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There is a fundamental disconnect in how writers value their writing, and how readers value their writing. Trying to understand the economic forces that drive information value will really help writers understand what is, and isn't, valuable prose to readers.
Too many people are stuck in the mindset of "buy a book/article" etc, but the web is 99.99% one and done. So nobody wants to pay 15 cents for something they will never read again, and may not even like the first time. But have them pay a third of a cent? Sure, if they go back an re-read it 100 time's they will have paid you 30 cents for it. The value would be emergent rather than demanded.
Until journalists can internalize that, this conversation will remain unresolved.
1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate.
2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back.
3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.
So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages.
I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term.
The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic.
Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed.
So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended)
Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing.
Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price.
So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles."
Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people.
There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence.
The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web).
If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus.
[1] The exception for fan fiction is noted.
[2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.
Wouldn't that just create more content that appeals to the least common denominator? Why would you want to focus the efforts of a professional writer toward creating that?
You misunderstand what was written. ChuckMcM was suggesting that most people only read an article once. Even if they frequently go back to the same website, they don't re-read articles that they've read from 5 years ago. That makes the economics different than buying a book or a magazine. People do save magazines. My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009, and when I was a kid I would read through old issues to get a sense of how science developed during the decades before I was born. Nobody does that with web articles. So the economics are different. You can become the owner of a magazine, but trying to claim ownership of a digital article is a subject of endless debates regarding copyright law.
As ChuckMcM said, the web is 99.999% "one and done". People read articles once and never go back. They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.
Actually, I have a fundamentally different perspective.
> They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.
The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader. Even if they read it once. This is true of literary content, educational content, news content, and even entertainment.
But more than that, what good content does is establish a relationship that can be cultivated. Even if you read an article just once, it can become part of the greater relationship that serves a larger purpose. (Perhaps, educational, building towards expertise in a certain knowledge area. Or, perhaps, entertainment, where the reader can reliably expect a change in their emotional state.)
> My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009
Many of my subscribers save all of the emails I send them. How is that different?
> Nobody does that with web articles.
Have you never referred back to the same web resource? How many times have you viewed this discussion? Do you wonder why there is a "bookmarks" menu button on your browser? Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later, or printed it out? These are all common behaviors.
Someone regularly comments on my Facebook article posts, saying "bookmarking", just so they can reference it later.
Ironically, I often email the same article to the same audience multiple times, and the readership rate remains high.
Yes, the web is full of low-quality content that degrades the reader, the writer, and the entire culture of the internet. Maybe that content earns 1/3rd of a cent per view -- and deserves it. But is that really what we want to be supporting?
"But is that really what we want to be supporting?"
you are instead remarking about how things should be. Maybe there is some alternate universe where utopia has been established and people pay a lot of money to support good content. However, I would suggest that you read Clay Shirky's remarks on the death of print:
"When you have an audience mostly made up of nostalgists, there’s not much market demand for unvarnished truth. This kind of boosterism wouldn’t matter so much if it were only reaching weepy journos whose careers started in the Reagan administration. But the toxic runoff from CJR and Nieman’s form of unpaid PR is poisoning the minds of 19-year-olds."
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2014/06/nostalgia-and-newspaper...
There was a long time, during the 1990s and early 00s, when it seemed it might be possible for newspapers to gain revenue by publishing on the web, but we now know that is impossible.
See also "This is why the news media is dying: global online ad revenue is $40 billion"
Combine that with “Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising“.
That leaves at most $25 billion for every content site in the world. Pathetic. Consider that television advertising in the USA is $160 billion a year.
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/this-is-why-the-news-me...
Again, my comments are more about how people actually use the web, rather than how they should use the web.
Which is why I addressed each of your points, before adding a new point.
> whereas when you write: "But is that really what we want to be supporting?"
In this case, I was adding a new point.
People DO go back and engage with content more than once. The assertion that people don't do that is wrong. Your reply alone is evidence of that.
The additional point I was attempting to make is that bad content is "one and done." Not only does bad content leave the reader unmoved, it is quickly forgotten, usually anonymous, and does nothing to build a relationship with the reader.
I'm not sure why you bring up newspapers. 1/3rd of a cent for a newspaper article "view" is in no way sustainable.
As for newspapers: today's Sydney Mornig Herald is a few dozen pages, with multiple articles per page. Let's call that 100 articles (current affairs, technology, finance, sports). It costs about a dollar per day. So each article is worth about a cent, for a paper newspaper delivered to your house.
The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.
Of course I would prefer to spend my money on a non-Murdoch paper. But that gets into politics rather than economics.
> The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.
That demonstrates perfectly how the micropayment model is fundamentally different than the subscription model.
The assumption with micropayments is that you're paying only for what you view – not for everything the website produces.
With a subscription, you're paying for everything, whether or not your read it.
Say you 10 read articles in the paper each day. That works out to $0.10 an article, not $.01 an article, if you're being charged just for what you read. A huge difference. $0.10 would possibly be sustainable for micropayments, especially if you guaranteed the publisher a minimum payment each month. 1/3rd of a cent is simply out of the realm of reality – unless you're agreeing to pay, in advance, for all of the articles they produce. In which case, I don't think you're talking about micropayments anymore.
Thus $0.01/article is still a fair pricing.
I would like to see the the empirical support for this.
Indicated by data collected from advertisers, internet content consumption is driven largely through social media platforms and mobile direct messaging. Shareaholic's report from the beginning of this year [1] indicates Facebook drives a quarter of hits to sites.
