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Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

satotious.com

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Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#41

Post by satotious »

jacques_chester wrote: post #40
satotious wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much! If you email us(ruby at satotious.com) your userID, we will credit it with a small amount of btc so you can test the extension auto-pay feature for free. So far we are getting 95% picking ads vs micropayments, I guess thats to be expected as most people dont have bitcoin lightning wallets yet. Right now we have demo ads which we create. Our ads are slightly different as they incorporate a captcha.…

How does the paywall know to let someone through? Disclosure: I am, in theory, a potential competitor through work I've done off and on over the past decade.

The content is encrypted, users get the key when pay or view an ad. We dont host anything

Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#42

Post by satotious »

jacques_chester wrote: post #39
fxtentacle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

Blendle (another one in this general space) had a mechanism where you could decide not to pay after seeing the content. Disclosure: I have previously pursued a business not dissimilar to the one under discussion.

Yes that would work for them as they aggregate and pay publishers at the end of the month. Problem with that is Blendle needs to track what users are viewing. If something like that ever got big, it would have everyone's browsing history

Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#43

Post by fxtentacle »

shuntress wrote: post #33
fxtentacle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

Articles that are not clickbait and YouTube personalities that are differentiated and not conspiracy theorists definitely exist and are worth supporting. You are on Hacker News, so presumably you click some of the links. Some clickbait of course does end up here but linked articles are mostly not clickbait. Similarly, you should pay attention to youtube links in comments (here and elsewhere) to start building a catal…

I fully agree with you, that there is good content. But in my experience, the good content on HackerNews is freely accessible without ads or paywalls because the author has another job and is writing just to get his/her story out, and not for any financial reason.

I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.

I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.

In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.

Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#44

Post by fxtentacle »

satotious wrote: post #25
fxtentacle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

The flow we are aiming for: users visit a site, they navigate a paywall and see the content is good. They add that domain to the auto-pay list. If it's clickbait, they dont. Hopefully by letting creators charge whatever amount they want, we can produce not just clickbait but well researched articles.

I'm paying for the newspapers that I read, and I usually close a clickbait website once I find out.

So then, the question here is: How many websites are there that are worth my time to read, but not worth purchasing a $5 monthly subscription for?

So I'm not sure that there is a use for micropayments here. Either it's good quality, then they charge $5+ anyway, or it's "ad level quality" and then I'm better off not wasting my time.

Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#45

Post by fxtentacle »

throwaways885 wrote: post #22
fxtentacle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

"I ate a chocolate bar and regretted it, so I won't pay the shop". Buyer's remorse doesn't make this more ethical.

Nah, more like "I won't eat chocolate that they specifically produced at such a low quality that it's financially viable to give it away for free."

Re: Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

#46

Post by erezsh »

satotious wrote: post #21
varbhat wrote: post #19

Add more options to micropayments. Many people don't know/use bitcoin/crypto. Then your platform isn't of much use.

The problem with traditional payment methods like credit cards, visa, paypal etc is the transaction costs. You can't make a $0.01 payments unless you aggregate those. The problem with aggregation for us is the fact we would need to track the sites users visit(huge privacy problem)

I wouldn't mind creating a user and getting "tracked". It's not like you need to save those after you're done aggregating.
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