[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
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Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
Amazon aws and related services can charge you a rate per email, or
per unit time of computation, so why can't news sites just charge
you $0.01 to read an article, or even half that?
Author : wppick
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-01-22 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
| sameers wrote:
| There are some great answers here already, I'll just add a what I
| think is different perspective on it.
|
| Each newspaper is already charging you $0.01 an article, from
| their perspective. They give you an issue every day that has 100s
| of articles and it costs you like, a $1? $2? So each article is
| indeed super cheap for you to consume.
|
| As others observe, you as a consumer probably aren't asking to be
| gated at every article - you are probably imagining some sort of
| general fund from which the paper draws down. Now if you really
| like just one paper or magazine, then you are back to a
| subscription model in this case.
|
| So your use case is most probably that you want to read a FEW
| articles from LOTS of sites. Like, 20 from the NYT, 20 from WSJ,
| 30 from Slate etc.
|
| Now the problem is to have an entity that is a 3rd party relative
| to these sites, which manages the common kitty. I vaguely
| remember some companies trying this, I can't remmeber the names,
| but you can see why this won't be easy. First, there's conflict
| of interest. It's tough to decide to enable a platform which also
| enables subscriptions to competing sources. Second, the platform
| company itself has to strike these deals individually because
| AT&T/the Mercers/George Soros haven't yet bought up all the news
| sources, which is a lot of friction.
|
| And third, the execs at the sites have to decide that this
| complicated arrangement is really going to attract a completely
| new set of subscribers who actually like their content but just
| haven't signed up because the subscription price is too much. Why
| is it intuitive that _at scale_, a non subscriber's main barrier
| is not their affinity to or interest in the content itself, but
| this reluctance to commit to the subscription model? Why even
| should I assume that this unserved market has significant
| marginal utility to me as a company, relative to all the other
| ways I am making money? Even if all this is true, as an exec, I'd
| probably first experiment with tiered subscription on my site,
| and have multiple gates, rather than buy into some micro payment
| kitty system.
| rgblambda wrote:
| Companies prefer stable income, even when it means making less
| overall. It makes it easier to plan future spending.
| davidw wrote:
| People have been asking that since at least the late 90ies. I
| think even Xanadu had some notion of micropayments.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Accounting, transaction reversibility, and taxation.
|
| In real life if you want to give somebody a dime, you just do it.
| But online you have to query your account to make sure you have
| enough money to make the payment, reserve the funds so the
| payment can go through without stopping other pending
| transactions, pass it the amount through some infrastructure
| where you can dispute the charge at a later date (if needed), and
| you also have to make sure the government is able to track your
| transactions for tax and anti-money laundering purposes.
|
| For Amazon it's a different situation because they're charging
| you for a service based on usage. They have given you an account
| number and they handle all the accounting on their end. It's not
| a general payments system.
| rogerallen wrote:
| Hear, hear! I would _love_ to give money to a "read-the-
| article.com" and have them dole out money on a per-article basis
| for articles I read online. They can make money on the float.
|
| Google & Apple should waive their 30% for this.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Like Blendle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This roughly is how Medium works.
|
| I subscribed to Medium mostly because I liked the idea of
| paying writers with money rather than with ads. Very shortly
| after, I stopped bothering with Medium because it's a pit of
| eternal clickbait. Pay-per-read sets up bad incentive
| structures.
| aurizon wrote:
| I get stock quotes with 15 minute delay. If I want real time, I
| am charged 2 cents. At the end of the month all the 2 cent
| charges are summed and added to my monthly fee. News sites could
| easily do something similar
| wppick wrote:
| Yes, and as a 3rd party service would be great too. I can login
| with Facebook, Google, etc. It would be great if I can just pay
| 1/2 cent to read 1 article vs signing up for monthly or yearly
| subscriptions. And I can choose pay with service a, service b
| or service c. They should all adhere to a single standard so
| any new service can just plug into it. Why should I have to
| choose only between ads or some big monthly/yearly
| subscription?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| But people into finance are already pretty much into money...
|
| I still view the internet as something that should be free and
| any transaction pisses me off. No matter how cheap it is I will
| avoid having to pay unless one of the conditions are met:
|
| - I really need the article in question
|
| - It's something substantial that I _really_ think is worth
| money (e.g. a book)
|
| For example, if I spend 2 cent on an article that turns out to
| be clickbait I will be royally pissed. Which I acknowledge is
| totally absurd because 2 cents affects my financial situation
| in no way whatsoever. But this is not how it feels to me.
