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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

#171

Post by AuthAuth »

tootie wrote: post #107

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 rev…

Put out good content that people want to read and people will read it and pay you for it. Youtubers do fine with inconsistent revenue for each video. There is usually less risk writing an article than producing a video.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#172

Post by sanswork »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #145
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I had originally heard was "the transaction costs of credit cards is so high, we need a system that works for many tiny payments. But of course, most of the cryptocurrency transaction fees are still pretty high, and a dedicated "tiny transaction" company would presumably be able to offer the same service for less cost than a distributed equivalent.

Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.

Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.

It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.

It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#173

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.

There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#174

Post by wanderingmind »

Micropayments gives me flexibility that subscription doesn't. I'm happy to pay $5 a month just to read Matt Levin. I'm not paying $40 for Bloomberg subscription. It also gives publishers signal on what really users care about and more importantly what are they willing to pay for. Maybe, there is a truly crypto market here for micropayments without the overhead of operators like Stripe

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#176

Post by CrazyStat »

linsomniac wrote: post #73
subpixel wrote: post #51

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you sub…

>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them. It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content…

Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.

[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#177

Post by mmooss »

subpixel wrote: post #51

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you sub…

> I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.

People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.

iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#178

Post by Paracompact »

SllX wrote: post #162
Paracompact wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.) Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or d…

My stance is exactly what I said: most news is priced correctly for most people at $0.00. If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.

Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.

If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.

So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#179

Post by SllX »

zeta0134 wrote: post #168
contravariant wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at…

You gotta punch the monkey though! Isn’t that fun?!

But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#180

Post by nemomarx »

Loughla wrote: post #160
nemomarx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does Google AdWords still exist? text only ads solves a lot of these issues

My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself. I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant. Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is…

I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.
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