Social platforms and mobile applications thrive on new content. If people are getting to their content through social / mobile apps, and those places maintain eyeshare by presenting fresh, new stuff, it would lead that those platforms de-emphasize old content, not pushing users to return to it.
https://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-01-...
This is a lofty goal. Very little on The Web comes within shooting distance of it. What's more, it has little to do with the fact that paying for access to soft copies of material is -unfortunately- [0] quite a bit different than paying for hard copies of the same thing.
> > Nobody does that with web articles.
> Have you never referred back to the same web resource?
Unless it's a reference manual or similar such thing, almost never. Even the issues of SciAm that I did save were saved for the sections that could be used as reference manuals. Frankly, I'm not one for sentiment. :)
> Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later...
I've emailed the URL to an article to myself to read later because I was either
* too busy with another task at the time to read it, but it looked like it was related to another one of my projects
* on a smartphone, which is often terrible for reading idea-heavy material
[0] I say "unfortunately", because it seems that "most" people don't understand how to save complete copies of online resources to their local machine.
If quality is the same, that is exactly what will happen. You are already using software, iphones and TVs built in 3rd world countries for $5 a day.
Any evidence supporting your statement? Or is it just pure anecdote. To counter your point: there is a long list of writers with accolades in writing (in English) who are not native speakers.
There are people who are just poor at language, native or learned. Also, there's a class of errors that only exists among 'native speakers', the most grating to me, is "would of"
its completely incomprehensible.
With love,
Your non English speaking 3rd world citizen.
I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.
I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else
Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French (Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like in the US.
If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.
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.
This is the same fallacy that content providers make with piracy; you can't just multiply the number of pirates by the cost of the item to see how much money you 'lost' to piracy. You will always get more viewers/readers/users when something is free.
I don't believe this has been established yet. Sure there are lots of people who won't even give up their email address and they run AdBlock and they whine everytime an article to the WSJ or NYTimes is linked to on HN.
But that preference for "free" information is being proven unsustainable as we type. And Apple's moves are going to make it that more obvious. And like Netflix which showed piracy was a service problem not a content problem, so is written text on the Internet.
Imagine there was a service that you could pay $25 a year for, that in exchange for your $25 a year, would take all annoying ads off every page of every website you cared about to read. Think about that. And if that $25 got distributed, a third of a cent at a time, to every web site that participated in this, and you read their articles, that money flowed to them, for providing the content you wanted to read? It changes the dynamic, it changes the parameters of A/B testing, and I suspect that a large chunk of the 40 million AdBlock+ users would sign up for it. A web site with a million of those page views a day, would bring in $90,000 a month.
Piracy, and articles on the web, is a mismatch between what the content provider thinks something is worth, and what something is really worth. If you artifically price it above what people think it is worth, you get piracy. If you provide a way for market dynamics to price it and capture the value you can see what it is really worth.
So rather an author saying "This article is worth $10,000" you throw out that article into a networked system which has millions of "small" votes, all articles compete for votes based on their value to the community. Value wins.
And like Netflix where a movie that is a dog may not make any more revenue by being part of the instant catalog, articles that aren't actually valuable won't suddenly have value by participating in this market. Conversely, articles that do have value, will automatically do very well financially.
And here is the problem. Content creators are still finding out painfully that what they create isn't worth what they believe it to be. Welcome to price discovery!
But if you've been watching this develop as long as I have its really fascinating to see how these markets emerge.
But what happens if it turns out that an insufficient minority are willing to pay for content to make businesses like the NYT and other publishers viable businesses (or at least viable at their current scale in their current incarnation)?
My current thinking is that if they were to stop writing, people would just get their news from elsewhere, and other publishers would gladly fill their shoes.
What are your thoughts around that? If enough people keep rejecting approaches to payment models (indicating they are not willing to pay), will we simply see the publisher space continue to shrink/degrade until it reaches equilibrium with the revenue they can manage to eek out?
I think about it slightly differently. If you ask the question "Will all the news organizations and publishers go out of business?" And the answer is obvious, no they won't.
The reason they won't is because there is a demand for content and the only people left standing will be the ones who can deliver content in a way that pays their own bills. Will the NYTimes go out of business? Perhaps.
This is the fallacy in a nutshell : "My current thinking is that if they were to stop writing, people would just get their news from elsewhere, and other publishers would gladly fill their shoes."
Nobody will commit finanical suicide to serve a market. They have to believe that there is a way to make money at it, so the only way "other publishers" jump into the market is if they can do so without losing their shirts.
What we're observing is the death of the "put up some content and slap some ads on it" way of making money. That it has worked this long has been very impressive as there is very little barrier to entry, but the commons is so thoroughly stomped upon with blog spam and content farms is finally killing it. Having service providers listen to their users and allow them to disable ads, puts the final nail in that coffin. Is it no wonder they scream loudly?
The vote is being called as they say, "Either put up with ads, or pay for your content."
The challenge though is how to negotiate what the content is worth? How do you make a market so that people can actually implement that choice over a wide range of pricing so that the market collectively they can arrive at a price?
It is something I thought Bitcoin like systems might help with, but any microtransaction system if it has low enough friction would work. Publishers could tweak the price of page views, readers could read or not read the content provided. Prices would float up to equilibrium and people will be able to once again reason about what an article is worth, whether it was written by a hack in a third world country or written by someone with an established reputation for quality.
