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Comment by Vraxx | Hacker News Reader

To me this seems like it would suffer from a chicken and egg sort of issue. To expand, this is useful to me as a consumer if I could install it and browse the web ad and guilt free, as well as having access to pay-walled content with my Atri subscription essentially paying for it. As a content provider, I'm only going to want to provide this avenue of "subscription" if it nets more money than my current method of monetization of my content. By the looks of it, this is trying to recruit users first, but what value is a user being provided for the $30 over 3 months other than being included in an artificially limited experiment?

edit: To be clear, I like the idea, and I think something needs to be tried in order for something to work. These are just my initial skeptical criticisms.

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I'd imagine their plan is to get enough people to pay (even if the value's not there now, it's sort of like a Kickstarter) so they can demonstrate demand to publishers. Once they get XX,XXX people using the extension, they can make a convincing offer for integration with them (and of course, each site that integrates will boost the atri userbase as well).

Yeah.. That's what I was speculating from reading the page. IMO (but by no means am I an expert) I think it would be easier to convince a limited amount of content producers to offer up some value that would attract users than it would be to convince users to pay for something that they have no immediate use for. I guess my opinion is based on the assumption that minimally lost revenue for the content producers would be easier to absorb than for the average user to absorb a $10 service which is competing with other monthly services like Netflix, music subscriptions, and other individual website subscriptions. I mostly posit this because just recently on HN there was a service displayed to analyze your bank data to point out monthly subscriptions, so I assume it's a pain point consumers are already concerned with.

You've definitely got a solid plan there, and its basically what Patreon is doing. But our belief is that if you're a content creator, you shouldn't have to do work on top of your creating to earn a living, hence the direct to consumer route

You're absolutely right that there is a chicken and egg problem. As it stands right now, publishers are desperately holding on to every last advertising and subscription dollar they can find, and aren't looking for new things. We've realized the only way to show publisher new revenue sources are possible (and we've spoken with almost all of them) is to actually give them a check. To start, the value to Atri users is limited - but we think there are enough people out there willing to give this a shot that we can get the ball rolling.

Also I'd say that it's an experiment, and we hope to show that if this was deployed it could work at scale and bring in the revenue the web needs to support itself and grow.

Yeah, that was pretty much what I gathered. Out of curiosity have you tried working with content producers to form some limited partnerships that you might be able to offer users? I was thinking something along the lines of a limited (to prevent abuse) subscription to a variety of news sites that are normally pay-walled. In addition, you might be able to bundle the extension with a partnered ad-blocker that could estimate revenue lost (on average) by the loss of impressions that could be used to compare to the amount of revenue that the site could stand to gain from the portion of the subscription fee. Some hard data could go a long way towards convincing content producers of the value of supporting a service like this.

We've starting talking to content producers, and its an avenue we want to pursue further, but as you pointed out the hard data we're gathering here is going to be key to our negotiations.

As to your idea of bundling an Ad Blocker, while we support ad block as a product, we don't want to be building two products, and there are plenty of great ad blockers out there already. We also think that there might be some people who, for whatever reason, don't want an ad blocker but do want to support creators, and we didn't want to limit Atri to only adblock users.

For something like Atri to be worth ANYTHING, it needs to be profit-competitive with ad networks. It won't be. It will never be. Because guys who make things like this think that they deserve to soak up a percentage of the 100% of what the publisher was already getting.

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