I consume.
teekert 3y ago
Sadly disagree, I've put some BTC on my Podcasting 2.0 player (Podverse) and stream it to every creator that wants them (via the Bitcoin Lightning network).
- thfuran 3y ago
  And you think more than about 0% of web users do the same?
  - teekert 3y ago
    I was reacting to the generalization. There are communities where the creators are well under way to becoming sustainable with this method. Granted, it's very early days.
TheFragenTaken 3y ago
Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, people will beg to donate/subscribe.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $100 to make in China, $50 to ship to the US and $150 in store costs (eg utilities, staffing, rent, amortized capex, etc). You might say I've made $200 profit. But let's say my corporate structure is to have 2 subsidiaries: PB Manufacturing and PB Retail. The first makes the table. The second manages the stores and sells the table. If PBM charges PBR $150 for the table then PBM makes $50 in profit and PBR makes $150. If PBM charges $300 for the table then PBM makes $200 in profit and PBR breaks even. This is what I mean when I say Twitch's profitability is a chosen narrative. There are many reasons to do this. Tax is a big one. Maybe you pay less tax in China so you prefer to take profit there. Maybe you want to argue stores aren't profitable to resist demands for higher wages or higher rents. The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it technically has to be "at arm's length" and other requirements).
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      Can you expand on this? You're saying Twitch is only unprofitable in an accounting sense but would be a viable business if on its own? Saying their AWS costs are $0 seems like it would be even more "fake"
geokon 3y ago
I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them
- scrollaway 3y ago
  It’s also a huge waste of energy at a time when the planet is on fire.
  - geokon 3y ago
    it's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a smaller price to pay
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      That's a false dichotomy: cryptominers are not the only alternative to ads.
      - geokon 3y ago
        that was literally what the parent comment said: "This is why ads are the only viable business model". No alternative to ads has been really made viable. Fattr shutting down makes the point
- rcxdude 3y ago
  It's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides basically nothing to crypto.
  - geokon 3y ago
    Why is it banditry.. you can opt out of going to the website. I think you're not looking at the alternative objectively.. Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"
blub 3y ago
There’s an overabundance of content/apps/sites. Most websites and projects are worth zero to most people.
bigbluedots 3y ago
Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.
- stonogo 3y ago
  Why is the answer to "how to remove ads" always "track the hell out of everyone at some other layer"
  - bigbluedots 3y ago
    If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way. Your ISP probably already does that - at least re sites visited and data used.
    - stonogo 3y ago
      They might try, but I tunnel all my traffic out anyway. In your proposal, my tunneling behavior would be morally equivalent to piracy. I don't think it's the world I want to live in. Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  No, for so many reasons. No, tracking is bad. No, a central organization will not do an equitable job of distributing fees even if it has invasive tracking information. No, a mandatory fee is unacceptable. No, not all sites visited deserve an equal share based solely on visits and bandwidth. No, there is no reasonable automated metric that would allow such division, as any possible metric can be gamed. The moment something like this were put in place, sites would immediately start gaming the resulting perverse incentives. Sites get more share based on bandwidth? Useless background downloads. Sites get more share based on number of visits? Lots of background loads, content in multiple iframes, split across many pages, etc. Any metric you can think of can and will be gamed, other than "user says they want this site to get a share". (That can be gamed too, but only insofar as sites already compete for user attention.) Here's how to remove unwanted ads from the Internet: get everyone to install an adblocker, put advertising out of business, observe better revenue models emerge out of necessity without having to fight to compete with "free with ads".
prmoustache 3y ago
I see a lot of people either proposing using paypal, patreon or ko-fi to receive donations. How did flattr differ from these services?
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  At least in theory, the flattr model was "pay a fixed amount you can afford, it automatically gets divided among the sites you flattr". That's a model that helps avoid subscription fatigue. Put $10 or $20 or $100 into a pool, and at the end of the month you know you'll spend exactly that much, no matter how many sites you flattr. I would love to have seen that model succeed.
indymike 3y ago
Most of the time, it's more painful to receive money than to donate it.
amelius 3y ago
Maybe adblockers could take the role of microdonation platforms. I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit, and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit most.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Google actually used to have this as a service. They canned it a few years ago though.
- mminer237 3y ago
  This is essentially Brave browser's entire proposition for its existence.
  - amelius 3y ago
    When clicking "Private advertising" on the Brave website you get: > Powerful Ad Formats (...) > Diversify from Big Tech channels, and get the first-mover advantage of advertising in the fastest-growing search engine since Bing. Search ads are privacy-preserving, text-based ads that appear at the top of a user’s search engine results page (SERP). > (...)
    - mminer237 3y ago
      Yeah, they themselves serve ads on their search engine. That's wholly separate from Brave Rewards and you can block their ads just the same.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  That was Google Contributor. It would pay min required to win the bid. Wasn't too successful. People very soon realized that you get the same for free with ad blockers.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percentage-based donations, instead of fixed values IIRC. People are selfish, but also willing to share, if you give them enough reason. But thinking about, maybe the lack of a social component and some virtual rewards would have been beneficial. But I guess, after the first fail, nobody cared anymore for it, and they somehow failed to find their market.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to donate. It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations come from 5% of users. Trust me, everyone says they prefer paying/donating over ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if given the option.
  - BottingRocks 3y ago
