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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

#221

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

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…

Anyone who visited a Wendy's in the 1980s or 1990s knows that newspaper ads can also make for interesting tabletop decorations

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#222

Post by zeta0134 »

vladms wrote: post #197
zeta0134 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts. Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the…

Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.

These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.

If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#223

Post by jdejean »

bonoboTP wrote: post #173
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…

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 muc…

Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.

These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#224

Post by cyberax »

eli wrote: post #135
cyberax wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll was successful. It provided more income than ads to participating companies. So it was hastily acquired and killed by Twitter. Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.

I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees ? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive. Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.

They had basically no investor money.

> Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees?

Yes. That's literally all they did. You paid for a subscription, and they distributed subscription fees among the sites that you visited.

In return, you got an ad-free browsing experience.

By the time they got killed, it was used on Ars Technica, TheDailyBeast, TheVerge and some other major news sites.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#225

Post by SauntSolaire »

ipaddr wrote: post #152
carlosjobim wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#226

Post by akoboldfrying »

contravariant wrote: post #209
akoboldfrying wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only news giants need revenue. Everyone producing news needs it, including any hoped-for smaller, more democratised new entrants to the industry. Where will that revenue come from? Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?

Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views? Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay. Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now? Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason somethin…

I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.

What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#227

Post by SauntSolaire »

Paracompact wrote: post #192
Gigachad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them. Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather…

How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill. I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following: (1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming par…

It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.

Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#228

Post by Paracompact »

8organicbits wrote: post #217
Paracompact wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill. I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following: (1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming par…

Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.

> I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.

Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing.

> Is usage based billing the same as micropayments?

Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#229

Post by danpalmer »

> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.

We know that micropayments can work because slot machines are a thing, but I don't think most people would say that's what entertainment should be.

Similarly, journalism can do better. Are people going to pay $0.20 to read "One thing financial advisors won't tell you, you'll retire 10 years earlier!", or are you going to pay $0.20 for "‘It feels like a worse version of Lotto’: what Australians told us about the great intergenerational wealth transfer" (a Guardian special report from today).

I know I'd rather pay to read the latter, but between clickbait and optimising revenue, the former is going to perform a lot better. Not to mention that the cost to produce slop content will be near zero, so they can charge less, where the cost to produce high quality content will be far higher and will therefore not be able to compete on price.

I'd much rather commit to paying $10 a month for news and then choose which articles get a share of that after reading. If I've already committed it costs me nothing to pay for an article, but by doing it after reading I can much more easily support good journalism. The problem with that is that it will probably trend towards just the news subs we have today.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#230

Post by Macha »

Izkata wrote: post #184
beeflet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments". As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent. The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of p…

The $1 in-game content payments are already so well known (and for such a long time) as "micropayments" I had thought that was where the term originated.

Isn’t it microtransactions? Which kind of hints at the difference, since it’s all the ceremony of a two party transaction, while micropayments proposals usually have some focus on being automatic or frictionless
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