Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Leaving BTC and lighting aside, I don't think most people would opt out of ads in favor of micro payments. There is a minority who have the money that would but I see nothing in society that points to making such a change possible. Do you have any studies that show people would pay for news/socials/etc. in exchange for no ads/tracking/+privacy? Even the paid streaming services have ads and even when you pay, I'm sure they are still selling tracking data.

View on HN

Many people already have opted out of ads. People like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who have massive, lucrative substacks, for instance.

Many others have done patreon. Many, many youtube creators and podcasters have strong incomes due to that.

What percentage of regular people participate in these schemes though?

What percentage of regular people would participate in this new scheme, though?

Why are we considering these regular people when this is becoming the new regular?

Perhaps not everybody, but this is a core business model for a lot of mobile apps. "Pay and we remove the ads". I've paid for quite a few apps just to get the ads out of the way.

Twitch and similar platforms are absolutely inundated with users who are quickly growing used to regularly donating via micropayment of sorts, not even via subscription but just as one-off donations. And they hate ads. It's very common for the wealthier streamers to run the absolute minimum number of ads required by their contract. When users don't have the money to donate, they will explicitly say "give me ads" and the streamer will run them.

I pay for youtube premium to avoid ads. Paying in a micro form over a lump sum form wouldnt matter for me as long as its reasonable in price and easy.

Really micro payments add-value is that most things on the internet are just not worth a visa charge or the slow fraud detection calcs on the back end. Like access to someones tweets. Its basically opening up a new economy and suitable for the metaverse in general.

Like imagine you have augmented reality glasses and are walking through a city outside a restaurant, and a digital food menu third party gives you access for 5 cents btc or eth.

Bit of a tangent here but the use case is fascinating.

I pay for Youtube and multiple podcasts on Patreon for exactly this reason. I think both ad-supported and subscription-supported are viable, and where possible creators should support both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com