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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

I think micropayments are a classic example of a solution that seems sensible to engineering under the assumption that humans are rational beings, but in the real world it falls apart because they aren't.

The hardest part of making a sale isn't the price--it's getting the customer to say yes. With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link. This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content. No wonder it hasn't taken off.

A better solution from a market psychology standpoint would be to sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites. Monthly auto rebill. Just one purchase decision for life and with enough sites the perceived value is high. Not sure why we aren't seeing more of this -- if anyone works at a media conglomerate feel free to reply :)

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Just make it an all you can eat plafond.

I know I am worth ~50$ a year to the Ad business. I'll gladly pay $60 a year for access to content. That $60 gets redistributed to content providers based on the share of my viewership they get.

Basically, cut the middle man (ad companies in this case).

And you only need to get everyone on the planet who wants to sell content to participate in the network and agree to standardized compensation. It's the same type of issue as with blockchain for supply chains, etc. Everyone needs to participate or it doesn't really work. It can work--it's been reasonably well worked out in music--but that's arguably a more standardized product.

The thing is someone in our community is probably worth $500 a year to the ad business whereas 90% of people are worth nothing. Would you be willing to pay $600 a year to access content, what happens to the other 90% who couldn't afford that. What media would they be condemned to consume.

$2 a day?

If you really want to be socially inclusive, raise taxes on those that can afford to pay (wealthy pensioners are massively undertaxed in the UK for instance), and distribute it as "consumer tokens", or cash, that people can spend on consuming crap.

Yeah, taxing other people is a simple answer to just about everything.

That's what advertising does. You're taxing me to pay for low income people to get free adverts

If you want to subsidise low income people, then be honest about it.

I actually doubt someone in our community is worth that much. If anything, we're worth less than non-tech-savvy people because we see through the bullshit (when we don't outright block it) where as they don't.

A friend of mine recently fell prey to a scam ad on Facebook and they got some money off her. I have yet to buy anything from an online ad in my entire life; so she is actually a much better investment than I am in terms of ad spend.

> because we see through the bullshit (when we don't outright block it) where as they don't.

Sounds like the "marketing doesn't work on me cuz I'm so smart" fallacy, which usually means you're getting hacked by a different type of marketing.

Getting the eyes of wealthy target demographic -- and IT/CS/Dev/STEM folks qualifies -- is definitely worth $$$, the only question is if it's $500 or lower (or higher?). I used to have clients who existed to target the hyper-wealthy, and they made cash hand over fist schlepping details about those folks.

$500 bucks for semi-personalized deets about FAANG devs making $300k+ makes sense, and you can find those people on HN for sure.

My preferred marketing vulnerability is Consumer Reports- or Wirecutter-style. They're making money off marketing things to me, but they're not dependent on any particular brand, so I can feel reasonably confident that I'll be happy with the results.

How can you know that? I remember back in high school I made a few flash games, that was the only time I ever got a few ECPM mesure of every countries, and I could get up to 10$ per 1000 views from the US. It did include video ads though.

Let stay conservative and say 3$ per 1000 views. I heard of plenty of people that make more and that's including what Google take out of it. There's no way you only see 20 000 pages a year. It's at least 5-6 times that amount of page.

Ads are also amazing by the fact that they still pay even though you are underage and can't get a credit card. My passion of software engineering wouldn't have been fulfilled if it wasn't from all the free resource. I learned from Site du Zéro, I was there pretty early when they started, I've seen the website owner going from nothing to building an amazing company. Now they no longer depends on ads, so that's good, but that's only because me seeing their ads at the being was enough for them to work full time on it.

20000 pages a year comes to 54 a day every single day. 5-6 times that amount would be 250-300 pages a day. I don’t think many people read that much.

Also note that this is in the context of the typically more valuable video ads. On eg YouTube if you say 1 ad per 10 minutes it would take 9 hours of video watching per day to rack up 54 ads.

I don’t know what rate of ads one can expect from a mobile game but maybe it would be more. I think you would still likely need several hours to get so many. And presumably you want to play less if there are more frequent ads.

>I don’t think many people read that much.

