Live data from Hacker News

Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

kapwing.com

161–170 of 190 posts

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

#161
post #143
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Play store et al already exist, why not use that?" Play store does not have the content I want. And it seems overly difficult to post the content I want to make. And if I want to pay for engagement with the content, that's not an option. Patreon is lot closer to what suits my needs. But even that is too inflexible on how to use payments and to what you should pay. So far everybody seems to be making their micro-tran…

I never thought of Zizek as the vanguard of the micropayments revolution ... I agree about the "funding more content" angle; I hope twitter eventually realises this, but they really have a bad idea about how their own platform works and seem to be allergic to taking money from users for features.

Off-topic, but the particular video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk

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

#162
post #45
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…

One big disincentive (at least for web articles) is that I tend to not know the actual value of the article until after I've read it. I don't want to pay 50 cents for an article, only to read it and realize they just copy-pasted a press release from Intel and did no actual reporting

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

#163
post #140

I've had this idea, and this is a good time as any to put it in the wild, since I don't have time to build it: My problem with paywalls/sponsoring/micropayments is that I'm completely fine to pay an entity, say $5 a month. What I am not OK with is supporting all the people I'd like to support, which at $5 a month might total a hundred bucks or more. I have the budget for it, but $5 increments can really get expensive…

You might want to check out Brave [1] which does pretty much exactly what you described:

> Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit.

See also their blogpost about it [2] and the FAQ [3].

[1]: https://brave.com/ [2]: https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/ [3]: https://www.brave.com/faq-payments/

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

#164
post #3

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

Agreed.

It's funny to me that someone wants to charge people for their online service, but can't even make a simple web-page fail gracefully. That's a pretty strong signal to me of the quality of their online service

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

#165

I found it really difficult to take this article seriously. >Kapwing is an online video and GIF meme generator It adds bars of text to the top and/or bottom of a gif. This product is worth $0. Probably less.

It would take me ~5 hours to manually add text to a video or gif. I'd need to download (or buy) software, install it, learn to use it, export/convert/etc. This site has significant value.

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

#166
post #165

I found it really difficult to take this article seriously. >Kapwing is an online video and GIF meme generator It adds bars of text to the top and/or bottom of a gif. This product is worth $0. Probably less.

It would take me ~5 hours to manually add text to a video or gif. I'd need to download (or buy) software, install it, learn to use it, export/convert/etc. This site has significant value.

It would take you less than 20 minutes to find and learn the requisite (free) software the first time, then less than 2 minutes each subsequent time. If you grok ffmpeg then you can probably get it down to a dead simple script and 0 time.

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

#167
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take me ~5 hours to manually add text to a video or gif. I'd need to download (or buy) software, install it, learn to use it, export/convert/etc. This site has significant value.

It would take you less than 20 minutes to find and learn the requisite (free) software the first time, then less than 2 minutes each subsequent time. If you grok ffmpeg then you can probably get it down to a dead simple script and 0 time.

I don't program and know nothing about video or video software or 'scripts'. My internet is ungodly slow and pc is incredibly old/weak. I don't know what grok or ffmpeg is.

The above is not me, but many other users.

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

#168
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take you less than 20 minutes to find and learn the requisite (free) software the first time, then less than 2 minutes each subsequent time. If you grok ffmpeg then you can probably get it down to a dead simple script and 0 time.

I don't program and know nothing about video or video software or 'scripts'. My internet is ungodly slow and pc is incredibly old/weak. I don't know what grok or ffmpeg is. The above is not me, but many other users.

You don't need to know any of that. You just need to open Windows Movie Maker (is that still pre-installed?) and spend 10 minutes familiarizing yourself with its simple UI and 30 seconds making the video.

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

#169

Earlier 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…

Not sure if you are Dutch, but if you follow dutch news then you'd known the soap bubble 'blendle' has burst already... Afaics they are at the brink of bankruptcy, and needed multiple financial injections to 'survive' and papers like NRC, FTM and recently the telegraaf have already pulled their publications. Today the people behind blendle launched a new product, Medianieuwsbrief.nl To me another pointer that blendle…

I am Dutch. Born and raised. I moved out two years ago though so I am not completely up-to-date with all the recent development.

Jeez. I didn't know the situation became that bad. I didn't notice because I mostly read American news. From what I quickly read on for example NRC [0], they pulled their content because Blendle introduced the concept of a subscription and that would cut profits for NRC.

The new concept Medianieuwsbrief.nl looks like a last resort kinda thing. I doubt it would take off.

[0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/03/07/waarom-nrc-stopt-met-bl...

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

#170
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't program and know nothing about video or video software or 'scripts'. My internet is ungodly slow and pc is incredibly old/weak. I don't know what grok or ffmpeg is. The above is not me, but many other users.

You don't need to know any of that. You just need to open Windows Movie Maker (is that still pre-installed?) and spend 10 minutes familiarizing yourself with its simple UI and 30 seconds making the video.

Eh well my point is still it takes 30 seconds with their tool and some multiple of 30 seconds to do it myself. There is some value and making things quickly.
Post reply on HN