    I believe that in the last couple of years the line between donation and begging has been blurred. You have things on the extreme side like people begging on tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people donating to the craziest streamers doing the most outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super donations on Youtube on live podcasts. When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun. Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit card details to a random site, but the masses will trust buying credits/donations/subscriptions through tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.
  - throwawayq3423 3y ago
    I think the one trick is using subscriptions that people opt into one time and just forget about. Using the dodgy psychology tricks of gym memberships to actually help people.
bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
i used flattr since it released for some websites i ran. had maybe 100 dollar there, mostly from an adblock filter list i used to maintain. eventually they just deleted my account due to ”inactivity” in maybe 2017 or so. this made me stop recommending them they just kept my money
seydor 3y ago
Rather , because it's still too difficult to put money in a computer. Arcade machines in the 70s had the perfect impulse-purchase-compatible usage model
itsoktocry 3y ago
>but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. That's an odd definition of "selfish". Why is there an obligation to hand someone money? If you are running a business, be up front and charge money for it.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  There is no obligation. That's the point.
sneak 3y ago
This is wrong. Laws around money transmission, as well as egregious rentseeking from payment processing networks, not “people [being] fundamentally too selfish” are why this doesn’t work. The tech and will is there. It’s just illegal to build it.
diggan 3y ago
> if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. Hear hear, this is exactly why bittorrent trackers is just a fad that will disappear as quickly as it appeared. What, are people supposed to just share data freely without getting paid for it? Good luck I tell them, it's impossible because every single person is just too selfish.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  Not seeding a torrent requires more effort than seeding, it's also basically free.
  - opengears 3y ago
    This argument does not take bandwidth into account. If the goal is to download a lot of different files, you will be effectively limiting your download with keeping (especially very popular) torrents seeded. I stand corrected if somebody could please disprove me.
    - master-lincoln 3y ago
      Isn't bandwidth up- and download independent usually, so seeding (uploading) would not affect your downloads?
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      As the other commenter said, upload and download speeds are separate. And if you mean data caps, most internet connections have "unlimited" bandwidth unless you're torrenting off your phone.
- ikrenji 3y ago
  torrents are viable with a few dozen seeders. you can't build a business on a few dozen 1$ donations
- SkyBelow 3y ago
  Isn't this why many groups look at how much one uploaded and you can get lower priority or lose access if you don't seed enough?
opengears 3y ago
this is called "tragedy of the commons" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
freediver 3y ago
I'd like to push back on this. It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality. Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-centric and web-centric.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Perhaps “truly worth paying for” is setting too high a bar for some kinds of content that people do find useful?
  - sbarre 3y ago
    It's also subjective down to the individual, so how would you even quantify it properly?
  - sethhochberg 3y ago
    I think its also just really hard for people to quantify on a small scale. Its much easier to reason about whether or not you get, on average, $25 a month worth of value from a subscription to the New York Times than it is to try and guess whether someone's review of a vacuum you're considering is worth $2 to you or $0.37 or anything in between. Or if the stakes are even lower and you're not avoiding a lemon of a vacuum, you're getting marginal improvement to an experience - what is it worth to read someone saying "don't go to Jim's Ale House when on vacation there, its fine but Jacks' is nearby and better"? Clearly that information has some value, but... how much? Whats the cost of a tip that helps turn a serviceable meal on a vacation into a better one?
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. That's two ways of saying the same thing. But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.
shpx 3y ago
Ads also physically influence the world. More humans become aware of something other humans want them to be aware of, more people end up buying some things (thereby incentivizing more of them to be created) or spending their lives on the most addictive mobile gambling thing or whatever. Whereas a system that just lets people say "this thing entertained me enough for 0.00023% of my economic output for the year doesn't do anything else, and deciding typing in how much something is worth to you is work. Not a lot of work, but it's still work that might even be worth more than your micro donation, depending on how you value your time and the neurons you dedicate to thinking about it. So obviously the system that actually does something is more viable.
pflenker 3y ago
I had multiple discussions with German news projects around micropayments, and they list other, much simpler reasons why they don’t accept it: - depending on the payment method, the transaction cost is too high and eats up almost the full payment - the administrative overhead to maintain micro transactions is huge - it creates the incentive to create articles that sell well, e.g. clickbait, which contradicts the values of these projects - you need to plan ahead and for that you need to have a somewhat predictable flow of income, which is not a given with micropayments.
- lencastre 3y ago
  That sounds about right!
lefixx 3y ago
its not fair to call people shelfish when the only subscription option given to them is 10000x the value of an ad shown to them. Flattr was a good idea and if it was integrated to youtube I would have easily pay more than the ads would have.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  I'm not sure how to talk about this without using the word selfish. It's not an insult. Most people are mostly selfish. There's no way of talking about the world without taking that into account.
Dylan16807 3y ago
I just something I can subscribe to and money goes to sites I visit in a reliable way. And the sites should stop showing me ads, but I'll even take that as optional right now. Ideally something like youtube premium, but not youtube. Google ran some services that at a very surface level had the same idea, but actually worked in a messy and bad way, and then they gave up on it. Which is a real shame because they have the ad presence to actually make it work. Every other attempt I've seen has way too close to 0% of the sites I visit able to receive money.