Anyone on Hacker News read much more than 250-300 pages a day. Just casually browsing on Hacker News would give a few dozens (multiple pages, looking at comments, going to the actual page). Any software engineer will look at reference on the web. I regularly reach 1000 pages a day myself at works (verified using a Chrome extension) and it doesn't take into account my usage over my phone.

> On eg YouTube if you say 1 ad per 10 minutes it would take 9 hours of video watching per day to rack up 54 ads.

Video ads pay much more, as I said, they can go up to 10$ for 1000 views and that's not included the ad provider part.

See https://contributor.google.com/ which offers almost exactly this.

It's $5/mo even for the limited list of sites participating (already $60/mo). I suppose removing ads everywhere by paying web sites the amount advertisers from all networks pay them would cost several times as much.

It's a sensible way of having content creators get paid, but I'm not particularly comfortable with Google watching what websites I visit, which is necessary so they can dole out the cash.

What's worked for me is a combination of aggressive ad-and-tracker-blocking and subscribing to the print versions of content I enjoy.

That seems worse than just a pay-per-page model, because it's pay-per-page AND you have to put money up front.

> sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites

This is a federated subscription. It tends to be a precursor to media mergers, though. (For example, Bloomberg buying BusinessWeek.)

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta is almost exactly what you describe.

It doesn't seem to be growing much though, only having roughly 20 sites it looks like.

https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995

It would be naive to think Google isn't still tracking you despite you're paying.

I haven't read into Contributor to see if they are even claiming that in the first place (the homepage doesn't mention anything about it, and I don't feel "tracking" and "ads" are the same thing at all, even if many conflate them to be).

But assuming they are promising that paying for Contributor would remove you from all tracking (whatever that means), wouldn't it be a pretty big deal (both legally and ethically) if it was found that they are still tracking you while saying they explicitly won't?

Obviously tracking required to run the service would be excluded (they need to know who you are to take money from you in the US, and they need to "track" your identity to tell that you are the person paying for that service), but don't they already have plenty of controls over how they use your personal information, regardless of whether you are paying for Contributor or not?

Sure, they could stand to make them more obvious, but I get asked all the time to double-check my privacy settings with google, I get asked if I want to enable personalized ads when I'm setting up a new Android phone, and the page where you go to turn it off is a single toggle switch.

Yeah, by paying all you're doing is showing you're prepared to pay for stuff; making you a better mark and so worth more for referrals.

Which sites go into that list? Who gets the margin on it? Who decides how much the sites get and how much is "spent" on infrastructure?

Can't wait to buy my "Internet Pass"!

Also it would start to feel like paying for cable. 1000 channels, and I only watch maybe 5.

Someone should figure out a way to:

- Track how many sites a user visits, without knowing which sites the user visits. Call this number N.

- Charge the user for N visits.

- Distribute the money to the original websites, without anyone knowing (not even their banks?)

Sounds like a nice task for a cryptography researcher.

way too easy to game.

just spread a virus... or chrome extension which keep querying your websites

there is no way to implement this with technology in a reasonable manner unless you monitor every action every user does at any time. which would be (at least in my opinion) worse.

> just spread a virus

Yes, but by that logic a banking website could also be compromised.

And they often are (in the sense that people have malware on their computers that try to siphon data and passwords when they go to a banking site)

And banks spend a lot of money to minimize that; less affluent business won’t be able to properly deal with that.

> And banks spend a lot of money to minimize that

Any examples of that, relevant to a desktop bank website user?

Do they sell antivirus solutions, or work with browser vendors to improve security?

I suspect banks have some kind of money-back obligation when hacked, but curious how far that goes when a sizeable part of their customers is hacked.

Some banks force you to use a token to log in.

Korean banks required an activex that scanned your computer.

These measures surely raise the bar though I don’t know how effective they actually are.

Now ad networks and sites bid for the amount to charge for ads shown in an ad slot on a web site.

They can equally bid for the amount to charge from a customer directly. If your payment for not seeing an ad outbids ad networks, you don't see the ad.

E.g. imagine that you agree to pay up to 5¢ automatically for visiting a page is the site asks for it, up to 15¢ per session. If the required sum is above it, you get notified (pay or not). You can configure your browser according to your tastes: accept larger charges from particular sites, always decline any paid pages from some other sites, bid for removal of video ads more aggressively than for static text ads, etc.