| Logically I shouldn't even think about it at all, it's not
| worth even thinking about. But this is not how this works.
|
| I'm pretty sure that people dealing with stocks are generally
| less bothered having to deal in stuff because they are in the
| middle of the economic model (it makes them money as well as
| takes it) whereas I'm purely at the end of it, only spending.
| [deleted]
| tonymet wrote:
| Merchant fees
| mimikatz wrote:
| People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and
| makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and
| watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you
| just pay small amounts.
| abeppu wrote:
| I get this, but also there's a class of things where we know
| we're constantly being charged by use, and we don't constantly
| think about it.
|
| Gas, electricity, water are all cases where my use is metered,
| I _could_ try to micromanage it on a daily basis, but so long
| as my bills don't vary wildly from month to month, I don't pay
| especially close attention. To the degree that I self-regulate
| my use, it's more about the environment than the dollar cost. I
| don't think about it every time I take a shower or turn up my
| thermostat.
|
| The amount of online stuff from for-profit institutions I read
| from month to month doesn't vary that much, and if I knew from
| habit what the typical range was, I think I could learn to be
| ok with that. But the current experience, where whenever
| someone links to something in a _different_ paywall than the
| ones I'm already in, I do have to think "would it be worth it
| to pay for this source?" and often the answer is "no".
| opreturn wrote:
| Very nice points. People are not that averse to metered
| pricing. There is a strong aversion towards unpredictable
| charges.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| maybe whats needed is a system that tallies up the sites you've
| visited and at the end of the month you can just say, allocate
| 5 bucks among them. Or if you've had a rough month, maybe don't
| give anything. Maybe you can distribute you payments once a
| year. Or make slight adjustments to it and not give a site any
| money if you feel.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| There've been several projects that did exactly that. Like
| Brave with their BAT tokens. But it never took off.
|
| Personally I don't like them because these things don't
| normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I
| want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want
| to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when
| I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)
| Lammy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
| addicted wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| For the longest time I thought there was just something wrong
| with me. Rarely would you find a comment in an article about
| micropayments that pointed out that micropayments sound,
| stressful!
|
| It causes me anxiety just having to think about having to
| consider making payments everytime I click on an article, for
| example, even if it's a tiny $0.01 amount each time.
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| Yeah. For example, thats why people like all-inclusive hotels.
| The reason is that you dont have to think about the prices all
| the time. You just go through the package only and thats it.
|
| The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of
| us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions
| over one big.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yep even if we end up paying more than we would have with
| separate billing, we don't care. It's a mental burden, I feel
| the same way.
| wppick wrote:
| How do you explain paywalls then?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The main reason I don't sign up for more paywalled things
| is not concerns about money, it's sheer inertia. Signing up
| takes effort, and it's yet another subscription to manage.
|
| That extends to relatively low-friction cases like Patreon.
| The number of podcasters and bloggers where I've thought,
| quite earnestly, "I really like what this person is doing,
| I should kick a few quid their way," and then just _not
| done that_ is near infinite. And it 's never because I was
| feeling stingy; it's because I couldn't be arsed.
| davidkellis wrote:
| Everyone hates paywalls
| wppick wrote:
| Yes, because they want you to pay for a monthly or yearly
| subscription and you just want to read one article and
| maybe never come back to their site. But if I can do a
| 1-click "pay 1/2 cent" to read the rest of the article
| that would be totally fair
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's not the only thing. It's the hassle as well.
|
| First they want you to sign up for an account. Give a lot
| of personal data. Then set up a payment model, often
| recurring. Just to read one article? No way.
|
| Micropayments will save some of that hassle but I don't
| want to have an account with every news site linked to by
| HN.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Paywalls typically ask you to get a subscription, not to
| pay for that particular article.
| [deleted]
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| As a consumer, I don't want to do this because I don't want to
| pull out my credit card to pay $0.01. I think they're hard to
| make work on a small scale. So an aggregate of people say putting
| $10 into a news pool, and each paying $.01 cent to read, and the
| news pool paying the providers, might make more sense. The
| micropayment could be like "credits", and may be refunded.
| dyeje wrote:
| Isn't this essentially what the Brave browser does?