infecto 3y ago

Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.

colesantiago 3y ago
> still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this. To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flattr or something along those lines. I could definitely see this working at scale.
- eknkc 3y ago
  I come across paywalled articles at least a couple of times a week. I’d gladly pay $0.50 for most of them to access the single article. It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
  - infecto 3y ago
    Thats the boat I am in. I don't even care if they show me ads too, I just want to get around the paywall but I don't want to pay for a subscription.
- dageshi 3y ago
  We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work. I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of. Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
  - infecto 3y ago
    Since most news publications are failing businesses I would not immediately assume they have considered all avenues of monetization. I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using on a NYT level publication. Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to consume it.
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      The NYT is very much not a failing business.
      - infecto 3y ago
        Thanks for the downvote but I said most not all. If you look at the news/magazine industry though it has not made a good transition to the internet age. Lots of closures and consolidations with some of the major outlets acquired as almost toys for the rich. It’s very much a shell of what it once was.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    > We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work. Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term. If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  The $0.50 weekly price for NYT is a teaser rate. The full price for digital only was recently raised to $195/year. I imagine they make too much money from people who subscribe at the teaser rate and forget to cancel (like all newspapers/magazines) to make it worth exploring other business models.
jstummbillig 3y ago
Since we have to assume that they assessed it, I suspect that they concluded the math would not work out. A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is important, even though it might not click)
- rchaud 3y ago
  News websites are not independently owned. NYT is publicly traded, Wash Post is owned by Bezos, Time Magazine is owned by Benioff, etc. They survive on patronage outside of their subscriber base.
LadyCailin 3y ago
There is, or anyways there was, but the model didn’t work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it’s all in Dutch now, and doesn’t work on a pay-per-article model anymore, it’s unclear to me what their model is now, since I don’t speak Dutch. In any case, what you’re asking for exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that’s why you can’t do it - it was tried, and people didn’t use it.
- infecto 3y ago
  This is one of those things where I wonder if it was too early for its success? I don't know the answer but it feels like it could have been. I have never seen it used on US based media unfortunately.
  - LadyCailin 3y ago
    It was. You could read newspapers like NYT and Washington Post, New Yorker (maybe not those exactly, it’s been a while), but there was a large number of US publications. I guess it could have been too early, but I just feel like the demand wasn’t really there. People didn’t link to Blendle articles, they linked to NYT articles, and I didn’t really think about Blendle, and instead just found the archive.to link or whatever. But I dunno. I too would love a model like this to take off, but it just didn’t.
vintermann 3y ago
You want to be nickeled and dimed? That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You decided up front how much you could afford to spend supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early user. However, they had the problem that most of the people who you might want to support, were not on Flattr. And Flattr made a poor move early on: in a bid to avoid getting spammed by low effort/beggars, they demanded that you give and take: If you wanted to be able to receive, you had to use the service yourself. This was eminently fair. It was also a disaster, because it exposed a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but which is a crush to most "creatives"' ego: The vast majority of us are net consumers! We watch way more than we create ourselves. Most minor bloggers/youtubers/podcasters wouldn't want to admit that, they'd just see "I pay more than I get out of this? This sucks!" Later they backed down from this demand, and then they got the problem with low effort/begging. All along they had the problem that some influential people really wanted to see them fail, due to their association with The Pirate Bay.
- nradov 3y ago
  Yes, I want to be nickeled and dimed for content. There's no way I'm going to sign up for any more subscriptions. But I would be happy to pay a few cents for individual articles or videos or podcasts if it was a single click process. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
rchaud 3y ago
Are you able to purchase anything for 10 cents today? The price of a short self-published ebook on Amazon is 30x that, $2.99, and plenty of people buy those. I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like what Substack has, which is semi-longform stuff that doesn't need to be padded with "blog" style posts.
- infecto 3y ago
  Hope the price was not hanging you up. I don’t know what the price is and it’s certainly variable depending on the content length and publication. Maybe for a long Journal/NYT expose it’s a $1…
itsoktocry 3y ago
>so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal! The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.
- apantel 3y ago
  Content just isn’t worth a lot because nobody really needs any particular piece of information all that much; and if they do really need a piece of information, chances are it is available in many places.
- Thrymr 3y ago
  Sure, but we all have subscription fatigue. Say I subscribe to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But sometimes I like to read articles in the Washington Post or the New Yorker. How many subscriptions are enough? It's just like streaming fragmentation with Netflix, Apple+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, ad infinitum.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  That "works", somewhat, if you want to get all your news from one place. That's the traditional newspaper model: most people don't get a dozen papers delivered. But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world. Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.
- infecto 3y ago
  Don’t get hung up on the price I listed, it’s just an example which is dependent on publication and article length/content. Your argument is pretty weak too. Of course I could subscribe but obviously I don’t for any number of reasons. I am saying I wish I could pay on a per article price. Sorry for wanting to pay for the content I consume.

