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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

#251

Post by fruitworks »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #233
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…

I'm reminded of how tedious it is when people debate how small something has to be before it can be called a microservice... Maybe the language needs to focus on something besides size. If you pre-pay, you're creating a debt which is destroyed when service is rendered. If you post-pay you're creating a debt when service is rendered that is destroyed when you pay. In both cases the logic of when and how you pay is dec…

The difference is that in micropayments the debt is practicially nothing, a fraction of a cent. So there's basicially no risk. Pre-pay, post-pay, doesn't really matter.

With minipayments, you could still lose a dollar or something. It's like a vending machine. If I put in a dollar and don't get a cookie, I will be pissed. You can run a buisness of setting up fraudulent vending machines that scam customers on the first purchase and dont put out cookies.

I don't really care if I put a tenth of a cent in and don't get my crumb out. I just won't buy the rest of the cookie. The margin on selling me the whole cookie is greater than scamming me out of a fraction of a cent. So it's not feasible to scam.

So the distinction matters. It's a difference in kind because in one model there is enough risk to sustain a buisness model off of scamming, which requires all this extra infrastructure for fraud prevention.

The benefit of micropayments is you don't need all this overhead for for fraud. Anyone can set up a vending machine pretty much anywhere and sell to anyone else.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#252

Post by nicoburns »

nabbed wrote: post #218
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…

100% agree! The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today. With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money. There are do…

It's more expensive than you suggest you are looking for, but the financial times does this pretty well.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#253

Post by fruitworks »

madars wrote: post #244
fruitworks wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you heard the good news about our lord and savior chaumian cash?

eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to…

I imagine you could have some contract that interacts with ecash, based on revelation of a blind signature. Similar to a HTLC.

I have actually written up some ideas for a system based on something like this that I called "chaumian coupons", but I would have to go through my notes to find it.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#254

Post by charcircuit »

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…

Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a site that requires a subscription, includes ads, and requires a micropayment for each article read.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#255

Post by DennisP »

munificent wrote: post #234

Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…

That seems like a really great idea.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#256

Post by danbruc »

fruitworks wrote: post #231
danbruc wrote: post #198

I pay $19 per month to some company X, and company X distributes this money to all participating websites I visit during that month, in return I get ad-free access to all the content. And this is implemented in a way that no website learns who I am and company X does not learn which websites I visited.

Or you could cut out the middleman and use a micropayment system like GNU Taler to pay the websites directly. That way you dont have to hope and pray that the middleman doesn't decide to track you censor, and charge increasing fees, which current middlemen like patreon currently do.

GNU Taler also has a middleman, the exchange. And they play more or less exactly the same role as my company X is supposed to do, exchange money for tokens that are handed to websites when you visit them and which they can then redeem. And I would want to avoid true micro transactions, i.e. pay amount x for looking at one article, because then the amount you spent will depend on how many pages you visited in a given month and that might make you think about each click and in turn hinder adoption. I want to pool the money of all users, divide it by the total number of payed links visited in the last month, and then pay that much per click to each participating website.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#257

Post by ted_bunny »

munificent wrote: post #234

Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…

What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#258

Post by dankwizard »

I would leave something about the article but I can't get over the horrendous layout of this website. Why is the article using only 20-30% of the horizontal space?

Why is the left pane similar posts wrapping after 2 or 3 words?

Shocking. I'd pay $1.00 to load this article and have it look decent.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#259

Post by shimman »

munificent wrote: post #234

Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…

Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving.

Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.

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