A clearinghouse company should handle this the same way an ad network would. Viewers would put some money to their account, and that would be written off in larger transactions e.g. weekly (dollars, not cents).

I believe such solutions were tried in the past, but did not work too well. I suppose most people value their attention much lower than hard cash.

I believe it is about price. Even relatively well off demographic here seems to think 20 bucks a month enough to get top 10 newspapers and magazines. This number is simply unworkable for high quality newspapers. Just like some people are dreaming about an aggregate streaming service which would be 20-30 dollars a month and can cover Netflix, Disney and myriad others.

Internet has given power to people to issue veiled threats that one has to give content to users at price they deem sufficient else users would simply pirate and pay nothing.

One way to do it would be that the first time I visit a proper article on guardian.com (not something 5 lines long which would acts as a loss leader), I get told "indepth articles cost 20p. Click to authorise upto £2 (dropdown for ". Then I don't get asked until after I've read 10 in depth articles. The payment site would have to track if I've read that article before to avoid recharging me, but that's fine, I'd agree to that (if I don't agree then I have to pay each time). I could get a monthly statement, and clear my past logs from a trivial interface (wipe this artcile, wipe this site, wipe all older than x days, etc)

I hit "yes" or "no", and don't hear about it until I've read those 20 articles. Something built into my browser could act as the middle man, taking 10% of that fee and sending the rest to the article's creator. Firefox could put in an infrastructure to plug in easilly enough. You could even allow payment via bitcoin to get VCs happy.

Yes, but then you get scam sites which show 1 decent article and trick you into paying for garbage.

In which case you'd blacklist the site. You'd pay for the first article (you're paying right now through your consumption of brainwashing), but you wouldn't fall for that twice.

I'm going to be honest with you: I would never use a website that used this service. I would just close the tab. I suspect most people would too.

I don't have the patience to be thinking about authorizing spend every time I click a link.

That was Clay Shirky’s argument years ago during the first round of micropayments startups. While we do deal with micropayments in one sense every time we flip on a light switch and used to do so for phone calls, it feels different somehow for reading articles. We don’t want to have to ask ourselves if something is worth 10 cents every time we click a link.

I think it fails fundamentally from a market perspective - you don't know what is truly in it until you agree. Browsing while met with grumbles by merchants is essential.

Toll gating inherently adds friction to a process whose whole damn point is being low friction - marginal costs per person and free to reference around.

A rational solution would be to pay for what you like but people really aren't trained that way or lack the resources relatively. I suspect "microwork" could work better for viewers with little money and even then it is still a friction akin to annoying ads that drives people away.

So, basically the cable tv industry for websites. One more thing for Comcast to buy and I don’t really think they deserve more money.

> it's getting the customer to say yes

Yes. That's how capitalism works. You have to compete in the market.

> With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link.

Yes - do you think you should be able to sell them additional products without getting the buy's permission? That "conative penalty" is the difference between an ethical transaction approved by both sides, and a scam, fraud, or strong-arm tactic such as bundling or abusive contracts of adhesion.

> This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content

Yes, consumers are empowered to more buy specifically what they want, and nothing more.

Or, you could try a new business model that avoids some of this penalty in new, innovative ways.

> sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites

That bundles together products that someone does not want into the same payment for the products they do want. This is the same market distortion that the cable companies use, which people have been walking away from over the last ~decade.

When buyers are empowered to bypass market distortions like bundling, product prices are able to move closer to their actual value. For some products that value is zero. That's a signal that it's time to find a better product to sell, not a reason to undermine the core mechanism of capitalism by removing consumer choice.

Hidden in the comments, here is the wisdom worth incorporating.

Do you pay for news? I do and I can tell you there is literally no way I'm going to do a per-article payment test.

In fact, what I want I already have. The WSJ will bundle (yes, bundle) all its articles into a single monthly fee. The Economist happily does the same.

If, for some reason, these guys decided to switch me to pay-per-article I just wouldn't read them. That's too much of a cost. I can't afford it. Time is too precious for this nonsense.

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