teekert 3y ago

Sadly disagree, I've put some BTC on my Podcasting 2.0 player (Podverse) and stream it to every creator that wants them (via the Bitcoin Lightning network).

thfuran 3y ago
And you think more than about 0% of web users do the same?
- teekert 3y ago
  I was reacting to the generalization. There are communities where the creators are well under way to becoming sustainable with this method. Granted, it's very early days.

TheFragenTaken 3y ago

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, people will beg to donate/subscribe.

Ygg2 3y ago
Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?
- jmyeet 3y ago
  Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $100 to make in China, $50 to ship to the US and $150 in store costs (eg utilities, staffing, rent, amortized capex, etc). You might say I've made $200 profit. But let's say my corporate structure is to have 2 subsidiaries: PB Manufacturing and PB Retail. The first makes the table. The second manages the stores and sells the table. If PBM charges PBR $150 for the table then PBM makes $50 in profit and PBR makes $150. If PBM charges $300 for the table then PBM makes $200 in profit and PBR breaks even. This is what I mean when I say Twitch's profitability is a chosen narrative. There are many reasons to do this. Tax is a big one. Maybe you pay less tax in China so you prefer to take profit there. Maybe you want to argue stores aren't profitable to resist demands for higher wages or higher rents. The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it technically has to be "at arm's length" and other requirements).
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    Can you expand on this? You're saying Twitch is only unprofitable in an accounting sense but would be a viable business if on its own? Saying their AWS costs are $0 seems like it would be even more "fake"

geokon 3y ago

I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them

scrollaway 3y ago
It’s also a huge waste of energy at a time when the planet is on fire.
- geokon 3y ago
  it's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a smaller price to pay
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    That's a false dichotomy: cryptominers are not the only alternative to ads.
    - geokon 3y ago
      that was literally what the parent comment said: "This is why ads are the only viable business model". No alternative to ads has been really made viable. Fattr shutting down makes the point
rcxdude 3y ago
It's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides basically nothing to crypto.
- geokon 3y ago
  Why is it banditry.. you can opt out of going to the website. I think you're not looking at the alternative objectively.. Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"

blub 3y ago

There’s an overabundance of content/apps/sites. Most websites and projects are worth zero to most people.

