5 ms·

How Bitcoin Can Save Publishing

47 points by walid 13y ago

aqme28 13y ago
How does this have anything to do with Bitcoin, on a fundamental level? Companies like Tinypass (http://www.tinypass.com/ http://www.tinypass.com/) do a pretty good job of this already with more traditional currencies.
- VMG 13y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't have this: http://www.tinypass.com/terms/ http://www.tinypass.com/terms/
  - adestefan 13y ago
    Except that it will if anyone actually tried to do this.
- walid 13y ago
  It is strange that I have to quote the article as an explanation but here goes: The Bitcoin Solution In today’s world, quick payments online with little or no cost are readily available via bitcoin. Recognizing the potential this provides are a number of entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on what could be a game-changing industry update. Micropayments of just a few cents per piece would offer greater incentive to consistently produce content worth paying for rather than optimize for headlines and SEO, since the probability of someone returning to a site where they didn’t receive ample value is low. Micropayments also reduce or eliminate the incentive to subvert the paywall, since the time to find a way around it may actually be economically more expensive than the few cents spent on the article. Enabling this are two companies that recently launched, offering bitcoin paywalls to solve this problem.
TylerE 13y ago
Reposting what I posted two weeks ago when this was posted the first time (and promptly ripped to shreds and then deleted) Where this utterly falls apart is that it doesn't consider that the major barrier is NOT the price. It's overcoming the friction of getting the user to pay anything, at all. If you can do that, conversion rates are similar at $0.10 and $10.00. That is why micropayments are dumb. They're leaving money on the table. NB: I work in the industry and this is coming from direct professional experience. I'm not really at liberty to go much more in depth than I did, but I have strong real world data that says micropayments are a disaster, plain and simple.
- triplesec 13y ago
  Thank you! Can you link here to any better economic analyses which are not so osecret but worth reading, to enlighten us some more?
  - TylerE 13y ago
    I don't really have anything formal that i can cite...just my observations from the trenches. I'll just say that we tried (and promoted heavily) a system where you could buy the access to a PDF of one day's content for a quite low price (Less than $1). In roughly a year that the system was up we sold less than $50 worth...TOTAL, but we have thousands of customers on a paid sub at $10+/monthly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- derekp7 13y ago
  So the solution is to have some sort of premium content Internet pass. It costs $10 a month, but can be used to get free content at whatever sites are signed up with it. Kind of like Amazon Prime, but with an arbitrary number of vendors. Then, the $10 per user is split among all the products that the user uses it with. Now here's the kicker -- come up with a marketing deal with various ISPs, where they can include this with their subscriptions. Either as a premium that comes automatically with their higher-speed tiers, or something that can be billed as extra for the lower speed tiers.
  - Kylekramer 13y ago
    Sounds like a lot like the old Readability (except with a hard paywall instead of donation model). I liked Readability idea in concept, but it didn't exactly take off.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      Readability made three errors, in my opinion: 1. They charged too little. Far too little. 2. In an attempt to be more viral, they took payment for websites that were non-participants, with the theory that this would entice them to sign up to receive payment. What happened is that they ended up with a pile of zombie cash that they could not touch. 3. They routed everything through their servers, meaning that a large fraction of their costs was controlled by third parties. This is connected to 1.
ath0 13y ago
Jon Rosenberg (of goats.com)'s experiment with this in the early 2000s -- not bitcoin, which didn't exist yet, but micropayments in general -- was the first one I saw with hard numbers about why this will be extremely difficult. Sadly, he's taken his site offline, but short version: There's a huge difference in someone's mind between "free", and "not free"; it's seen as a change in category, not in degree. Having to commit any amount of money - even $1 - significantly reduces your audience, but once someone's gotten over the hump of willing to pay, you might as well ask them to make a larger purchase of a T-Shirt or subscription. This sort of experiment has been repeated many times. Folks like Flattr have tried to tie this to social networks, so it's seamless; and the NYTimes model of metered paywalls (smaller publishers can use something like http://www.tinypass.com/ http://www.tinypass.com/, which Andrew Sullivan's blog uses) seems to be taking over magazine publishing. Even attempts to turn cable subscriptions a la carte aren't doing well, as Megan McArdle explains: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant-we-unbundle-cable/239849/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant... I get why the Genesis Block would have enthusiasm for this idea. But one-pass micropayments, Bitcoin or otherwise, don't seem like the future to me.
- Groxx 13y ago
  Did they charge before access? I would honestly expect such systems to fail, forever, for the same reason free iOS apps with in-app purchases are vastly more profitable than paid apps. There's no chance to build trust if you charge up-front, and why would I pay if I have zero trust? It's easier to leave and look elsewhere, leading to tons of results are useless, and it seems reasonable to assume the site that's charging for access is just as likely to be useless.
- Aqueous 13y ago
  Ten years ago you were right, but I think you are making this out to be some hard-wired component of human nature when it is largely cultural. Something has changed culturally and psychologically in the time since then. The psychological gap between paying and not paying now is narrower than it was 10 years ago. This is in large part due to developments that have taken place in the time since, especially the iTunes model. In the 90s people people were extremely cautious about purchasing things online. In the beginning it didn't happen at all, but Amazon and the development of e-commerce broke that barrier. People began to think nothing of giving out their credit card information and home addresses to purchase things that will ultimately be shipped to their homes. Then, paying for all-digital premium content became the norm, especially because of iTunes. iTunes completely normalized the concept of a small payment for quick and easy access to content. People think nothing of purchasing an app or a song in two seconds on iTunes, because psychologically $1.00 doesn't mean a whole lot to them and easily fits within their recreational budget and it is exceedingly convenient. I think the next form of content to fall into this model will be written content. First major newspapers had to stop giving away their content for free (they already have as you point out). People have shown that they are willing to pay for this formerly free content. Now comes the part where they start charging for a la carte access to articles. I've already seen this on some magazines - GQ? Time perhaps? I forget - and I must admit I've clicked through a few times, and I don't have a lot of disposable income. I might simply irresponsible but on the other hand I'm probably not alone.
kaonashi 13y ago
Bitcoin paywalls… gee how original. It's just like our old non-solutions, only with Bitcoins, so that makes it awesome.
- aminok 13y ago
  Lower fees, and no divulgement of personal financial details, make it awesome for micropayments.
  - kaonashi 13y ago
    It's like Paypal without the risk management and all the convenience of forex.
    - aminok 13y ago
      It has lower fees than PayPal. For micropayments, you don't really need risk management. In addition to offering a lower cost option for micropayments, it enables transactions in countries not well integrated into the global economy where PayPal can't operate (e.g. Ukraine). You're right about the forex cost.
coryfklein 13y ago
Although I'm not sure Bitcoin can do much to change the paywall problem, this article does shed interesting light on the state of the publishing industry and how the natural downward drive of quality is leaving a gap of top-quality and accurate reporting. I am very interested to see who will fill that gap in the next few years, and I think it will go to whoever solves this free/non-free paywall problem.
- nwzpaperman 13y ago
  It's more complex than free vs. non-free, but it's solvable and will be solved.
donohoe 13y ago
This was posted two weeks ago and was a load of BS then and still is. Can someone with appropriate privileges just kill this one off please? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566
- walid 13y ago
  Note that you work for qz.com which kinda discredits you when asking for another site to be deleted.
  - eli 13y ago
    Ad Hominem attacks aren't cool.
    - walid 13y ago
      True, but I wasn't trying to attack him. I was surprised that someone would ask that a thread be deleted that vehemently so I got curious about his background. When someone is in a competing position, s/he has to respect other people's expectations about them.