The existing market is collapsing, and in its place a new market will emerge because people really do like reading stuff. And enough people like it to make it into a market. Capturing that value which was learned back in Ben Franklin's days for what became newspapers, will be relearned given the channels and technology we have today. Its cost structure will be different, I would hope more of the value would flow through to the authors but one can never predict these things. Music is in the middle of the same process. But the music industry won't cease to exist, but it could very easily transform into something we would not recognize.
There are other high quality music outlets for people to choose and they are choosing them instead. C'est la vie. The same could happen to writing on the web, or something else could happen. You don't know until you run the experiment. But it is possible that people will not be interested enough to either put up with ads or pay per view (in whatever form) for readable content on the web.
There is the issue of location (i.e. you have to live in or near a big city to be able to go to an orchestra), but that is a consequence of the physical world (you need to be close to something to visit it, and for niche things like an orchestra, there will only be enough people to support it in a big city). This isn't the case on the internet - if your worldwide market is small, you can still reach them wherever they are.
I, too, have thought about a system like what you describe ($25 a year, distributed to each thing you visit). However, there are some issues.
1) You say 1/3 of a cent per visit... what happens after you visit 7,500 sites in the year? Where does the money come from at that point?
2) Say that instead of a 1/3 per year fee, you just take the whole $25 and divide it by the number of sites I visited...so if I visited only 5 sites in the year, they each would get $5, but if I visited 25,000 they would each only get 1/10 a penny. The question then becomes, how much is a reasonable amount to charge per year, if we are going to charge the same rate to everyone? Should someone who consumes much more pay more, or is it a flat rate?
3) No matter your system, there are going to be issues of content. Does a click-baity article that takes 10 seconds to read cost the same as a 10 page, in depth and well researched, article? You are going to incentivize people to make cheap and quick content, since you are not rewarded for anything besides clicks.
I also think your analysis of piracy being a result of pricing something above what it is worth to be a bit of a stretch; no matter what something is worth, if you offer the same thing to me for free, I will take the free.
To give an example: Suppose I was selling $10 bills for $10, and the guy next to me was giving away $10 bills. Everyone will obviously take the free $10 bills from the guy next to me - that doesn't mean I was selling the $10 bills for more than they were worth, it just means that people will always choose to pay less for something no matter what it is worth.
1) Something of a red herring, my VOIP provider starts sending me emails when by balance drops below $20. But it works well in terms of periodically topping up the balance.
2) For markets to work it is essential for them to reward individually. A basic income for authors would simply raise the noise level, an income for "quality" authors based on readership encourages an increase in signal level.
3) Perhaps we could use the phone call method, and accrue fractions of a penny the longer you stay on a page. I agree that you would want to be able to express a desire for less click baity and more useful articles, the mechanism for that isn't as clear.
On the whole piracy thing, I presume you were around when NetFlix streaming knocked the winds out of torrent streaming? It didn't do it because it disable the torrent protocol, it did it because people who had been pirating content switched to Netflix because it was a better service experience at a price they were willing to pay. That is a very very important lesson for content providers. Their pricing authority is extremely limited in a high tech world.
I like your story but we both know that the guy next to you would quickly be out of free $10 bills, and then he would have to go to the bank and give them some money for another stack to give away, and eventually, like content providers today, would get tired of giving away $10 bills to people. And eventually he would run out of the funds as well.
The basic economics of a functioning market are that suppliers try to get as much as they can for their product and buyers try to pay as little as they can. The process for creating the process creates a price floor, below which nobody makes the product because they go broke doing so. Between that sad place, and people paying way more for a product than it costs to produce, lives the market economy.
Historically people have argued that information flies in the face of this view of the world, after all if I can produce infinite supply of something (copies) shouldn't the price go to zero? And yet it doesn't. I've spend about 20 years looking at how information gains and loses value, and how people can capture that value in a transaction. Google, for example. doesn't sell the eyeballs of a person to an advertiser, they sell the eyeballs of a person who just asked a question about the product that advertiser sells. Google is selling the information about searcher intent and that is very valuable indeed.
There is a fun experiment you can run which can show you information pricing in action.
Set up a chessboard at some distance removed with the white queen on a certain square. At a nearby table, offer to pay someone $2 to go to the far off chess board and come back and report the position of the queen. As soon as its reported the queen is moved to a new position. Now an entrepreneur can walk down to the chess board and on his way back sell the information to someone coming the other way, walking less and getting a fraction of the value. A really creative entrepreneur can set up a web cam that watches the board and they sit there 10 yards from the source table repeatedly selling the new positions as they come in. In that respect they are doing what high frequency traders do, applying technology to achieve an information advantage which is then convertible into revenue.
Understanding how information develops value will illuminate the strategies that will capture that value. As more and more people figure this stuff out we will see more things like flattr.com and other services. For a long time I've been expecting a curation service to appear which does what an executive secretary might do for a busy executive, pull the the top 10 or 15 best articles describing that news of the day or the area of interest, and making those easily consumable on the go. Capturing the value of the information curated, versus a giant pool of information one is forced to forage through to get to the good bits.
Except that content filtering isn't about the creation of ad-free public spaces, but rather ad-free private spaces. There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session.
The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want; the server, of course, is free to try to determine whether I'm actually viewing its ads or not, and may refuse to serve my requests if it chooses.
As for micropayments, I love the idea but people in general seem to be extremely resistant to them. For one thing, they definitely don't want unbounded monthly charges. That could be solved by having a set amount of money, divided up by the sites one visits—but the service that does that would be a privacy nightmare.
