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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

#151

Post by SllX »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #143
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I subscribe to a couple of these already. :) It’s not micro-transactions though, it’s a feature built off a subscriber-provider relationship.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#152

Post by ipaddr »

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.

He is because they make money from ads.

I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#153

Post by Paracompact »

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…

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 danger?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#154

Post by calebkaiser »

airstrike wrote: post #114
rjbwork wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a platform called ethical ads for developer focused advertising: https://www.ethicalads.io/

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#155

Post by landl0rd »

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/

No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones. Look at that list: no FT, only partial WSJ, no Bloomberg (only Businessweek), no Economist, no NYT, no Foreign Affairs, no SCMP. I guess Foreign Policy and Puck bundled could be cool but most "high-value" publications are excluded. This is like netflix where it's never worth subscribing because it's ten thousand things you don't care to watch.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#156

Post by sanswork »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #80
sanswork wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.

I mean that's just how reading works.

It isn't with news though. I am a bit of a news junkie and have actually subscribed to multiple news sources over the past year and I can't name a single journalist from any of them and I am almost certainly average in that way.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#157

Post by AuthAuth »

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…

But how many people would really go to another site just to save 0.002? I can already go to the internet archive to read paywalled content. If needed and that option will still be available for the people that dont want to pay the 0.002.

Its a social problem and all it takes is one player breaking through. People have done this with far far worse things that people thought were unviable socially. Microbetting, microloans, gaming microtransactions, hardware subscriptions,

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#158

Post by sanswork »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #120
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.

With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.

The scale of the decisions doesn't align.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#159

Post by NicuCalcea »

reactordev wrote: post #132
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…

I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.

Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?

Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#160

Post by Loughla »

nemomarx wrote: post #134
airstrike wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.

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