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0 pointsjacquesm10y ago0 comments

Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario into account.

Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 / year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.

A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such as articles.

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Animats10y ago

All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.

viraptor10y ago

You'd think so... I signed up for flattr (https://flattr.com/) with some credit shortly after they launched. Over half a year, I found one website (https://lightspark.github.io/) I went to which wanted to receive my money (and they did). Everybody else served ads (which I blocked).

Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)

danneu10y ago

Clicking on a Gittip/Flattr/Patreon badge or looking up a donation Bitcoin address are always worth a sad chuckle.

That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a counterpoint.

It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.

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vinceguidry10y ago

They haven't found a killer app yet. This seems like a ripe moment for them to shine. I'd be all over micropayments like a cheap suit if it let me read any article on any service I wanted, ad-free.

mirimir10y ago

Micropayments can be as automatic as ad auctions. Publishers would just give readers the option of winning the auctions for all ads on the page. Most simply, payments could come from deposit accounts for readers.

mattmaroon10y ago

I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment.

This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)

If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.

voyou10y ago

"there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers"

At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.

nulltype10y ago

The most successful micropayment service of can think of is probably Spotify. It doesn't look how everyone was imagining micropayments but is effectively the same thing.

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