Hear, hear! I would love to give money to a "read-the-article.com" and have them dole out money on a per-article basis for articles I read online. They can make money on the float. Google & Apple should waive their 30% for this.
This roughly is how Medium works.
I subscribed to Medium mostly because I liked the idea of paying writers with money rather than with ads. Very shortly after, I stopped bothering with Medium because it's a pit of eternal clickbait. Pay-per-read sets up bad incentive structures.
Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
I doubt that any transaction costs some percentage of the transaction's value. The true cost shouldn't differ whether I charge $1 or $10 (maybe large transactions incur extra costs for security measures). It's just a convenient way of pricing for the credit card company.
Many of the entities that process transactions do fraud monitoring. Oftentimes, the fraud monitoring has different levels of time spent depending on amount: under $10 and the system just ignores it, under $1000 and a computer uses some heuristics, and above that, it might be flagged for human review. These aren't exactly 5% of the cost of the transaction, but they do show that the cost to process the transaction does increase as the amount increases, and fraud prevention, detection, and responsibility is how companies justify charging a percentage on a transaction.
Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…
Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…
Because it’s a pain in the butt. You end up keeping track of who’s charged you what. You end up being a full time accountant and adding a value judgement to every little thing you do. It’s just another thing chipping away at you constantly. Another distraction and another treadmill.
This! Totally this. It'll be super hard to keep track of finances with thousands of transactions per month.
And yes the value judgement. I'd hate having to think whether every page I visit is worth it.
Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…
Because a lot of news sites know you're not loading them intentionally in your browser, but landing on them because of shares or search. Meaning you may only see their pages 10x a month or similar even without a paywall. The hope with the paywall is if you keep seeing it, you'll go ahead and pay to unlock it, and the amount you're paying offsets the transaction fees. 1000 users each paying 20 cents for ten articles (…
Well in a way this actually works.. There's been several sites I'm paying a subscription for because I came across them in some search and found them really good. Like Ars Technica and some local sites. Besides paying for the content I like sponsoring them so they can keep doing the thing they do.
But usually those sites are the ones I open at least once a day to see what's new. I don't want to pay for every clickbait I visit.
I want to pay for the things I want to read in other papers that I don't subscribe to.
Up to $1 or $2 a piece.
I just want it like Blendle used to be that I can get my money back if I jump back out after a few seconds and I want some more choice (travel and fashion isn't exactly my stuff but actively looked for tech stuff to read there and hardly found anything).
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…
Isn't that basically how Flattr works?
Kind of? Doesn't Flattr have you choose up front how you want to distribute your subscription? I was imagining a system where you don't have an upfront choice to make, but that as you consume content the subscription is drawn down.