Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

kapwing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 190 posts

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

#41

Post by vintageseltzer »

bearbearbear wrote: post #18
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

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 comp…

That's a pretty rude comment. I'm sure cpncrunch understands that, literally, not everyone on the planet can afford to pay a dollar. Please adjust your tone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

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

#42

Post by freeloop3 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #9
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

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. I can't. Source: broke and unemployed.

Anyone heavily invested in making memes on the internet that they can't stand having a watermark should be able to afford a dollar.

If not, maybe a deep intersection into what one does during the day would be warranted.

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

#43

Post by chipperyman573 »

jancsika wrote: post #33

Did you get the permission of the users whose responses you posted?

Legally they're fine because the responses were anonymous and none of the users would reasonably believe that their responses would remain completly private.

Ethically (at least in my opinion) is the same, as long as they're kept anonymous and there's nothing personal or private in the responses they can use them for any reason. Especially because they were given in lieu of payment.

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

#44

Post by mango1900 »

This might get downvoted, but let me play devils advocate... the $1 is too cheap. You don’t value my time if you’re making me whip out my credit card and go through the painful process of checking out for transacting only a dollar from me. You’re also extremely downplaying the value of your product. if it was only worth a dollar, you would likely not be building a startup around it :)

Most people don’t know how much something is worth. Try not to lower price, rather, increase value.

Under the sad faces, I’d change the messaging. Its generally understood (even by the layperson) that the true cost of technology is very low. What this really costs, and this is true, is the time-value of your development team (and associated market salary). “It takes real people to build and maintain this” might be more effective messaging.

All that said, this does seem like an interesting way to gather user feedback. Good luck!

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

#45

Post by Aloha »

shash7 wrote: post #37

Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this: Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet. Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you. Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.

I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a payment button on a landing page on a website, the rest is mostly automatic, require more than just a click thru for anything larger than say, 25 cents. You could even set it up so it doesn't prompt you to pay until you're more than half way thru too.

Yes, It'd take some doing to build infrastructure and get content providers online, but it would eliminate a lot of the mechanics of paying for news, information, online media and other like content (as well as many of the privacy and practical concerns of ad based content payment).

The big thing is to make it content agnostic, it can't be part of apple, google, facebook, whatever, it needs to be something that functions just as a payment/escrow service, not part of some other media empire - part of the utility of such a service is universality. I'd also steer clear of person to person payments, large transactions, pretty much just be a one-trick-pony (at least until you have wide penetration), and only go after small payments - all of those other markets are well served by a multitude of providers, and would serve as a distraction from the primary product.

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

#46

Post by peterburkimsher »

I like this idea of avoiding a paywall with a reason.

I read many articles from The Guardian, who use a banner ad to promote their premium subscriptions. Due to my unstable life, I can't commit to regular payments from one bank account in one country for more than a couple of months at the longest.

The Guardian and many other news sites have entire sections dedicated to Bitcoin. But they don't accept it as a payment method.

I emailed their customer feedback, and was pleasantly surprised at the encouraging reply. Their management will be discussing whether to accept Bitcoin as a payment method.

If the news websites start accepting Bitcoin, they'll be more likely to post less sensational articles about it, and the value proposition to the end user becomes more clear (remove ads). The fact that Bitcoin payments aren't traceable encourages factual articles instead of promoting articles that indulge the political opinions of the people funding the news agency.

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

#47

Post by ambrosite »

mysterypie wrote: post #34
ambrosite wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc. That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on m…

> it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment

Their comment form requires login or signup. I'm already signed up and logged in here. That's reason enough for me to post here and not there. I would never create an account just to leave a comment unless it was someplace where I intended to visit and comment often.

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

#48

Post by jbigelow76 »

bearbearbear wrote: post #18
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

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 comp…

If you can't, or choose not to, afford $1 to generate a gif meme without a watermark then so be it. But the $0-$1 meme market also cannot afford the cost of righteous indignation.

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

#49

Post by Retra »

shash7 wrote: post #37

Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this: Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet. Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you. Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

Online, asking for $1 is asking for someone's credit card info.

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

#50

Post by dalfonso »

Aloha wrote: post #45
shash7 wrote: post #37

Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this: Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet. Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you. Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere. I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a p…

Saw https://blendle.com/ posted on HN a while back. Works exactly like that.
Post reply on HN