The ad is arguably part of the content, as it's what's paying for you to see it in the first place.
"The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want"
That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself. What if your company decided that you're not worth paying, but still wanted your work?
Contracts don't exist if nobody enforces them.
PS: Most of the content I enjoy is not ad supported. And ads aren't the only way to spread money around while creating value in an industry.
Remember that there is a camp who thinks that they can do what they wish with the data sent to their computer -including refusing to process said data-, and there is a camp who feels that one has a moral imperative to process all data sent by a website to one's computer.
These camps rarely see eye-to-eye.
There's a very reliable method of ensuring that one who labors and posts to The Internet gets paid: refuse to deliver the fruits of the labor to others prior to payment.
If camp #2 actually thought as you claim they do, they would advise all Internet-publishing laborers to eliminate the ad-blocking worry -and keep the dishonest among us honest- by putting their creations behind a paywall.
If your ad network delivers autoplay video with sound, it gets blocked. If your ad network delivers annoying animated graphics, it gets blocked. If your ad network delivers malware, it gets blocked.
If your ad network is The Deck, you are fine.
Part of the social contract is that your ad network shows me ads, not distractions and malware.
There is a lot of good content out there that is not ad-dependent. If all ad-dependent websites made a clear declaration that "you are not welcome, go somewhere else" that would solve my problem. Not theirs though...
NB: I strongly dislike advertising/tracking networks and paywalls.
Far more seriously: your statement is a non sequitur.
Perfectly reasonable, then you stop working/creating content and find another job. Capitalism is selfish.
Myself, and the server, whose right to refuse to serve me I explicitly recognised.
Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of $1-$2-$10. These are the models that work.
It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel.
It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or any other platform. It's what's built into your brain. "Pay as you go" is incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers.
I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.
This is wildly incorrect. $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games[1]. The key to their success was bulk purchases of intermediary "currency" that frees players from the mental energy of thinking about actual money (its a sunk cost because the currency can't be redeemed).
[1] Distaste for social games and the business model does not invalidate the financial success of their implementation of micropayments. Note: I started a micropayments company.
Charging $10 is accepted by the paying consumers, being nickel-and-dimed isn't. Even in the "micropayment" games.
That's it right there. That's the "what". :)
Paying 0.01 cents to someone is quite different from paying $5 to that same someone that gets delivered in tiny portions over some span of time.
In the first case, you're out a tiny fraction of a cent. In the second case, you're out $5.
Because (AIUI) the money movement system makes it prohibitively expensive to move fractions of cents around, micropayments don't happen.
Puts $5 each month into a bucket, and then each time you visit a site you pay a few cents in order to have an ad-free experience.
In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model is relevant to web content. I can't set up a pain/pleasure response in readers and condition a tiny fraction of them to pay vast sums after 10 to 50 hours of engagement. That's not an option in journalism.
(Not that this has stopped the FT from trying it: $1 for a one-month trial, $480 a year for a subscription. I wonder how good the conversion rates are?)
I (and it appears a significant number of others) ended up paying for the Economist - the 10 articles free / month was conditioning enough.
Web content and gaming aren't remotely the same. Micropayments in gaming is almost akin to gambling for many games. Then there's the whole "pay to win" aspect, and "pay to play" aspect where you have points or stamina that gets eaten/spent as you play. When it reaches zero, you need to wait hours for it to recharge, or pay to recharge.
Web content is like buying a magazine in a store, or a newspaper from a gas station. It's nothing like mobile gaming.
I set up an account, put some money in it, set a $20 monthly limit, hook it up to soundcloud and github, and then every time I "like" a song or "star" a repo it adds them to that month's list. At the end of the month it divides the $20 between everything I enjoyed most that month.
A similar system would probably work for ALL web content. But as always this gives the control directly to the consumer and big companies don't like that at all.
With the obvious proviso that it would need to be simple enough for everyone to set up in order to get the traction necessary to be useful. Simple enough for everyone means one button with a single 'Yes please' screen (eg OAuth). Anything more complex than that is destined to fail.
And similarly, how do you prevent fraud? WAP was a walled garden experience; if I can send money to any site on the Internet by clicking a button, what's to stop a malware author from using their malware to send lots of clicks (and thus money) to a site they run?
Technically, micropayments aren't a difficult problem to implement. The business rules around financial transactions (which exist for good reasons) often present an intractable conflict with what would be a viable user experience.
Already happening with pay-pr-click ads etc.
Micropayments would be a different story since the money would be coming out of individuals' pockets.
Now, you can remove the friction by devising some automated system that pays sites some amount of money based on how long you spend there, but then you have to build an entire fraud-detection system to make sure people don't try to game the system and take more money than they are owed. This would add significant transaction costs -- and these costs would be high enough that very small transactions would no longer make sense to process. Keep going down this road and you'll eventually realize that you're just another credit card payment processor and have a similar cost structure. Bitcoin solves none of this, btw - you still want to make sure whatever micropayment scheme you use doesn't hand over your Bitcoin to a fraudster.
So now we're back at the user being the "filter" for good vs. bad transactions by making them explicitly authorize those transactions. And the friction problem you describe is very real: something like 90% of buy flows are abandoned at the credit card entry page. Micropayments are an intractable problem in my mind; they would solve a lot of business model problems but I don't know that they're very attractive to consumers.
I'm interested in this statistic, do you have a source?