bigbluedots 3y ago

Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.

stonogo 3y ago
Why is the answer to "how to remove ads" always "track the hell out of everyone at some other layer"
- bigbluedots 3y ago
  If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way. Your ISP probably already does that - at least re sites visited and data used.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    They might try, but I tunnel all my traffic out anyway. In your proposal, my tunneling behavior would be morally equivalent to piracy. I don't think it's the world I want to live in. Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
No, for so many reasons. No, tracking is bad. No, a central organization will not do an equitable job of distributing fees even if it has invasive tracking information. No, a mandatory fee is unacceptable. No, not all sites visited deserve an equal share based solely on visits and bandwidth. No, there is no reasonable automated metric that would allow such division, as any possible metric can be gamed. The moment something like this were put in place, sites would immediately start gaming the resulting perverse incentives. Sites get more share based on bandwidth? Useless background downloads. Sites get more share based on number of visits? Lots of background loads, content in multiple iframes, split across many pages, etc. Any metric you can think of can and will be gamed, other than "user says they want this site to get a share". (That can be gamed too, but only insofar as sites already compete for user attention.) Here's how to remove unwanted ads from the Internet: get everyone to install an adblocker, put advertising out of business, observe better revenue models emerge out of necessity without having to fight to compete with "free with ads".

prmoustache 3y ago

I see a lot of people either proposing using paypal, patreon or ko-fi to receive donations. How did flattr differ from these services?

JoshTriplett 3y ago
At least in theory, the flattr model was "pay a fixed amount you can afford, it automatically gets divided among the sites you flattr". That's a model that helps avoid subscription fatigue. Put $10 or $20 or $100 into a pool, and at the end of the month you know you'll spend exactly that much, no matter how many sites you flattr. I would love to have seen that model succeed.

indymike 3y ago

Most of the time, it's more painful to receive money than to donate it.

amelius 3y ago

Maybe adblockers could take the role of microdonation platforms. I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit, and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit most.

Workaccount2 3y ago
Google actually used to have this as a service. They canned it a few years ago though.
mminer237 3y ago
This is essentially Brave browser's entire proposition for its existence.
- amelius 3y ago
  When clicking "Private advertising" on the Brave website you get: > Powerful Ad Formats (...) > Diversify from Big Tech channels, and get the first-mover advantage of advertising in the fastest-growing search engine since Bing. Search ads are privacy-preserving, text-based ads that appear at the top of a user’s search engine results page (SERP). > (...)
  - mminer237 3y ago
    Yeah, they themselves serve ads on their search engine. That's wholly separate from Brave Rewards and you can block their ads just the same.
renewiltord 3y ago
That was Google Contributor. It would pay min required to win the bid. Wasn't too successful. People very soon realized that you get the same for free with ad blockers.

PurpleRamen 3y ago

IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percentage-based donations, instead of fixed values IIRC. People are selfish, but also willing to share, if you give them enough reason. But thinking about, maybe the lack of a social component and some virtual rewards would have been beneficial. But I guess, after the first fail, nobody cared anymore for it, and they somehow failed to find their market.

Workaccount2 3y ago
Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to donate. It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations come from 5% of users. Trust me, everyone says they prefer paying/donating over ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if given the option.
- BottingRocks 3y ago
  I believe that in the last couple of years the line between donation and begging has been blurred. You have things on the extreme side like people begging on tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people donating to the craziest streamers doing the most outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super donations on Youtube on live podcasts. When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun. Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit card details to a random site, but the masses will trust buying credits/donations/subscriptions through tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.
- throwawayq3423 3y ago
  I think the one trick is using subscriptions that people opt into one time and just forget about. Using the dodgy psychology tricks of gym memberships to actually help people.

bdhcuidbebe 3y ago

i used flattr since it released for some websites i ran. had maybe 100 dollar there, mostly from an adblock filter list i used to maintain. eventually they just deleted my account due to ”inactivity” in maybe 2017 or so. this made me stop recommending them they just kept my money

seydor 3y ago

Rather , because it's still too difficult to put money in a computer. Arcade machines in the 70s had the perfect impulse-purchase-compatible usage model

itsoktocry 3y ago

>but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. That's an odd definition of "selfish". Why is there an obligation to hand someone money? If you are running a business, be up front and charge money for it.

mvdtnz 3y ago
There is no obligation. That's the point.

sneak 3y ago

This is wrong. Laws around money transmission, as well as egregious rentseeking from payment processing networks, not “people [being] fundamentally too selfish” are why this doesn’t work. The tech and will is there. It’s just illegal to build it.

diggan 3y ago

> if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. Hear hear, this is exactly why bittorrent trackers is just a fad that will disappear as quickly as it appeared. What, are people supposed to just share data freely without getting paid for it? Good luck I tell them, it's impossible because every single person is just too selfish.

