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Comment by mahranch | Hacker News Reader

> I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it.

Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.

That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.

Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And none have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?

Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.

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I've struggled with this myself. A while back, due to linkage from here and other sites, I had used up my free allotment of free nytimes stories and thought, "hey, let me see if I can pay a bit to raise the limit, because I'm willing to pay a bit for journalism." So I checked out their subscription plans and could find nothing even remotely close to worthwhile for me.

There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:

* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories/month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.

* The subscriptions were for what I'd call "odd" time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.

Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.

There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. If I had to pay $4/mo each for all the random sites I visit each month... I wouldn't visit those sites any more.

What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.

(And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)

That sounds like Brave's bitcoin protocol they are working on.

Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?

Well, there's really no reason why Bitcoin should/would be a part of it. Bitcoin is no better at microtransactions than any other payment solution, it's actually worse. So you're left with solutions that involve "off-chain"-type transactions and even then, you have a MAJOR adoption hurdle with Bitcoin that you don't have with credit cards and ACH.

I guess the reason Bitcoin is used is because the payments are to be decentralised and without opt-in from the site's that are getting paid. As opposed to services like Flattr that require signup from the site's before hand.

It doesn't. Does it need to?

I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.

But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.

I don't see how clicking on click bait means you pay/nearly pay. You're only paying if money leaves your bank account. You're just wasting a little time (not much though; just click the back button) and feeling a little stupid for falling for it. Just don't click on linkbait, and make a note not to ever visit that site again. Actually, it'd be nice if adblockers let you blacklist sites and turned their urls into the text "linkbait url removed". I think people DO hate linkbait generally because nobody likes being lied to, which is essentially what's happening.

>People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.

Just that? "People", "Cosmo", "Men's Health", all the most succesful print titles are hardly better than BS clickbait...

Bitcoin? Uh, no thanks.

Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc.

Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.

How about they are not? Radical I know, but what about having a button on the bottom of the page where you could click to say "this was a good article, flattr it"?

Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button.

That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?

I think Google's "pay not to get ads" service is a good first step. Handling contnet at the ad-server level makes a ton of sense, given that they are already in the business of maximizing CPC/CPM. If users could "bid" on NOT seeing an ad against an advertiser bidding to show you an ad, you disrupt the content creators as little as possible.

Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies.

Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold.

A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.

I love Google's Contributor program and i'm actually at the max contribution now (I started at $1 a month, and over the last 6 months or so gradually increased it because i liked the results i was seeing) The problem is that i've found most people want an "all or nothing" system. They want to see NO ads for their payment, and not have the possibility for some ads.

For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead.

Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".

man, why isn't this advertised (ha) more heavily? This sounds fantastic!

There was some pretty big pushback when it was first announced and i think they went into "let's fix this before trying again" mode.

Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that?

Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it.

Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.

Probably because it didn't work so well for Google.

Premium ad slots on premium sites -- eg the ones most people are actually seeing -- can sell for 10x your $2.80 cpm example. Just adding that it does make the math more challenging

Absolutely not. The only thing that does is drive up ad prices. If I am paying I want NO ADS. Not a bidding war, not less obtrusive ads. NO ADS.

>What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.

You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content.

One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off.

In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only.

True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.

> Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.

That's because magazines are heavily advertiser-supported, the very thing you're trying to not have online.

That is exactly how Spotify Premium's payment model works. The nearest equivalent in journalism might be a wire service like the AP.

I'd say there's an even more obvious reason than that; most content simply isn't valuable enough that people would pay for it. Can you support high quality journalism with a subscription model? Possibly, but the audience will be far lower than the audience on todays ad supported sites, and perhaps not even big enough to support two or three seperate ones.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get.

And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.

The core of the problem is that's easy and cheap to copy content(while rephrasing, for legality). So unless you need the content right now(or need it from a reliable source, say for your job/investments/etc), you could probably find most of what you're interested in offered for free, or something similar to it, which is good enough.

> What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.

It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution

>There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site.

That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media).

Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.

>> They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard

Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:

"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."

Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.

[1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...

>Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter)

No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself.

Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this:

https://launch.blendle.com/

That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US.

But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.

Thanks. Very interesting.

But(from an article in business insider): "It may well be that Blendle has been so successful in the Netherlands because the publications that have signed up have been Dutch language, rather than English, in which articles are often replicated hundreds of times over. But Klöpping[the founder] believes the Netherlands is no different than any other country"

I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.

On top of that, if you want to replicate content in hebrew, you're probably an Israeli, you have more lucrative jobs. But many poor people in the third world do know english pretty well, and the english market is bigger, so there are enough people willing to do that job,

So the situation is very different. But sure it would be interesting to see how the u.s. expansion goes.