Are you saying that 90% of all buy flows are abandoned at the payment stage while x% are abandoned at another stage and <10% are completed or are you saying that 90% of all abandoned buy flows were terminated at this stage? In case of the latter it seems like knowing what percent of all buy flows become abandoned would be relevant to your point.
Also, was this data collected from one vendor/industry or from multiple sources? I'm also curious if the study examined cases where the "pay now" screen already had the customer's payment information (e.g. for a pre-existing customer).
I bought some electronics today; I ended up almost placing an order at three different distributors until I found the one I wanted.
It varies quite a lot based on how your individual buy flow is set up. I personally prefer to be up-front about pricing with people; it skews your metrics if you make them get to the credit card entry page just to see a price. Regardless, if we're talking a SaaS buy flow the conversion rates are usually far worse: your best case scenario is that 3% of customers who sign up for a free trial will convert.
Honestly, this is a case where A/B testing helps. Build both buy flows, measure the outcomes you care about, and go with the one that produces the result you're looking for. This assumes you have sufficient volume for A/B testing: if you don't, you shouldn't be focusing on optimizing your buy flow, you should be focusing on traffic acquisition :)
Such scheme being HTTPS? Unless you are speaking about "stolen content" which basically boils down to the fact that copy costs nothing and nothing in the world will solve this.
When texting started it was almost universally $.25 or $.10 or so per text. One would definitely be aware of that fact when communicating with friends but you get over it because it's useful.
Wait I have another example, $0.99 songs via iTunes. That was the model that created the largest music retailer in the world from whole cloth.
It's not that complicated, all it would take is for someone (gee I wonder who) to standardize the price (or price tiers) and have a quick modal OK to continue on to the article for one credit, or equivalent.
A $0.99 song from itunes isn't a micropayment. It's a dollar paid for a music track you are likely to listen to over and over. Additionally, you knew what you were buying because you heard the music for free on the radio or in a club.
Journalistic work doesn't fit the iTunes model. News and blog posts tend to be fire and forget. Nobody will pay $1 up front, and once they've consumed the content once, they no longer need to pay for it.
When texting started, it was free until the phone companies figured out that my wife and spent more time texting for free than we did talking for money. When I'd be on the road, we texted until our thumbs had callouses. Imagine our disappointment when Verizon (and everyone else) started charging for it. (Caveats: U. S. on Verizon using pay-as-you-go phones, and at least 12 years ago.)
In my opinion iTunes is an outlier due to several factors: 1. The tie-in with the hardware (Apple iPod), 2. High-profile discussion about piracy and "punishment" avenues that were being discussed prominently, and 3. Steve Jobs working in the background to capitalize on 1 & 2 for very favorable terms with record labels enabling the price point (which was again maneuvered by Tim Cook with iTunes Music getting good deals for the new service).
You couldn't just buy one track before. Now you can for $.99. You couldn't send a text message at all before.
Try $.10 per email and see what traction that gets.
The market, like all markets, is defined by people's willingness to pay and their next best alternative. Make the transaction cheap and nearly frictionless and it might be the choice with the highest utility.
So... pretty much every web paywall I've ever encountered. Where's my amazon 1-click for news website paywalls? Several of which I encounter using this very site?
I don't want to create an account, subscribe, save my details, unsubscribe from services I no longer use, etc. for each individual website.
You don't want to be deciding whether to pay on every little pageview.
I agree with the above, but disagree that this makes micropayments for online content a futile venture. There are a couple ways that come to mind to solve the mental fatigue issue:
1. Automate all the payments
2. Automate all the payments w/ a cap
3. Automate payments from whitelisted domains
4. Don't automate payments, but ask to whitelist new domains (similar to: "remember me").
These could all just be user preferences, just as described in the post.
The other three all fall on the sword of "should I pay $0.05 for this mouse click?". If the user ever has to ask himself that question, the game is up.
The whole thing basically heads face first into net neutrality territory.
That said, back during for pay phone services the service got paid by the telco, and then the telco added the cost to the callers bill.
So should perhaps my ISP bill me for my Netflix viewing, rather than me paying Netflix directly?
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
Amazon's recently come up with $10/mo all-you-can-eat book purchase plan.
Think about it this way. Businesses need stable, predictable income. If they depend on "micropayments," then they would depend on producing consistently high quality articles. I am a subscriber to the New Yorker. They have some of the best writing out there -- but some of it is just not that good, in my opinion. And yet, I still pay for it.
A subscriber is willing to forgive bad content -- and still give you money. You're able to build a relationship, and ask for the money once (a year), not constantly.
$70 * 1,000 subscribers = $70k a year. Plenty to support the livelihood of a good writer.
How many "micropayments" would they need? What if they struck out a few months in a row?
They'd have to find another job.
As a new visitor I might click the flattr/contributor button (equivalent to "+1"), then when reviewing a statement I realise that I am visiting your site a lot, so switch to subscription instead.
The core issue is people recognising the value of good journalism or tech writing in terms of dollars, and being willing to pay for stuff that is worthwhile. After that the problem is only removing "friction" in getting a payment to the publisher.
Related in a way: How people can easily waste "energy" because it takes no "mental energy" to do so. Each time you turn on a light or decide to leave a light on (or even drive to a store) you are not confronted with "going to drugstore, cost 1.23, proceed?". ".10 to turn light on for 1 hour, proceed?" The cost is hidden and given to you in bulk. You just have to decide generally that spending $35 per week for gas is "worth it". (Along with other fixed type expenses).