| ksm1717 wrote:
| An idea I had recently that relates to this - sites use some of
| your compute power to mine crypto in your browser and credit your
| wallet some rate, other sites like news sites draw from your
| wallet when you browse
| mbreese wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more efficient to just send money directly?
|
| I mean, the user will still end up paying someone. But with the
| mining strategy, instead of directly paying sites, the user
| will pay the electric company.
| posguy wrote:
| Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange
| of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of
| these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't
| be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates.
|
| Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this
| infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the
| context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do it for AWS as they
| aggregate many small charges into one bill, resulting in the
| service cost not being dwarfed by the payment processing cost.
| acjacobson wrote:
| The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has
| tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the
| end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then
| draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you
| could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every
| article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts
| from your balance then you don't have the transaction cost to
| manage with the CC, and you don't have the friction of
| purchasing. The challenge here is like any two sided
| marketplace - you need consumers to pay, and then you need
| content providers to sign on to get enough on offer for it to
| be worth it for both sides.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| >charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or
| $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you
| go.
|
| Wow, I just realized why Steam does this for in-game
| purchases.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| That's also so they can deny refunds for cash balances --
| once you pay money to their company, you may never receive
| it back under any circumstances. That way they can 'refund'
| you games at any time, but not ever have to record a cash
| transaction to do so. This is, not coincidentally,
| universal among online video game and microtransaction
| stores, with the singular exception of Apple who does _not_
| compel all purchases through an intermediate currency
| balance.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Isn't that basically how Flattr works?
| acjacobson wrote:
| Kind of? Doesn't Flattr have you choose up front how you
| want to distribute your subscription? I was imagining a
| system where you don't have an upfront choice to make, but
| that as you consume content the subscription is drawn down.
| bingo_cannon wrote:
| That is how most toll systems work. You load up a balance
| on the card $10/$20 and it deducts every time you cross a
| checkpoint.
|
| The difference between this and a micropayment platform
| would be the fees. In the toll system, the fees are paid
| once. With a micropayment platform, the fees would be per
| transaction.
|
| There can be a "self hosted" version of such a platform
| that say each content-provider can host but I am not sure
| it will work out against the cost of maintaining it
| includes much more than just hosting (securty, auditing,
| refunds, taxes etc).
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| There have been several projects that did exactly that. They
| just haven't really taken off. Like Blendle.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
|
| I see they're moving to a subscription model now too in an
| attempt to make it more attractive.
| [deleted]
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I must be misremembering, but isn't that what paypal did long
| ago?
| onion2k wrote:
| Bitpass was an early micropayment startup that was around for
| a few years. Beanz and Flooz were late dotcom era
| "micropayment" startups (they were more like gift
| certificates really) that were very well funded and failed
| terribly. More recently Kim Dotcom tried it with Bitcache.
| There are significant problems with the model.
| [deleted]
| jbob2000 wrote:
| This is really just circumventing the problem. As an end
| user, I don't want my money to be split up in to all of these
| random pools that private companies have control over.
| choeger wrote:
| I doubt that any transaction _costs_ some percentage of the
| transaction 's value. The true cost shouldn't differ whether I
| charge $1 or $10 (maybe large transactions incur extra costs
| for security measures). It's just a convenient way of pricing
| for the credit card company.
| lostcolony wrote:
| That's pricing in the risk of taking the charge. The $10
| transaction is 10x as risky to a credit network's bottom line
| as the $1 transaction. That's also why the debit percentage
| is lower.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Many of the entities that process transactions do fraud
| monitoring. Oftentimes, the fraud monitoring has different
| levels of time spent depending on amount: under $10 and the
| system just ignores it, under $1000 and a computer uses some
| heuristics, and above that, it might be flagged for human
| review. These aren't exactly 5% of the cost of the
| transaction, but they do show that the cost to process the
| transaction does increase as the amount increases, and fraud
| prevention, detection, and responsibility is how companies
| justify charging a percentage on a transaction.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't think this is inherently the issue. News sites could
| aggregate charges and bill you at the end of the month.
|
| I think the bigger issues is that if I see an article presented
| to me as shared on social media or in search results I assume
| it is free access. I click in, and if they ask for payment,
| it's a turnoff since I thought it was going to be free. Also, I
| don't like how credit card information can be continuously used
| by the organization.
|
| I want to be able to hand an authorization for a single one-
| time payment to any organization and not an authorization to
| charge however much they want, whenever they want.
|
| That goes for hotels too. I want to be able to say "Here's my
| credit card" [but I don't authorize more than $130/day].
