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Flattr is closing down (2023)

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Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#191

Post by JeffSnazz »

boplicity wrote: post #145

I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model. What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure h…

Ads (along with nazis and pedophiles) are the root of almost all issues on the internet and it looks like a very bleak future if we can't build an alternative form of compensation into our protocols. I don't understand why we can't at least outbid the advertisers for our own attention.... what a waste of time and money and attention and culture all around.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#192

Post by manx »

pikrzyszto wrote: post #37

I used Flattr for a while but struggled with: - flattr support discovery: Instead of having a "Flattr" button on the webpage I visit I need to navigate to flattr website and search there... but I'm not going to do that. Maybe adblocker removed that button? - ownership confirmations - I wanted to donate to person $PERSON and found them on flattr. But I had no idea whether this flattr account actually belongs to $PERSO…

A browser extension sounds like a potential solution here.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#193

Post by fidotron »

freediver wrote: post #127
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

I'd like to push back on this. It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality. Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-ce…

Even acknowledging the state of crypto today the dev and payment experience of Metamask as a browser extension beats any conventional payment system I've encountered. What's needed is Metamask but not necessarily crypto.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#194

Post by WheatMillington »

boplicity wrote: post #145

I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model. What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure h…

>What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big one.

Does the subscription model not do exactly this?

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#195

Post by WheatMillington »

freediver wrote: post #127
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

I'd like to push back on this. It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality. Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-ce…

>It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for.

Go spend some time on /r/Youtube. If there is any content worth paying for on this internet, it's the virtually limitless reservoir of incredible content across youtube, and for a relatively low fee you can make ads disappear. But the anti-Google sentiment is so strong that the selfish freeloaders will do anything in their power to both not pay and not accept ads.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#196

Post by JoshTriplett »

itsoktocry wrote: post #103
infecto wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.

> so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal! The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.

That "works", somewhat, if you want to get all your news from one place. That's the traditional newspaper model: most people don't get a dozen papers delivered.

But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world.

Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#197

Post by JoshTriplett »

dageshi wrote: post #26
colesantiago wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this. To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flat…

We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work. I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of. Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on th…

> We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work.

Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term.

If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#198

Post by infecto »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #182
infecto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since most news publications are failing businesses I would not immediately assume they have considered all avenues of monetization. I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did…

The NYT is very much not a failing business.

Thanks for the downvote but I said most not all. If you look at the news/magazine industry though it has not made a good transition to the internet age. Lots of closures and consolidations with some of the major outlets acquired as almost toys for the rich.

It’s very much a shell of what it once was.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#199

Post by JoshTriplett »

bigbluedots wrote: post #55
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.

No, for so many reasons. No, tracking is bad. No, a central organization will not do an equitable job of distributing fees even if it has invasive tracking information. No, a mandatory fee is unacceptable. No, not all sites visited deserve an equal share based solely on visits and bandwidth. No, there is no reasonable automated metric that would allow such division, as any possible metric can be gamed.

The moment something like this were put in place, sites would immediately start gaming the resulting perverse incentives. Sites get more share based on bandwidth? Useless background downloads. Sites get more share based on number of visits? Lots of background loads, content in multiple iframes, split across many pages, etc. Any metric you can think of can and will be gamed, other than "user says they want this site to get a share". (That can be gamed too, but only insofar as sites already compete for user attention.)

Here's how to remove unwanted ads from the Internet: get everyone to install an adblocker, put advertising out of business, observe better revenue models emerge out of necessity without having to fight to compete with "free with ads".

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#200

Post by infecto »

rchaud wrote: post #75
infecto wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.

Are you able to purchase anything for 10 cents today? The price of a short self-published ebook on Amazon is 30x that, $2.99, and plenty of people buy those. I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like what Substack has, whic…

Hope the price was not hanging you up. I don’t know what the price is and it’s certainly variable depending on the content length and publication. Maybe for a long Journal/NYT expose it’s a $1…
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