From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.
Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
91–100 of 190 posts
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#92Don'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.
We really need web standards for a "web wallet" and for micropayments. Something managed locally by your browser, preferably in some sort of separate sandbox. And then you'd be able set a per-site budget. However, it feels like is something the big boys don't want to handle as a standards because there's too much money at stake if they get a piece of the pay themselves, i.e. Apple Pay & co.
The Web Payments API was actually created just a few months ago (or at least gained public notoriety).
https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
It's already in Chrome and Edge, coming to Safari:
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#93From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.
This, to me, seems like a strange way of thinking. They're not 'wasting people's time,' they're making a request of them in exchange for a service.
Instead of turning them away entirely as a full paywall may have, they got some information or at least amusement out of them, and the user still gets their service.
Users benefit either way; the question is whether they have to pay in exchange for it or answer a question in exchange for it. The latter may seem wasteful to you, but clearly it didn't to the owners of that website.
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple Pay and Android Pay are one touch, authenticated by thumb print and IIRC uses a temporary credit card number.
That's not going to work given that it is still CC on the back end -- per-tx fees will eat you alive at the $1/tx level.
I'd guess it'd eat $0.50 of a $1.00 transaction, maybe a bit less if you're lucky. That's bad, but it's workable if you have low operating costs - it certainly isn't a loss. Most people seem to think $5.00 is when credit transactions start making more sense.
Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx.
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saw https://blendle.com/ posted on HN a while back. Works exactly like that.
Hijacks my back button..big no no
Can someone explain to me why hijacking of the back button is even possible? It's obviously something that browsers could fix, and the fact they don't fix it means that there must be some legitimate uses. But what legit use?
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#96Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#97Don'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…
> it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.
I remember when Peter Sunde's Flattr was around (circa 2010) and websites had flattr buttons (like those html/css buttons).
Edit: I just checked and apparently it still exists: https://flattr.com/
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article. They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything. I highly recommend you give this a shot. Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the wo…
Does it work as I suspect: you pay, and yet you still get ads too?
Nope, I never saw a single ad. You open up the app, pick and article that looks interesting to you and you can start reading. When you click, you pay a small amount, the price for an article is always clearly displayed.
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article. They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything. I highly recommend you give this a shot. Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the wo…
> Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the word. Sure.
Oh c'mon. I cannot endorse a cool product? They're from my home country, I like their product and I'd like to see people use these kind of services where authors actually get paid instead of through ads.
Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hijacks my back button..big no no
Can someone explain to me why hijacking of the back button is even possible? It's obviously something that browsers could fix, and the fact they don't fix it means that there must be some legitimate uses. But what legit use?
JavaScript apps. If you dynamically load content using js, the user will likely expect the back button to undo that change.