47 points by walid 13y ago

How does this have anything to do with Bitcoin, on a fundamental level? Companies like Tinypass (http://www.tinypass.com/ http://www.tinypass.com/) do a pretty good job of this already with more traditional currencies.

VMG 13y ago
Bitcoin doesn't have this: http://www.tinypass.com/terms/ http://www.tinypass.com/terms/
- adestefan 13y ago
  Except that it will if anyone actually tried to do this.
walid 13y ago
It is strange that I have to quote the article as an explanation but here goes: The Bitcoin Solution In today’s world, quick payments online with little or no cost are readily available via bitcoin. Recognizing the potential this provides are a number of entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on what could be a game-changing industry update. Micropayments of just a few cents per piece would offer greater incentive to consistently produce content worth paying for rather than optimize for headlines and SEO, since the probability of someone returning to a site where they didn’t receive ample value is low. Micropayments also reduce or eliminate the incentive to subvert the paywall, since the time to find a way around it may actually be economically more expensive than the few cents spent on the article. Enabling this are two companies that recently launched, offering bitcoin paywalls to solve this problem.

TylerE 13y ago

Reposting what I posted two weeks ago when this was posted the first time (and promptly ripped to shreds and then deleted) Where this utterly falls apart is that it doesn't consider that the major barrier is NOT the price. It's overcoming the friction of getting the user to pay anything, at all. If you can do that, conversion rates are similar at $0.10 and $10.00. That is why micropayments are dumb. They're leaving money on the table. NB: I work in the industry and this is coming from direct professional experience. I'm not really at liberty to go much more in depth than I did, but I have strong real world data that says micropayments are a disaster, plain and simple.

triplesec 13y ago
Thank you! Can you link here to any better economic analyses which are not so osecret but worth reading, to enlighten us some more?
- TylerE 13y ago
  I don't really have anything formal that i can cite...just my observations from the trenches. I'll just say that we tried (and promoted heavily) a system where you could buy the access to a PDF of one day's content for a quite low price (Less than $1). In roughly a year that the system was up we sold less than $50 worth...TOTAL, but we have thousands of customers on a paid sub at $10+/monthly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
derekp7 13y ago
So the solution is to have some sort of premium content Internet pass. It costs $10 a month, but can be used to get free content at whatever sites are signed up with it. Kind of like Amazon Prime, but with an arbitrary number of vendors. Then, the $10 per user is split among all the products that the user uses it with. Now here's the kicker -- come up with a marketing deal with various ISPs, where they can include this with their subscriptions. Either as a premium that comes automatically with their higher-speed tiers, or something that can be billed as extra for the lower speed tiers.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  Sounds like a lot like the old Readability (except with a hard paywall instead of donation model). I liked Readability idea in concept, but it didn't exactly take off.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    Readability made three errors, in my opinion: 1. They charged too little. Far too little. 2. In an attempt to be more viral, they took payment for websites that were non-participants, with the theory that this would entice them to sign up to receive payment. What happened is that they ended up with a pile of zombie cash that they could not touch. 3. They routed everything through their servers, meaning that a large fraction of their costs was controlled by third parties. This is connected to 1.