It's interesting that the opposite of netflix was the video store, even with a monthly plan and no cost per DVD. You would have to get to the store, review the available movies, and then decide which one to rent. All along knowing that if you got home and didn't like the movie, you'd have to trek back to the video store and repeat the process. In that case, and even assuming the cost was $9.99 per month, you are closer to having a "cost" and energy (physical and mental) than you do on netflix.
On netflix the mental energy requirement is there as well but not the same as a video store obviously. You still have to cue up the movie, watch some of it, and then decide when to stop watching (3 minutes in, 20 minutes in etc/) if it doesn't appear to be what you like. This is after spending some thought to what you want to watch in the first place.
Which brings me to my point. One of the things that I have learned in business is to not make people have to think, that is to make it easy for them to make a decision. Instead of giving them 20 choices only give them 3 or 5 choices. People I have found, at least with things that I have sold, like this a great deal.
As a counter example to what you say, there are plenty of free to play games on mobile that have small in app purchases.
It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(
If you frame it that way, the problem isn't how can people charge for their passion, but how can we get people decent working conditions so that they can have a meaningful and rich life outside of work?
But knowing the internet, people will claim up and down that it doesn't have any value, while still using it. And then call the person greedy for wanting to feed their family.
Like Taylor Swift on Spotify.
> Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.
And like I said, not everyone is lucky enough to where they can give away a lot of their labor.
Every 'free' github repository is an ad/tie-in for their payed services. If you are not paying for something, it's because you are the product.
For one thing, I'm talking about the people that are posting things on Github, and Github itself is just an example. You can replace it with "a personal website on a server in your living room" if you prefer, although I suppose that's just an ad for your ISP's services?
Secondly, you are not the product. You are never the product, unless you live in a country where slavery is still legal. "Inclusion of text and image content in HTML sent to you" is the product Facebook et. al. are selling, but that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
Which you pay for. Otherwise, your information, and activities on the website belong to someone else.
It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient virtual-reality strip mall.
We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire. Infrastructure and upkeep costs are why ISPs are actual businesses. The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution, which spreads costs much more evenly while decreasing latency by bringing data closer to edges of the network. You support Wikipedia-over-IPFS by flipping a switch in your settings to help host it, rather than doling out a handful of USD to the incessant baleful banners of Jimmy Wales' face.
Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware.
We already pay for [network connectivity].
Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of social welfare].
Indeed, those dirty reds and their communist system of... voluntary patronage.
But, then again, maybe you're right on UBI. It has been espoused by known communists like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and F.A. von Hayek.
In fact, it is completely devoid of meaning. You're going to have to make an actual case, rather than just engage in red-baiting.
The latter can easily be defrayed with appropriate network technologies, which is along the lines of the original intent of the Web as a platform for sharing information; the former requires some change in how we fund creative work.
I think it's productive to address them separately, as their relative scales are vastly different for digital objects compared to physical ones. Since the incremental costs of producing additional copies of physical objects are so high, it's easy to absorb design costs into the price paid for each copy, but for digital objects this makes much less sense.
I am advocating a humanitarian system of patronage of the arts, yes. I think it's worthwhile to have faith in the ability of people to self-actualize when their basic needs are met, and I'm hoping we can thereby support creative endeavors of modest scale, like writing articles for the Web. A coercive system like communism has been shown to not work for various reasons, but socialist basic income on top of a relatively free market seems viable.
That instead of having the people who are consuming and enjoying the content pay for it, that the entire economic system needs to be overhauled.
I'm not opposed to UBI, but that is clearly not the solution to the problem here, especially because there is no way in hell that UBI will be even close to reality in most nations, let alone the US.
As soon as I see random site asking for money before I even see a content, I just close the page and find another with roughly the same content. Just ask nicely and maybe I'll disable adblock or donate if I feel like the content was worth it.
No you won't. You'll think, "Maybe I'll do it tomorrow," or, "You know, I didn't really enjoy it that much," as you go back to the site every day.
Your statement is just like the people who put a rating for one star on an app, and say, "I'll change it after I've used it if I like it," or, "One Star until Feature X is implemented," when Feature X was never promised as part of the app. And then when the change is made, the rating is never changed.
Proposed micro transaction model won't make me pay for it anyway. Why someone feels entitled to my money, just because they facerolled their keyboard for a half an hour? Sometimes it feels like authors should actually pay me for reading/installing that pile of garbage they call "content".
They're not the ones feeling entitled. You read their content. You used the product of their labor. Isn't the entire basis of Capitalism that you pay for the product of other people's labor?
"Sometimes it feels like authors should actually pay me for reading/installing that pile of garbage they call "content"."
And yet, you're still reading it.
Interesting example. I have Wikipedia as a local database on my own secondary storage.
As long as there are mirrors of the data dumps, I only occasionally need an internetwork. (To download data dumps.)
That has basically been the dream of every exec out there since the .com boom.
Cory Doctorow touch on this: https://vimeo.com/10457689
That's definitely what we're going to have here. Voluntary sponsorship relies on communism which, supposedly, does not work ^TM.
Universal Income would be fantastic but we're not there yet.
We need something in the interim, because conservative values will never allow for a universal income.
You're paying for that byte to get from Point A to Point B. You haven't paid for the creation of that byte, though.
"The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution"
Again, that helps with the cost of sending that byte somewhere. It does absolutely nothing for the cost of creating that byte (writing the article, drawing the cartoon, creating the song, etc) in the first place.
"Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware."
Are they? I mean, why do you feel entitled to read someone's content without paying for it?