| egty wrote:
| Doesn't directly solve the root problem, but I use
| https://privacy.com for all of my online purchases. It lets
| you create multiple virtual card numbers, so every site I
| pay, I give a different card number. If any single site gets
| hacked, I can disable just that card. And each card can have
| a spending limit per transaction/day/month/year. Or, you can
| make the card a "burner" card that automatically deactivates
| after the first transaction.
|
| Edit: I suppose that doesn't work as well for hotels
| specifically, at least in terms of giving a card for
| incidentals. Since it isn't a physical card, not sure if the
| receptionist would be keen on entering a digital card like
| that? But I've definitely used it to pay for rooms online.
| tzs wrote:
| Taxes are a big reason. Consider a site in the US with customers
| in the US.
|
| Quite a few states require you to collect sales tax on sales to
| customers in those states. Most have thresholds and you only have
| to collect taxes if you exceed those thresholds, but
| unfortunately most of those thresholds are of the form sales of
| at least $D dollars _or_ at least T transactions.
|
| $D is usually reasonably high, like $100k or $200k, but T is
| often 200.
|
| So 200 people in South Dakota each pay $0.01 for an article on
| your site generating a whopping $2 in revenue...but you have 200
| transactions so you owe sales tax on that $2. Same thing will
| probably happen in a bunch of other states.
|
| And so there you are, with tiny revenues from many states, but
| having to register with their tax authorities, having to file tax
| reports (quarterly in most cases, but I think some may be
| monthly), pay filing fees in some (which might be more than your
| revenue in those states!), and of course actually send the tax
| money.
|
| Now throw in other countries. There is VAT in the EU, for
| instance. Most countries have VAT thresholds, but those often do
| not apply to out-of-country sellers, so you might have to deal
| with VAT for European that comes and buys one of your $0.01
| articles.
|
| There are some things that help with this. In the US there is the
| Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement, which is an agreement between
| about half the states where if an online seller agrees to collect
| sales tax for all sales in all the participating states (even the
| ones that they do not meet the thresholds for), the states will
| pay for the seller to use a service like Avalara or Tax Cloud,
| which will handle the rate calculations, the filing, and all that
| at no charge to the seller.
|
| But that only covers about half the states. Those services will
| handle the rest for you, but not for free, so you can't escape
| tax pain.
|
| With VAT in EU, there is a thing called VAT MOSS that you can
| sign up for. You sign up for VAT MOSS in one country (Ireland is
| a good choice for US businesses), and then you just have to file
| one quarterly report with them listing your sales in all EU
| countries and the tax owed, pay that tax to the VAT MOSS country,
| and that country then distributes their shares to the others.
|
| The VAT situation is considerably nicer than the US sales tax
| situation, because VAT is per country. I just have to know that a
| customer is in, say, Germany, to know how much VAT to collect. In
| the US, the sales tax depends on address. 123 Fake Street in a
| town can have a different tax rate than 124 Fake Street, and the
| seller is expected to deal with that.
|
| If instead of charging $0.01 per article you make the site free
| to users and plaster it with ads and make your money from those
| ads all those tax issues go away. The money you make from the ads
| is just ordinary business income, that gets taxes as part of your
| corporate income tax. The tax is the same regardless of whether
| someone who saw the ad lived at 123 Fake Street or 124 Fake
| Street.
| strombofulous wrote:
| You only have to collect state sales tax if you have a taxable
| nexus in that state (basically, six figure revenue from that
| state alone in a fiscal year or a physical presence in that
| state)
|
| I doubt many non-US companies meet this condition in more than
| a few states. Hell, I doubt many US companies even meet this
| requirement (nb, that's why a lot of smaller ecommerce stores
| don't collect tax). That would be a minimum of $5,000,000 in
| yearly revenue from the US alone - more than enough to assume
| that they have at least one accountant on payroll to deal with
| this.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Because payments are a hassle.
|
| People resent that the credit card companies take 3%, but it
| takes more than just 'transfer money from this account to that'
| but also dealing with fraudulent buyers and sellers.
|
| In the case of you visiting a site and feeling you didn't get
| 0.005 cents worth of value it is very clear that somebody could
| perceive it was unfair. In the advertising economy, however, no
| one party sees the whole transaction so rip-offs can be pervasive
| and people don't know.
| solus_factor wrote:
| Because nobody yet built a good implementation of the idea.