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
Not seeding a torrent requires more effort than seeding, it's also basically free.
- opengears 3y ago
  This argument does not take bandwidth into account. If the goal is to download a lot of different files, you will be effectively limiting your download with keeping (especially very popular) torrents seeded. I stand corrected if somebody could please disprove me.
  - master-lincoln 3y ago
    Isn't bandwidth up- and download independent usually, so seeding (uploading) would not affect your downloads?
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    As the other commenter said, upload and download speeds are separate. And if you mean data caps, most internet connections have "unlimited" bandwidth unless you're torrenting off your phone.
ikrenji 3y ago
torrents are viable with a few dozen seeders. you can't build a business on a few dozen 1$ donations
SkyBelow 3y ago
Isn't this why many groups look at how much one uploaded and you can get lower priority or lose access if you don't seed enough?

opengears 3y ago

this is called "tragedy of the commons" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

freediver 3y ago

I'd like to push back on this. It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality. Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-centric and web-centric.

skybrian 3y ago
Perhaps “truly worth paying for” is setting too high a bar for some kinds of content that people do find useful?
- sbarre 3y ago
  It's also subjective down to the individual, so how would you even quantify it properly?
- sethhochberg 3y ago
  I think its also just really hard for people to quantify on a small scale. Its much easier to reason about whether or not you get, on average, $25 a month worth of value from a subscription to the New York Times than it is to try and guess whether someone's review of a vacuum you're considering is worth $2 to you or $0.37 or anything in between. Or if the stakes are even lower and you're not avoiding a lemon of a vacuum, you're getting marginal improvement to an experience - what is it worth to read someone saying "don't go to Jim's Ale House when on vacation there, its fine but Jacks' is nearby and better"? Clearly that information has some value, but... how much? Whats the cost of a tip that helps turn a serviceable meal on a vacation into a better one?
paulddraper 3y ago
> It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. That's two ways of saying the same thing. But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.

shpx 3y ago

Ads also physically influence the world. More humans become aware of something other humans want them to be aware of, more people end up buying some things (thereby incentivizing more of them to be created) or spending their lives on the most addictive mobile gambling thing or whatever. Whereas a system that just lets people say "this thing entertained me enough for 0.00023% of my economic output for the year doesn't do anything else, and deciding typing in how much something is worth to you is work. Not a lot of work, but it's still work that might even be worth more than your micro donation, depending on how you value your time and the neurons you dedicate to thinking about it. So obviously the system that actually does something is more viable.

pflenker 3y ago

I had multiple discussions with German news projects around micropayments, and they list other, much simpler reasons why they don’t accept it: - depending on the payment method, the transaction cost is too high and eats up almost the full payment - the administrative overhead to maintain micro transactions is huge - it creates the incentive to create articles that sell well, e.g. clickbait, which contradicts the values of these projects - you need to plan ahead and for that you need to have a somewhat predictable flow of income, which is not a given with micropayments.

lencastre 3y ago
That sounds about right!

lefixx 3y ago

its not fair to call people shelfish when the only subscription option given to them is 10000x the value of an ad shown to them. Flattr was a good idea and if it was integrated to youtube I would have easily pay more than the ads would have.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
I'm not sure how to talk about this without using the word selfish. It's not an insult. Most people are mostly selfish. There's no way of talking about the world without taking that into account.

Dylan16807 3y ago

I just something I can subscribe to and money goes to sites I visit in a reliable way. And the sites should stop showing me ads, but I'll even take that as optional right now. Ideally something like youtube premium, but not youtube. Google ran some services that at a very surface level had the same idea, but actually worked in a messy and bad way, and then they gave up on it. Which is a real shame because they have the ad presence to actually make it work. Every other attempt I've seen has way too close to 0% of the sites I visit able to receive money.