EDIT: one thing though - i see their most popular piece is an in depth analysis of how will middle east will look in 2035. Seems like something that might not fit ad-based content(it's too long, making it both hard to copy well, and not fit for ads, and also credibility of the author matters). Now i really want to see what kind of content this produces in english.

>I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.

Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.

> Subscription models just don't work

I'm not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say "then don't use the site", you don't get to choose whether or not you're exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it's already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I'm of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren't so black and white, from either side)

> but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent

You watch the big bang theory and they play an ad during the commercial break for colgate. Did you get sold something without your consent? It's literally the exact same thing.

When you browse the web or when you watch TV, it's inherent to the media that you will see ads and that ads subsidize that content. Admitting to anything else but that inherent truth is (to me) just technicalities and/or pointless pedantry. Unless it's your first time on the 'net, you understand ads subsidize the content you see. Pretending like it's some injustice is almost laughable. It's like you're saying commercials on TV are taking advantage of you every time they cut to a commercial break.

TV ads are not tracking you, taking data from you and/or providing an attack vector for malware or other cybercrime.

So literally not the exact same thing.

That's an argument against a certain type of advertising. The link explicitly rejects the distinction between ads that monitor and track you and ads than are entirely passive.

I agree with the position set forth by the link. I don't want to be advertised to at all. I cut the cord, I no longer watch TV, I've stopped following sports, I run uBlock Origin... Any site that decides to block ad blockers will simply no longer get a visit from me.

I think advertising is one of the lowest, most pernicious forms of psychological manipulation out there. It simply cannot be done in good faith, by definition.

Some content creators even try to level with their audience about it and say "I'm just putting up this ad to get paid, just ignore it (or click it but don't buy anything) if you want." That's not dealing with the advertising company in good faith.

To me, the only good faith relationship between content creator and audience is the patronage model. This model has endured for centuries and some of our culture's very best artists have relied on it.

Is there such a thing as an entirely passive online ad? Any clickable ad at least knows which site you were on when you clicked; TV advertisers don't know what I was watching when I saw their ad.

That aside, the crucial difference is still this:

TV ads cannot be removed. If they could be, they would be.

Since online ads can be removed, and since doing so provides an enhanced user experience, and since (passive or not) online advertising facilitates the gross pollution of the internet by financing endless numbers of splog, malware and other content-free junk sites, that nobody would ever pay for directly, why not block them?

Laugh all you want. Laughter doesn't change facts.

And facts are -- nobody is indebted to companies who snuck themselves in the content we're interested in. I didn't ask for them there. Did I sign a contract mandating me to not use ad blockers? No. Your move then.

What's so hard to comperehend here?

No there isn't anything inherent in the way commercial TV happens to work in the US. There are many other models, including, but not limited to:

- Taxpayer funded television (ala BBC)

- Direct viewer funded television (ala PBS)

- Subscription television (ala HBO, Netflix, etc.)

- Television subsidized by some organization that doesn't advertise but wants to produce content (probably doesn't currently exist, but could)

- Community produced television (ala cable access)

- Any other model you'd like.

Just because the current model exists doesn't mean nothing else could work, and doesn't mean that I should assume anything when I turn on the TV. There's nothing inherent about advertising.

> That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.

I'm willing to pay for high-quality content, it's just that whenever a "pay" option is offered, it's usually overpriced. The standard Netflix subscription costs ~$10/month; the online subscription to Wired costs $4/month. Is accessing a single random website (Wired) worth 40% of Netflix to me? No, not really. Am I going to spend hundreds of dollars a month to individually subscribe to every website I use? No, I'm not doing that either.

Add to that that I'm extremely wary of subscriptions for obvious reasons.

I'd gladly pay for content if I could subscribe to most websites I use with a single service at reasonable prices (or better yet, buy credits/access-triggered weekly passes for them).

Netflix and Spotify might argue with you. Subscriptions might not work in all case, but as these threads demonstrate, there are many alternatives depending on your content (micropayments, or sponsored content for newspapers).

Ads of today don't work, the widespread and increasing use of content blockers back it up.

Spotify isnt really making money. The other music services have all failed.

Netflix is the only streaming service seeing some success, and they don't own or produce most of their content or the delivery systems. If they did, their business wouldn't be viable either.

Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money? How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?

What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system? That seems like a rather specious argument. HBO GO, Hulu, MLB, Sling TV and the 100s of other OTT services seem to be missing from your industry understanding.

>Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money?

Industry observers see the financial numbers from Spotify filings in the UK and Luxembourg and can piece together that they spend more than they take in. Another source of information about Spotify health was the Sony email leaks[1] revealing the unfavorable terms to license the Sony music catalog.

Lastly, CEO Daneil Ek has been on record[2] saying, "we believe in the business model of Spotify, and believe that ultimately we’ll become profitable at some point..."