|
| There was Flattr, but they pivoted from their original idea
| because they couldn't make it work for some reason.
|
| It can't be implemented on the level of individual sites - the
| solution needs to be universal, like Google adding a 'tip' button
| to Chrome + Play Store payment integration.
| m34 wrote:
| For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve
| exactly that.
|
| As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support.
| Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or
| subscription financed models.
|
| Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better
| demographics data/statistics.
|
| [1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/
| westurner wrote:
| https://webmonetization.org/ lists Coil (flat $5/mo) as the
| first Web Monetization provider: https://coil.com/
|
| Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which
| is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's
| probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the
| <1C/ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able
| to achieve.
| kgwxd wrote:
| You know exactly what you're buying from cloud services.
| Micropayments for digital media would feel like buying blind
| bags. I loath buying blind bags.
| eitland wrote:
| I want to pay for the things I want to read in other papers that
| I don't subscribe to.
|
| Up to $1 or $2 a piece.
|
| I just want it like Blendle used to be that I can get my money
| back if I jump back out after a few seconds and I want some more
| choice (travel and fashion isn't exactly my stuff but actively
| looked for tech stuff to read there and hardly found anything).
| [deleted]
| RustyRussell wrote:
| As sometime who has worked full time on this for over 5 years
| now, I have found a few aspects of your answer:
|
| The technical challenges of doing it with credit cards are
| overwhelming (in CC parlance, a "microtransaction" is anything
| under $10) due to fee structure.
|
| You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my
| case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different
| problem: nobody has Bitcoin.
|
| You also need to add the lack of convincing incentive: since
| microtransactions don't yet exist, there's no proof that that's a
| market for them. That leap of faith is a significant barrier.
| 37ef_ced3 wrote:
| Obviously you are aware of this, but here is an example of
| micropayments in practice:
|
| When I use (for example) Vultr cloud compute, I load my Vultr
| account with $10 via credit card. Once the money enters the
| account it remains there until it is spent
|
| Then I pay 1 or 2 cents each hour for a cloud instance. At the
| end of each month, Vultr tells we what's due if I exceed what
| remains in the account
|
| This kind of simple micropayment scheme (with a trusted entity
| holding upfront credit card payments) is widely implemented
|
| If you are willing to trust an intermediary (and most people
| are) then distributed ledgers (blockchains) are unnecessary
| egypturnash wrote:
| Because payments are a for-profit industry. If we had some kind
| of digital money that could be transferred without any fees
| (because, say, the infrastructure was operated by the government,
| under the assumption that a medium of exchange that doesn't take
| a few percent off every transaction is a Public Good we should
| have) then it would be much easier to see if micropayments are
| actually a thing that anyone is willing to do.
| kube-system wrote:
| The US already has a government-facilitated money transfer
| system that was specifically created to make small electronic
| money transfers accessible for more people.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
| beefman wrote:
| Nano is a cryptocurrency that is completely feeless. It's the
| only feeless payment system I know of. (This is not an
| endorsement, though the handful of transactions I've done with
| it over the past couple years worked as advertised.)
| strombofulous wrote:
| How are miners incentivized to maintain the network?
| rkho wrote:
| I was curious and looked into this myself. According to
| Coinbase[1]:
|
| > users provide the computational power required to verify
| their own transactions, allowing transactions to be
| processed without fees
|
| [1] https://www.coinbase.com/price/nano
| wppick wrote:
| Nothing is stopping the payment provider from taking a
| percentage. I pay 0.5 cents for an article and service provider
| takes 0.1 cents. Still $4 RPM for the news site after a 20%
| fee!
| hehehaha wrote:
| Think of it as a cable subscription. When you bundle a whole
| bunch of articles, it's easier to up charges due to volume and
| perceived value.
| defertoreptar wrote:
| Part of it may be the mindset of "paying for something =
| negative" and "getting something = positive." Micropayments
| maximize the time we spend thinking about the negative part of
| the transaction. On the other hand, if we wait too long and have
| a $1000 bill at the end of the year, that may be even more
| painful than having to think about smaller payments more often.
| The psychological sweet spot for many things is the once a month
| subscription.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| People don't like paying money for things, and they especially
| don't like paying small amounts of money for things. People also
| have less money these days to spare, and an overflow of content
| that doesn't require them to pay.
