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Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

kapwing.com

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#11

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

Pretty sure Stripe does this - webmaster has to enable refunds on the Stripe side though.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

um... bitcoin? heard like 3 years ago that bitcoin will handle all sorts of micro-transactions... anyone know what happened?

I haven't used BTC in a long time but last I read transactions take a very long time to process because the blocksize is too small to contain all the transactions that took place. I read (not sure if this is correct) that transaction fees needed to be upwards of $20 to ensure the transaction was included in the next block.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#13

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an account with them, the cognitive cost of signing up has already been paid.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

um... bitcoin? heard like 3 years ago that bitcoin will handle all sorts of micro-transactions... anyone know what happened?

Bitcoin transactions have something like a $5 average transaction fee. You can offer less but your transaction won't get processed as quickly. Bitcoin is already slow at processing transactions.

Disclaimer: I don't use bitcoin. The $5 number is outdated, but from the graphs I could find in a quick search it seemed to be rising consistently.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#15
post #3

Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

It's using react.js, maybe try unfiltering the site before heading to the comment section to tell everyone how much you don't care.

This seems like an interesting way to do research on the best ways to convert these users who don't want to pay outright. Maybe selectively show ads to the free users?

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#16

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

I think it's more about the friction of engaging a payment method. For me at least, there is a bigger gap between free and $0-but-fish-out-a-credit-card than there is between $1 and $10.

True, I wouldn't pay either $1 or $10 to generate a meme, but I wouldn't 'pay' $0 either.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#18

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

> Anyone can afford a dollar

At the moment I'm unemployed and I'm literally living day to day just waiting for some kind of break.

It's easy to say "anyone can afford a dollar" while you sit in your $4,000 apartment sipping a late` that was just brought to you in less than five minutes by any of fifty different food delivery services available to you.

But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic computer or smartphone and internet access who actually can't afford a dollar.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#19
post #17

Here is my honest brutal “apology”: I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of cents to use your service. If you want to monetize it find a way to allow nano-payments. You are not adding as much value as you think.

One dollar is something you could afford. And if you can't/don't think it's of enough value then the watermark version is good too for sure.

And if you are a content creator that needs lots of them then the 10$\month will be fine. Let users pay with their wallet. Not everyone would know how to do this in some graphics software so there is a value.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#20

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

Bitcoin micro-transactions via lightning:

http://lightning.network

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