Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

blog.zgp.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 408 posts

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#111

Post by J_Shelby_J »

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…

There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#112

Post by ErikCorry »

1659447091 wrote: post #76
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…

> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. Apple News+ is ~$13 https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ The list of publications included https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

$13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#113

Post by Ethee »

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).

I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#114

Post by airstrike »

rjbwork wrote: post #108
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…

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.

Feels like there's an opportunity for an "ethical ads" platform

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#115

Post by Zaskoda »

Bratmon wrote: post #56
spir wrote: post #53

If micropayments have a future, it's on blockchains. https://www.x402.org/ https://www.8004scan.io/networks https://www.x402scan.com/

Why? What does adding a slow database to the process help?

This sounds like a reflexive "I hate blockchain and cryptocurrency" reaction but I'll give a reply regardless.

You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.

x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.

And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#116

Post by SllX »

carlosjobim wrote: post #105
SllX wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.

A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.

But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#117

Post by jaredwiener »

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…

But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.

For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.

Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)

Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.

If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)

It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#118

Post by tyre »

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…

> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.

I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?

Brother.

Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#119

Post by SllX »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #111
SllX wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.

Did you go on to write checks in the thousands to the writers or publications that produced them?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#120

Post by abdullahkhalids »

sanswork wrote: post #3

Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation…

What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
Post reply on HN