It is not wild speculation that Spotify is losing money.

>How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?

Pandora is also still losing money.[3] Whether it's 80M or 800M users, it's a failure if the business can't turn a profit. (Otherwise known as costs exceeding revenue.)

The overwhelming "costs" in both music streaming services is the royalty payouts for licensing music. So far, not enough people can be convinced to pay $9.99/month. Or, the people that are willing to pay something-per-month are not willing to pay higher amounts such as $19.99.[4] So far, the financial numbers are not working.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_ha...

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/07/daniel-ek-...

[3]http://www.techtimes.com/articles/98853/20151026/pandora-con...

[4]https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/201745891-How-mu...

I think the key is so far. It might not turning a profit, but ~1bn in revenue is still a strong argument that you can get the subscriptions model working for online music streaming and is not doomed to failure from the very beginning.

> Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money? How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?

There are plenty of public reports of Spotify revenues and losses that show they're having trouble. Pandora has had continual losses and the stock isnt doing well either. There's only more drama coming with artists and studios demanding more money so it's a very tough market and isn't going as well as it might seem on the surface. User counts don't matter if the business can't sustain itself.

> What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system?

Traditionally there were cable companies that owned the delivery infrastructure and studios that produced the content. Netflix is neither (although they're getting a little into the production business). They will continue to feel pressure from both sides as the traditional companies start to compete much more strongly with digital offerings. Regardless, if Netflix was actually producing all the content they have, they wouldnt be in business today.

My point in response to the GP reply is that subscriptions aren't easy. Netflix and Spotify were named but both have issues and arent clear winners. Leasing content doesn't show the true cost of that content and while it might work for audio/video resellers, it's not going to help all the major web content/news publishers.

>> Regardless, if Netflix was actually producing all the content they have, they wouldn't be in business today.

Sure, but that's just a growth phase, right ? Once Netflix becomes fully global(and as successful it hopes), won't it revenues fully support the content ?

People pay for plenty of content on Kindle Store, for example.

But "books" are on a higher shelf compared to the "content" that people consume mostly out of restless boredom, for which they perhaps are reluctant to pay because they don't really care about it that much anyway.

At least as big an issue I think is that for Kindle books, the analogy is roughly "Amazon = the Internet".

If there was a single vendor who knew my payment information and transparently and simply just made it all work, I'd be far more likely to consider paying for one article here, one article there, etc.

People will pay large monthly bills to read stuff on the Internet -- they do so today to their ISP. But for a variety of reasons, no one is going to pay 750 individual monthly bills for $0.06 each to all the different pages they've stumbled through during the month, even if it works out to be about the same amount of money.

I don't want to pay $0.06 for anything because what could possibly be simultaneously interesting and worth so little?

On the other hand, I gladly pay $5 through the simple checkout thing on LouisCK.com because I trust and respect him and want to support his business.

This is kind of why I'm so lukewarm about the idea of micro payments. It seems to assume a world where everybody gives tiny tips to little blobs of semi-worthless generic content that they probably consume on the bathroom.

I've paid for downloads of independent ebooks too and would happily do it again. If payments are really tedious then that's a general problem and, like, Stripe could just make a browser extension to make it utterly trivial. VISA works pretty well after all, no?

For me, the overwhelming problem seems to be that I'm only genuinely interested in a small subset of high quality things (books, videos, articles) by people I have real respect for.

With most news articles, I'd pay for the privilege of never even hearing about them. But if someone made a plain text newsletter with coherent, intelligent news commentary, I wouldn't think twice about filling out a Stripe pop up for that. I've paid for dumber things in my life.

There needs to be some sort of combination between subscriptions and "pay as you go." I pay for The Washington Post, since I tend to read it almost every day. I won't pay $4/month for Wired, since I'm not a regular reader. I'd pay say 50 cents an article, though, if that were an option. That goes for The Economist, Scientific American, and a number of other sites.

The main issue with this type of payment model isn't the money; it's the mechanics of it.

If something behind the scenes automatically took my $0.50, kept track of the fact that I was entitled to read it on any device and browser I might use anytime in the future, and didn't bug me about it ever again, then it might be workable. I don't have a problem paying a few cents for an article. I have a problem manually entering into the transaction to pay a few cents every time I want to read an article throughout the day.

I think this is related to the importance of defaults. If a site charged $4 per year, and then, in an unrelated transaction a user could opt-in to advertising to cover that $4 fee, you'd see a tiny fraction of people expressing the "preference" you think they are expressing.

>Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.

Anybody asked them?

> Subscription models just don't work

he said and looked at his torrents

> Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.

The subscription model has worked for 20 years in the adult industry, even though free online porn has existed since the invention of the GIF.

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