ath0 13y ago

Jon Rosenberg (of goats.com)'s experiment with this in the early 2000s -- not bitcoin, which didn't exist yet, but micropayments in general -- was the first one I saw with hard numbers about why this will be extremely difficult. Sadly, he's taken his site offline, but short version: There's a huge difference in someone's mind between "free", and "not free"; it's seen as a change in category, not in degree. Having to commit any amount of money - even $1 - significantly reduces your audience, but once someone's gotten over the hump of willing to pay, you might as well ask them to make a larger purchase of a T-Shirt or subscription. This sort of experiment has been repeated many times. Folks like Flattr have tried to tie this to social networks, so it's seamless; and the NYTimes model of metered paywalls (smaller publishers can use something like http://www.tinypass.com/ http://www.tinypass.com/, which Andrew Sullivan's blog uses) seems to be taking over magazine publishing. Even attempts to turn cable subscriptions a la carte aren't doing well, as Megan McArdle explains: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant-we-unbundle-cable/239849/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant... I get why the Genesis Block would have enthusiasm for this idea. But one-pass micropayments, Bitcoin or otherwise, don't seem like the future to me.

Groxx 13y ago
Did they charge before access? I would honestly expect such systems to fail, forever, for the same reason free iOS apps with in-app purchases are vastly more profitable than paid apps. There's no chance to build trust if you charge up-front, and why would I pay if I have zero trust? It's easier to leave and look elsewhere, leading to tons of results are useless, and it seems reasonable to assume the site that's charging for access is just as likely to be useless.
Aqueous 13y ago
Ten years ago you were right, but I think you are making this out to be some hard-wired component of human nature when it is largely cultural. Something has changed culturally and psychologically in the time since then. The psychological gap between paying and not paying now is narrower than it was 10 years ago. This is in large part due to developments that have taken place in the time since, especially the iTunes model. In the 90s people people were extremely cautious about purchasing things online. In the beginning it didn't happen at all, but Amazon and the development of e-commerce broke that barrier. People began to think nothing of giving out their credit card information and home addresses to purchase things that will ultimately be shipped to their homes. Then, paying for all-digital premium content became the norm, especially because of iTunes. iTunes completely normalized the concept of a small payment for quick and easy access to content. People think nothing of purchasing an app or a song in two seconds on iTunes, because psychologically $1.00 doesn't mean a whole lot to them and easily fits within their recreational budget and it is exceedingly convenient. I think the next form of content to fall into this model will be written content. First major newspapers had to stop giving away their content for free (they already have as you point out). People have shown that they are willing to pay for this formerly free content. Now comes the part where they start charging for a la carte access to articles. I've already seen this on some magazines - GQ? Time perhaps? I forget - and I must admit I've clicked through a few times, and I don't have a lot of disposable income. I might simply irresponsible but on the other hand I'm probably not alone.

kaonashi 13y ago

Bitcoin paywalls… gee how original. It's just like our old non-solutions, only with Bitcoins, so that makes it awesome.

aminok 13y ago
Lower fees, and no divulgement of personal financial details, make it awesome for micropayments.
- kaonashi 13y ago
  It's like Paypal without the risk management and all the convenience of forex.
  - aminok 13y ago
    It has lower fees than PayPal. For micropayments, you don't really need risk management. In addition to offering a lower cost option for micropayments, it enables transactions in countries not well integrated into the global economy where PayPal can't operate (e.g. Ukraine). You're right about the forex cost.

coryfklein 13y ago

Although I'm not sure Bitcoin can do much to change the paywall problem, this article does shed interesting light on the state of the publishing industry and how the natural downward drive of quality is leaving a gap of top-quality and accurate reporting. I am very interested to see who will fill that gap in the next few years, and I think it will go to whoever solves this free/non-free paywall problem.

nwzpaperman 13y ago
It's more complex than free vs. non-free, but it's solvable and will be solved.

donohoe 13y ago

This was posted two weeks ago and was a load of BS then and still is. Can someone with appropriate privileges just kill this one off please? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566

walid 13y ago
Note that you work for qz.com which kinda discredits you when asking for another site to be deleted.
- eli 13y ago
  Ad Hominem attacks aren't cool.
  - walid 13y ago
    True, but I wasn't trying to attack him. I was surprised that someone would ask that a thread be deleted that vehemently so I got curious about his background. When someone is in a competing position, s/he has to respect other people's expectations about them.