codycowan

Atri contacts you the same way it identifies you - via twitter. When possible, we'll email or reach out directly, but we use twitter to verify identities and know who to send the money to, so we use it to communicate as well. Once we get in contact, we can send money via ACH, paypal, bitcoin, etc

You're absolutely right that consumers as a whole don't care about this problem. The Atri experiment isn't intended for all consumers - we're looking for people who really care about the problem.

It won't be long before there's a paywall and subscription for every site you want to read, because publishers on the whole aren't trying to innovate, they're just holding on to what they know.

Consumers aren't paying attention (as they shouldn't - this is insider baseball), but some of us don't like what we see happening, and those are the kind of people we're looking for with Atri

In a way, yes. But what we found when building adieu.io was that people who were willing to support content creators want to have it done automatically, and Flattr required a considerable amount of work on the part of the donor. Atri does all the work for you, figuring out what content earned your attention, and then assigning funds appropriately.

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.

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.

I don't think security is as much the barrier here as access - localized servers provide 24/7 access by local employees, and until every part of the stream (employees, clients, HQ, mobile, and cloud) have near 100% internet uptime, access is going to prevent this. But it does seems likely that 100% internet uptime is possible, so I'd say eventually this is how most companies will operate.

With the sale of Lastpass to LogMeIn, more excited than ever for 1Password to add team features

Yes, agile is basically waterfall when the people "practicing" it are using it in name only. No one promised Agile would be Engineer Driven Development - it should be team driven development. Anyone (business, product, marketing, engineer, or otherwise) should be advocating for them to lead the process, because thats how Waterfall starts, with one person in charge of decision making.

Agile works when the user is the decision maker, and everyone on the team is advocating for the user (although if its only product that is advocating for the user, that works too). Its a group effort, not something that should just magically work because "we're using agile now".

Are there any other modern companies with a fanbase that is so important to its image/marketing that an article like this would be written? Can't imagine one for Microsoft, Facebook, google, etc...

By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song).

But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.

Its not that we don't want to pay - its that we're only willing to pay when asked to do so - nobody is going to stand up and say I'll pay. And publishers aren't trying to make things readers want; advertisers have become more important to publishers than users, and that dynamic is what needs to change (just as its changing with TV/netflix/hbogo/amazon, etc)

users, plus relationships with the various services they had integrated into the app (eventbrite, foursquare, evernote, song kick, asana, todoist.....). 100 million is a lot, but sunrise was a well thought out, well executed product

Given what they did with Accompli, not at all