I don't know why you were downmodded but this is absolutely correct. Just because I bought a car and paid for its gas doesn't mean when I get to the theater, the movie should be free.
Better yet, it's like buying a TV then expecting all the stations, including pay-per-view channels to be free. You bought the TV, not the content that gets displayed on the TV. You can watch the free channels but guess what pays for those free channels? Yep, ads. Ads subsidize (pays for) your free content. That content isn't actually free at all, the ad companies paid for it. And they're allowing you to see it in exchange for seeing their ad.
> Are they? I mean, why do you feel entitled to read someone's content without paying for it?
Amen. Why is everyone suddenly so entitled? Makes my skin crawl to see people so naive about how the world works.
Because nobody likes to talk about actually creating things. They feel like everything should be free, because costs of replication are low.
While the status code is a good place to start, you really need Accept-Monetization and the corresponding Content-Monetization headers to fill out the picture. We propose these to work the same way that Accept-Language and Content-Language headers work. Essentially the user passes along the monetization methods they allow, and when there's a mismatch on the server, a 402 error occurs...along with instructions on how to fix that.
The ideal system would allow multiple ways to pay for content, and would include advertising as a "free" option.
It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments, but they still have your money.
I don't like the way other cellphone bills work. My previous cell phones were AT&T and Sprint, and they were awful enough for me to permanently swear off of them. Maybe more people should quit trying to bend over backwards to convince their cell carrier to 'allow' them to have an iPhone.
Not only is it $35/mo, but I can top-up the account for several months at a time, so that I simply don't have to worry about it.
My one complaint is that my provider still "warns" me every month that my plan is about to expire, even if there are multiple pre-paid months to go. They really need to fix that.
A lot of people do, yes.
No, because i know what to expect from different newspapers and in the very very rare cases where i buy them, i do that only after skimming the front and relevant pages.
>Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on the app store and you stop using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your need?
Yes, all the time.
What's your point?
Perhaps optional refunds can be baked into the protocol, so content providers can decide if they give refunds, and users can decide if a purchase is worth the risk.
Reputation is what counts and you can see this on Amazon and ebay where a poor rep means no future earnings. Good rep means higher potential future earnings.
IF someone rips you off you have multiple forums in which to vent your frustration and lower the seller's potential future earnings. That's a lot of power. That's more power than most corporations and countries have when they over-pay for a costly piece of shit system. Hell this is more power than you have when it comes to taxes! When your tax dollars are misspent there's absolutely no chance for a refund and you have an election every 4 years but you ain't getting a dollar back.
Any mircropayment protocol design should take this into account.
UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to proceeding with the use case?
To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry. Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists, that’s another story.
The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its physically parts. It will have many solutions.
I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet at the moment.
My first concern is the lack of (popular) payment providers that enable microtransactions. If you want to pay $0.15 for a web page, and there's a flat 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee on every transaction, the model doesn't work.
Second concern is using primarily commercial payment providers nothing to break the oligopolies created by payment gateways, which is what makes these transaction fees so high in the first place. I would love to see cryptocurrency support baked into any implementation of browser payments, as microtransactions and user freedom are both well supported.
Global-shared-ledger cryptocurrencies aren't suitable for this case: a global record of every web page the world views is far too huge a quantity of data.
The micropayments protocol for cryptocurrencies doesn't really cover the use case of using many website, unless you have a trusted 3rd party to accumulate the micropayments.
But I will only pay for ad-free content.
Remember how cable TV used to have that promise? You pay for your TV and you don't have ads. I remember that back in the day my cable provider would broadcast listings of today's programming schedule to cover up ads in the source transmission. Now you pay and you watch ads. If we do pay for websites, I hope we pay for no ads.
Google Ads is the embodiment of leveling that relationship now, and seeing that the conversation has shifted towards supporting creative processes which make the web great.- we need this. We just don't need Google Ads or ads in general to be the medium for transfer.
The quantity of available good content created every day in many areas from internet posts to music far outweighs anyone's ability to consume them. We're throwing away 99% or more of it anyways, so if changing economics would make half of the content producers stop producing content, it's not a big deal for the total market. The song from a local artist with 5000 listens is as good as the hit with 5000000 listens, and it's not going to get there only because all the attention is already busy; if the producers of that hit wouldn't distribute because of economic reasons... well, the other song would suddenly get the same listeners, that's it.
A decrease in available content is a bad thing, but just a bit bad - if a reasonable model works out, it would be great, but if not, then "no ads, no payment, less content - if you want, then make it, you might get some donations, but it's not a business" will be a natural outcome that's actually not that bad for most people. Well, except the current crop of web-content-manufacturing companies - but the whole cause of this debacle is that people don't value them nearly as much as they would like to be valued.
I do, in fact, pay for a voluntary subscription to a web site that is free to use, ad-free even without ad-blockers, and entirely donation-supported.
But that's pretty much the only thing I pay for on the entire web. All other sites fall into one or more of several categories. (A) They don't need my money to continue operating as usual. (B) I wouldn't care all that much if they disappeared from the web. (C) The effort of paying makes payments worthwhile only for amounts greater than I am willing to spend. (D) I am not confident that any payment I might make would specifically support something that I like, and not things that I do not like. (E) My budget for frivolous spending has already been pre-empted by higher-priority spending this month.
