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The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you al

The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction. So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket. One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

lotsofpulp 2mo ago
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction? The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
joseda-hg 2mo ago
Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
II2II 2mo ago
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs. Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here. > How do you price articles? The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear. > And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example. > but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled. That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers. (As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.) > On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read. > They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles. Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.
  - II2II 2mo ago
    > Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here. In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher. > This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read. Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).
godelski 2mo ago
It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...
- Cider9986 2mo ago
  > It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. We still have Monero. Here's some recent projects. https://donatemonero.org/ https://donatemonero.org/ https://monerostats.org/ https://monerostats.org/ https://monero.forum/ https://monero.forum/ notice zero posts on the first page about USD price besides one disparaging Bitcoiners for caring about USD price.
  - godelski 2mo ago
    Everyone knows about Monero. If someone doesn't we can count on someone ensuring we do. But I can say with certainty that anyone who knows what a ZKP is knows about Monero even though Monero doesn't use ZKPs
xur17 2mo ago
Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.
boplicity 2mo ago
No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all. They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.
nottorp 2mo ago
Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.
- boplicity 2mo ago
  Your comment illustrates the tension very well, I think. Businesses don't generally want customers who aren't their core market; those people though, often want one slice of a business's offerings. This can lead to big distractions for businesses, as putting in the effort to serve the wrong market is a waste of time. The publishing industry really fell for this when the internet became widespread; they dreamed of huge audiences and big ad numbers. Turns out, that was not a model that worked, at all. The model that works is focusing on serving a niche, and charging a subscription fee, so you can get predictable revenue.
  - nottorp 2mo ago
    > so you can get predictable revenue That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :) You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed. Where's that issue you can try out now?
notatoad 2mo ago
Lots of smart people have tried to implement micropayments like this, and it has never worked. Publishers would rather have the chance at $10 than give up the chance at $10 for 10c. And readers don’t want to be thinking about their credit balance every time they read an article.
kelnos 2mo ago
That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system. It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance. So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge. A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once. It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached. You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.

lotsofpulp 2mo ago

Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction? The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.

joseda-hg 2mo ago

Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto

II2II 2mo ago

The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs. Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

kelnos 2mo ago
Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here. > How do you price articles? The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear. > And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example. > but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled. That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers. (As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.) > On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read. > They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles. Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.
- II2II 2mo ago
  > Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here. In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher. > This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read. Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).

godelski 2mo ago

It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...

Cider9986 2mo ago
> It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. We still have Monero. Here's some recent projects. https://donatemonero.org/ https://donatemonero.org/ https://monerostats.org/ https://monerostats.org/ https://monero.forum/ https://monero.forum/ notice zero posts on the first page about USD price besides one disparaging Bitcoiners for caring about USD price.
- godelski 2mo ago
  Everyone knows about Monero. If someone doesn't we can count on someone ensuring we do. But I can say with certainty that anyone who knows what a ZKP is knows about Monero even though Monero doesn't use ZKPs

xur17 2mo ago

Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.

boplicity 2mo ago

No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all. They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.

nottorp 2mo ago

Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.

boplicity 2mo ago
Your comment illustrates the tension very well, I think. Businesses don't generally want customers who aren't their core market; those people though, often want one slice of a business's offerings. This can lead to big distractions for businesses, as putting in the effort to serve the wrong market is a waste of time. The publishing industry really fell for this when the internet became widespread; they dreamed of huge audiences and big ad numbers. Turns out, that was not a model that worked, at all. The model that works is focusing on serving a niche, and charging a subscription fee, so you can get predictable revenue.
- nottorp 2mo ago
  > so you can get predictable revenue That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :) You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed. Where's that issue you can try out now?

notatoad 2mo ago

Lots of smart people have tried to implement micropayments like this, and it has never worked. Publishers would rather have the chance at $10 than give up the chance at $10 for 10c. And readers don’t want to be thinking about their credit balance every time they read an article.

kelnos 2mo ago

That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system. It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance. So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge. A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once. It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached. You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.