| michael1999 wrote:
| TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_cost
|
| The transaction costs of small transactions quickly overwhelm the
| value of the transaction. This gives rise to market structure
| included (especially) the firm and the bundling within of non-
| market transactions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
| cJ0th wrote:
| There was (is?) a website that charges you a couple of cents per
| article. They offer content from many different magazines. I got
| some free credit during the early phase. Even though I wasn't
| even spending my own money, seeing the amount go down after every
| article made me realize that none of the articles I read were
| worth any money.
|
| On the other hand, I am willing to spend $80 on a book if it
| contains really valuable information.
|
| One idea I like is spending $x flat each month and then consume
| as much as I like knowing that the amount gets shared equally
| among all the creators whose contents I have consumed. There
| probably are businesses with such a mode out there but I am not
| aware of any.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Here's some older explanations:
|
| Clay Shirky:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20060214180624/http://www.openp2p...
|
| Andrew Odlyzko:
| http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...
|
| Nick Szabo:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20080514172459/http://szabo.best....
| ghaff wrote:
| I still think Shirky is pretty much spot-on after a couple of
| decades. Even when it seemed as if "midi-payments" might be
| getting some traction in music and apps, they've now mostly
| turned into either subscriptions, ad-supported, or "free to
| play." And arguably a bunch of midi-subscriptions (e.g.
| $1/month) is even worse because enough of those and they add up
| to a real money leak. For subscriptions, I'd much rather have a
| $5-15/month that is a sufficient line item that I'll spend the
| time to consider whether I really want this or not.
| lisper wrote:
| > why can't news sites just charge you $0.01 to read an article,
| or even half that
|
| They can. See https://blendle.com/, though the going rate there
| is considerably more than 0.01. But that's a question of pricing,
| not of logistics. The way it works is that you pay a small-ish
| lump sum up front and then you draw down that balance in small
| increments. That is different from true micropayments where you
| can send small amounts to anyone on demand, but it's a proven
| model.
|
| The real problem is that to scale this beyond payments to a fixed
| set of vendors you basically need a license from the federal
| government. You need to either be a bank or a money-transfer
| agent, and both of those have extremely high barriers to entry,
| basically insurmountable, mainly to prevent money laundering,
| which is the tough nut that no one has been able to crack.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| Is there admin overhead that gets in the way? For example,
| someone disputing 400 different 1 cent charges
| lisper wrote:
| That too, though that's actually easier to deal with than the
| regulatory issues because there are technological and ToS
| solutions here.
| RedditKon wrote:
| Transaction fees
| amelius wrote:
| Isn't this what in-app payments are already doing?
| xeromal wrote:
| Google tried that years ago but it didn't pan out. I was part of
| the program and always had a few bucks in there. I loved the
| idea. I can't remember the name though
| uncledave wrote:
| Because it's a pain in the butt. You end up keeping track of
| who's charged you what. You end up being a full time accountant
| and adding a value judgement to every little thing you do. It's
| just another thing chipping away at you constantly. Another
| distraction and another treadmill.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This! Totally this. It'll be super hard to keep track of
| finances with thousands of transactions per month.
|
| And yes the value judgement. I'd hate having to think whether
| every page I visit is worth it.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Because a lot of news sites know you're not loading them
| intentionally in your browser, but landing on them because of
| shares or search. Meaning you may only see their pages 10x a
| month or similar even without a paywall.
|
| The hope with the paywall is if you keep seeing it, you'll go
| ahead and pay to unlock it, and the amount you're paying offsets
| the transaction fees.
|
| 1000 users each paying 20 cents for ten articles (so assuming
| -double- the rate you propose, and charging only at the end of
| the monthly billing cycle) is still a loss of likely around 1/4th
| the revenue even with a cut rate payment provider (due to the
| large fixed cost of 2-4%). So might make $50. It's -negative- if
| using something pleasant to integrate with (because they will
| charge for that convenience with a larger fixed cost, like
| Stripe, who will charge $.30 + small percentage per charge),
| unless you work with them to design a new pricing model for you.
|
| Converting 50 of those thousand (so just 5%) of those people to
| paid users at $5 each is going to be north of $200 you keep, even
| if you use Stripe and don't negotiate anything.
|
| And for those users that -will- load up a news site
| intentionally, the economics are even starker; a subscription
| means you'll likely go to their site, and stay there. Pay-as-you-
| go pricing incentivizes you to not visit the site, and instead
| find other, cheaper news sources.
