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Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

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Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#101

Post by pzmarzly »

salawat wrote: post #77
dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility . Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of fi…

Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#102

Post by AndrewStephens »

beeflet wrote: post #64
AndrewStephens wrote: post #33

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile. Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and…

The problems you describe are technical problems. How do you increase efficiency and avoid charge-backs due to fraud? Perhaps it is enabled by cryptocurrency (some systems like payment channels, RaiBlocks already exist for this). I would go into more detail about this but I think i've already debated you about this already. The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intract…

> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.

The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.

There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#103

Post by micromacrofoot »

linsomniac wrote: post #61
micromacrofoot wrote: post #46

who the hell wants to think about micropayments every time they read an article? microtransactions just suck outright, they create a ton of overhead for everyone involved — both use and implementation not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly

I'd rather think about micropayments than think about subscriptions.

micropayments are just subscriptions with extra steps

in the US there's no easy way to implement them without essentially buying a bulk of nonsense tokens, because the american banking system is complete garbage and still doesn't have a good peer-to-peer payment system without credit card processing fees that make microtransactions too expensive

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#104

Post by contravariant »

dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)

It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.

But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.

Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.

So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is

Good.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#105

Post by carlosjobim »

SllX wrote: post #90
dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc. Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles. Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers…

Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#107

Post by tootie »

Advertising in an SEO game. Get ranked in Google and take a few pennies from millions of drive-by users.

Subscriptions is a loyalty game. Convince users of your value and get them to commit to becoming a supporter for an extended period. Get them to install an app, accept breaking news alerts and lean on you as a trusted source.

Micropayments is neither. There's no obvious path to generate consistent micropayment revenue. Maybe for like long-form features, but not for daily newsrooms.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#108

Post by rjbwork »

contravariant wrote: post #104
dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves) It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments. But I don't like the way ads are presented a…

I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.

What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#109

Post by mikestorrent »

ggm wrote: post #74

It's a bit dispiriting to be discussing a 30+ year old idea which in turn is built on a 60 year old idea by Ted Nelson.

Well, the problem is that it's still just a little bit too hard to implement. In-person, it was always easy to just have a coffee can labelled "Tips"... back when we had jingly pocket money to throw around, at least. We've lost that with the move to digital currency, and nothing has quite brought back the anonymous ease of just tossing a loonie in a jar for someone, whether it's the barista, a busker, or a homeless person.

On the web, he mentions that a micropayment platform that solves the Sign In problem would be useful... well, Sign In with Ethereum / Metamask exists, but it's still too much to ask for people to use it. One wedge issue coming down the pike that may force this is mandatory age verification, since most websites will need to outsource that.

I for one would prefer something entirely anonymous and cash-like. I don't need my preferences to be on file with god-knows-which data vendors to form profiles on me just because I liked a stupid article one time enough to give the author a dollar.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#110

Post by easton »

dboreham wrote: post #97
dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments. Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back. That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).

A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
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