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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

#141

Post by eli »

PaulHoule wrote: post #68
eli wrote: post #12

This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of. What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very lo…

There was https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat... which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.) I can only guess that the New York Times , WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sig…

I assume it was more about dollars and cents than pretensions. Scroll was plausible as a replacement for ad network revenue, but at $5/month it can't come close to robust subscription or premium ad revenue. NYT subscription is more than the entire $5.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#142

Post by m132 »

I used to find this and the whole idea of "Web3" ridiculous, but with the recent saturation of low-quality slop and disinformation, perhaps it's time to reconsider.

I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime.

There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#143

Post by kelvinjps10 »

SllX wrote: post #124
tyre wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them. But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transa…

There is some publications that manage this by letting paying person to share it and the other person can see it too

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#144

Post by mrighele »

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.

I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.

You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.

Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.

I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#145

Post by littlecranky67 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #70
Bratmon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#146

Post by landl0rd »

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.

They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.

So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#147

Post by oblio »

SllX wrote: post #119
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Worse than that, what was the percentage of these amazing articles?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#148

Post by 1659447091 »

jasode wrote: post #131
1659447091 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...

I see that happen in the free Apple News, but had not seen it with the Apple News+ subscription.

They may be confusing the 2, similar to how people confuse Apple TV: separately a device, an app, and a subscription service

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#149

Post by littlecranky67 »

Zaskoda wrote: post #115
Bratmon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Implementing lightning (bitcoin layer 2 solution) is probably easier or at least at par. And way more accesible. Look at lnurl, lnaddress.
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