|
| AWS pricing works because of the scale of the resources people
| tend to use, and that for businesses, using those resources =
| additional revenue. It is spending money to make money.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The funny thing is that they're exposing their content for
| indexers but hiding it for users.
|
| When I encounter these websites I just write another
| greasemonkey / tampermonkey script to delete the popup and
| unlock the content.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Well in a way this actually works.. There's been several sites
| I'm paying a subscription for because I came across them in
| some search and found them really good. Like Ars Technica and
| some local sites. Besides paying for the content I like
| sponsoring them so they can keep doing the thing they do.
|
| But usually those sites are the ones I open at least once a day
| to see what's new. I don't want to pay for every clickbait I
| visit.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| There are a lot of complications to this, but I'm optimistic that
| eventually this will be a more common user experience.
|
| 1. Credit card vendors have flat fees that will eat up a whole
| transaction if it's too small. For instance, strip has a flat 30c
| fee. This means the only reasonable way to do this is to have a
| user pre-pay a large sum and reduce from that, or to batch their
| transactions and extend them some credit. The former dissuades
| people from making a payment at all, and the latter runs the risk
| of bounced charges or users never purchasing enough to justify
| the charge.
|
| 2. There is no universal payments API. Browsers are starting to
| work on this with the w3c web payments standard
| https://www.w3.org/Payments/ but this is just for user input. You
| still have to work with companies like Stripe or PayPal to then
| actually make the charge.
|
| 3. Dark patterns are more successful. You see this with a lot of
| game currencies. By forcing users into larger purchases, you can
| get them to justify spending more (e.g. bundling multiple items
| into one package, maybe with "discounts") and if you sell your
| own currency, you can make the values not add up evenly so that
| the user has leftover balance that they perceive as being
| "wasted" unless they buy more.
|
| I work on a web extension that provides a javascript API for
| making payments using the Bitcoin Lightning network:
| https://lightningjoule.com/. I really love the possibilities that
| small payments open up, and have been working to smooth out the
| UX of having to confirm a payment every time:
| https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/introducing-joule-allowances-2....
| However it's still a long way from any mainstream adoption.
| finm wrote:
| My two cents: https://www.finmoorhouse.com/writing/micropayments
|
| The bottom line is network effects, I think.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Fees? Sure, a service might charge you a small rate per email,
| but are they going to charge you for just one email at a time?
| Probably not. But that could easily be a problem for a news site.
| wppick wrote:
| I guess there would need to be a 3rd party or even in house
| token system where you buy something like 1000 token for a
| dollar. And you can spend x tokens to view an article. Online
| advertising like Google ads is essentially doing this for ad
| views/clicks
| Finnucane wrote:
| I suppose a news site could offer monthly billing based on
| usage rather than a flat fee. Surely someone has tried it.
| But then, consider all the pay sites that are linked here on
| HN that you might only look at occasionally.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| PayPal could easily offer this sort of thing, along with the
| integrations for news sites etc.
| bserge wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised Paypal has fallen so much. They were a
| pioneer in online payments, they used to offer Patreon-
| style subscriptions that could be integrated on any
| website, they'd automatically transfer the monthly fee to
| your account, but damn the interface was extremely
| confusing and buggy, I wonder if it got any better...
| smithza wrote:
| The idea is akin to a driver going through a modern toll. They
| take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill in the
| mail after looking it up in the state registry. For those who
| registered (have an express RFID chip or similar), that process
| is cheaper and you get a cheaper bill that is summed up each
| month/quarter.
|
| To stay strictly with the analogy, 1) what is our online license
| plate? 2) how would one send a bill after translating license
| plate to home address?
|
| To me, these are fundamental web browser capability deficits. Tim
| Berners-Lee envisioned this and put some HTTP response codes in
| the registry with a _TODO_ bookmark and never got around to it or
| something like that. It is possible but we will have to call in
| the committee.
| ericnolte wrote:
| Is the Brave browser a pseudo-solution to this problem? It can
| hold a crypto coin balance and either collect more of it through
| advertisements or pay it out to publishers like news sites.
| jasonv wrote:
| Brave doesn't have enough market share to matter for this, so
| far.
|
| This was revealed in a recent HN thread where webmasters shared
| the browser breakdown for their traffic.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Why _pseudo_ -solution?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm kinda happy they're not. It'd be much harder to track
| expenses that way, and literally everyone would be constantly
| asking for money.
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