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Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

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Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#121

Post by kylebenzle »

harry8 wrote: post #117
RustyRussell wrote: post #76

As sometime who has worked full time on this for over 5 years now, I have found a few aspects of your answer: The technical challenges of doing it with credit cards are overwhelming (in CC parlance, a "microtransaction" is anything under $10) due to fee structure. You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin. You…

>due to fee structure Why is a little bit of data exchange so expensive? (Ok because they can, so why aren't the competitors to drive that fee structure down? What's the barrier to entry?)

The company Blockstream hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub a few years ago and artificially limited the block size to try and increase fees and push people to their second layer products.

Any real users and devs moved to other project like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, now only trolls and bag holders keep pushing BTC as a "store of value", a totally meaningless concept.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#122

Post by benlivengood »

paxys wrote: post #114

People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while. A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee…

> A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee? The simple reason is that the numbers just don't work out. They'd have to charge a lot per article and have people pay for a lot of them to break even with the current subscription or ad-supported model, and that's not going to happen. And even if they do, there would just be too much day-to-day variance in sales. The reason subscriptions are popular is that businesses like a steady, predictable stream of revenue.

What the newspapers need is something like ASCAP that can act as a single revenue management entity for microtransactions. What no one wants is to have 30 news subscriptions, and so what actually happens is everyone has ~zero news subscriptions. It's happening with video now too as Disney+, HBO, Prime, Netflix, etc. are each fighting over limited monthly subscriptions to segmented markets as opposed to Spotify, Pandora, etc. being gateways to one large market.

I don't know the details of how or why ASCAP has managed to do for the music industry what pretty much no other industry has been able to achieve. ASCAP isn't even exclusively licensed.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#123

Post by donclark »

posguy wrote: post #4

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…

Does it have to be a credit card? Could it not be crypto or some other option? And in doing so, would the fees be less?

How do they do it so easily in other countries?

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#124

Post by GekkePrutser »

0-_-0 wrote: post #112
GekkePrutser wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There've been several projects that did exactly that. Like Brave with their BAT tokens. But it never took off. Personally I don't like them because these things don't normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)

Why do you say Brave tracks you?

Not Brave itself, but the sites that you visit don't have to give up tracking per se (for participating users, of course). They should have to in order to participate IMO.

Brave will block tracking to some extent but we know it's not perfect.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#125

Post by aurizon »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #52
aurizon wrote: post #9

I get stock quotes with 15 minute delay. If I want real time, I am charged 2 cents. At the end of the month all the 2 cent charges are summed and added to my monthly fee. News sites could easily do something similar

But people into finance are already pretty much into money... I still view the internet as something that should be free and any transaction pisses me off. No matter how cheap it is I will avoid having to pay unless one of the conditions are met: - I really need the article in question - It's something substantial that I really think is worth money (e.g. a book) For example, if I spend 2 cent on an article that turns…

Yes, It would be nice to enslave a few AI's to run a free web, but come the revolution when they control the food synthesizers.... I know the stock quote company pays a fee to get real time quotes(RTQ) (versus the 15 minute delayed free quotes), so it is fair for me to pay a fractional fee. In the old day I would phone the broker and he was get me the RTQ and I could also get the bid-ask array. Now lots faster and easier. The phone brokers got old and died off, mush like the classified ads were mugged by Craigslist and the internet killed display advertising. These were all paid, the papers were paid, you want free - eat some more ads. I do not pay for clickbait. I would hit the roof if I clicked for a RTQ and got an ad how to get rid of my wrinkles or to manscape my groin - so no, these 2 cents fees will get the real goods clicked from the snippet that lets you decide if you can spare the 2 cents. If you have no job, just spending, the library helps...

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#126

Post by paxys »

abeppu wrote: post #33
mimikatz wrote: post #10

People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.

I get this, but also there's a class of things where we know we're constantly being charged by use, and we don't constantly think about it. Gas, electricity, water are all cases where my use is metered, I _could_ try to micromanage it on a daily basis, but so long as my bills don't vary wildly from month to month, I don't pay especially close attention. To the degree that I self-regulate my use, it's more about the e…

The difference is that (1) metering is mostly done for limited resources and (2) you don't really have a choice but to not mind for any of the services mentioned. If someone came about and offered a flat-fee electricity connection, the majority would switch in an instant even if their bills remained about the same.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#127

Post by m-p-3 »

paxys wrote: post #114

People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while. A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee…

> Look at the gaming industry, [...] Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while.

They'll do whatever it can to make a penny in this cutthroat industry and especially on mobile, so losing a significant portion on transaction fees is better than nothing to them.

In other industries, it's better to maximize your transactions ROI and reduce them to a minimum, even if it means making the payment a bigger amount that covers a longer subscription period. They'll even offer a promotional rate if you take a yearly subscription instead of monthly.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#128

Post by viraptor »

westurner wrote: post #73
m34 wrote: post #62

For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve exactly that. As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models. Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics. [1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/

https://webmonetization.org/ lists Coil (flat $5/mo) as the first Web Monetization provider: https://coil.com/ Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.

I really like their approach and I paid for Flattr for quite a while when it started. But something big needs to push them to the critical adoption rate. On a number of very techy blog posts, I got... 0 from WebMonetization. And that's on best case audience (coming from HN and tech Reddit).

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#129

Post by CryptoGhost »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #104

The problem is the mental overhead, not the fee. If every single article click adds an extra mental overhead of "is this worth paying for? how much have i spent this month on reading?", people will simply stop clicking. Headlines are already super optimized to get you to click. The impact of a mental tax before every click would be at least -10x a good headline and seriously puts the media company at risk of bankrupt…

I disagree. Take Youtube as an example. A ton of mental overhead: videos padded for time, clickbait titles and thumbnails, in video promotions, reminder to check their patreon, reminder to like and subscribe, interruptions for Google ads, etc, . All this adds up and makes you question if the time waste was worth the chance at maybe getting to view some decent content. A system where you are throwing a penny at somebody to unlock a video is preferable.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#130

Post by acjacobson »

Veserv wrote: post #105
acjacobson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From what I can tell as a lay observer, such schemes are likely illegal in the US. Excepting certain entities with specific legal carveouts or very careful navigation of the legal system such as Paypal and Venmo, every scheme that I am aware of in the US is just maintaining an account with a single provider that you charge and draw down for services from that single provider (e.g. Walmart could allow you to make a Wa…

Forgive me if this is a naive question, but how is this different from Patreon, but dolled out in smaller ad hoc amounts? Is the legal distinction because with Patreon each user chooses the distribution ahead of time? Couldn't this be worked around by creating a white list of publishers you are willing to support that approves some set limit or transaction amount ahead of time? So as an example I whitelist a newspaper, and agree to pay $.005 per article view?
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