The more likely result is the cost of providing a service over the internet continues to constantly implode; if the independent food blogger is motivated enough to spend $5/mo for internet "fame" there are numerous providers today who will take money in exchange for hosting. There may be a revolution in web design; a "cool looking complicated" web page might cost 5 megs of javascript and graphics and that might cost a blogger $5/mo if less than 1000 visit per month, but if the blogger gets famous for actual content (as opposed to web design) then once the blogger hits the 1M visits per month big leagues, shrinking the page from 5M to 5K might save the blogger a factor of a thousand in hosting costs. I don't think web designers will be happy about this; then again they won't be paying the bills. This will lead to something like the ancient "adobe flash" effect where the fancier a web page is designed and appears, the less likely it is to contain useful content, so it can be skipped, and the less complicated a page looks, the better the content it serves.
Another way the economics of the model would work is a trivial extension that probes all links at rendering time and if the link comes up as payment required the link is eaten. Currently I have to remember to ignore NYT links; in the future with the new extension I won't even see NYT links.
Another model that may develop is content that sellers want, like glowing "independent" reviews of a restaurant, might go away (relatively speaking) in a consumer oriented internet. This works on all levels from very small to very large, the advertisers pay for Gawker no matter if I look at it or not, given supposed levels of click fraud. Without the advertisers, if we don't look at Gawker it simply goes away. Rephrased and simplified, now you can push something no one likes except the advertisers if the advertisers pay for it, but in a future internet economy if you push something no one likes, you'd better be prepared to pay for it by yourself. That might have interesting socioeconomic class issues WRT widening income inequality; all billionaires will have blogs, no poor people will, and a way to filter college applications to make sure the "right" people are let in would be to require blog submission instead of traditional essay submission or the other socioeconomic filters we use now like extracurriculars or disaster tourism, etc.
This is the most important point you're making.
1. Snack food is very highly consistent. As with other mass-market goods, it's entirely homogeneous. You know precisely what you're getting. Information goods are virtually by definition not homogeneous. Virtually all successful sales models for information goods are based on some level of subscription or branding (frequently by author, venue, or publisher/publication, particularly periodicals).
2. The typical vending-maching payment mechanism has no extended-tail risk. Deposit a few coins or bills, receive your product (yes, I suppose there are debit/credit based vending systems). Every time I make a debit or credit card payment, particularly online, I'm creating a risk of future account fraud. That's something I weigh heavily, have experienced in the past, and quite simply do not consider worth any putative convenience benefit. Paying cash is a very reliable stop-loss risk mitigation strategy.
3. Privacy. Particularly for information goods, leaving a perpetual trail that I specifically paid for specific items of content is ... highly unappealing. I don't pay for my physical books with credit (or use "loyalty", a/k/a Snoop Card programs). It's why I don't and won't use Kindle or similar apps (I do read eBooks, but open, untracked formats, on other devices).
Oh, and I really don't buy much from vending machines. Prefer fresh foods or a good street vendor if I can find one.
If only apps were that way. "I feel a visceral need for a new app, and if I don't get it somebody is going to get hurt!"
I would pay .02$ for displaying a news page (it's is still 4 times more than what advertisers give to publishers) and probably everyone would - but disrupting trillion ad business is not that easy.
I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100% of the 402 payment?
What a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has ever downloaded something knows how confusing and difficult it is to press the right button (instead of some ad or virus or whatever). The idea that one single click could reveal my identity to the site owner AND wire my money to them is truly frightening.
For example I want to see car ads, movie trailers, new gadgets and I want to see what's on sale at grocery and hardware stores with 10 miles of the zip code I give it. No video, no animation, no tracking, no targeting, no fucking Taboola. And if an ad pisses me off I want a "never show me ads from this company again" button.
What if you flipped the burden to online commerce providers?
I'm not crazy about the bitcoin bandwagon, but this seems like a good entry point for distribution. Multiple providers other than stripe can deposit to the same bitcoin address stored in your browser, and then that bitcoin address is paid out according to the sites you visited that had "opted in" to the revenue sharing.
Some of us can not use Paypal (and are not being told by paypal as to why after being banned) so have to use bitcoin, bank transfers, prepaid cards and cash for day to day transactions.
all centralized companies that do restrict access to their systems for all sorts of reasons (often not shared with the person being blocked)
all are "pull" methods where your account can be charged in an unauthorized manner
bitcoin, prepaid cards (such as paysafecard), cash and bank transfers are "push" methods giving the owner more control and cheaper fees for that manner
Not sure how practical paypal would be if you only want to spend a few cents (or more interestingly fractions of a cent!)
You can also get prepaid Visa/MasterCards, incidentally. No trackable information required.
I actually have been thinking about this for some time and while there are many things to consider, this is a problem Mozilla could get behind. My assumption about them is still unsubstantiated, but given enough research, it is a solution that is in serious need.
I might do a write up on my detailed thoughts on the subject.
When web advertisements finally die off, I imagine subscribing to one or two news websites, maybe the NY Times and a local site. Other than that, I'm not interested in paying for web content.
The funny thing is, the sites I'd be most likely to pay for don't have ads in the first place.
I really miss the days when people made websites and posted things on the web because they enjoyed it and were trying to be helpful, and not because they were out to make a buck on ad clicks. Quality has plummeted so far it's not even funny.
Though the best system will always be free primary content with paid "premium" content. That way if you enjoy the content of the webpage you can support them, but you aren't required to pay to figure out if you do enjoy it.
Ofcourse Facebook and Google would earn most of this money.
Do it the same way first month is the free trial..want to keep reading each month than pay the month subscription
Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? >_>
This is not a business model I want to support. I'm happy to pay for good content, but if the supposed "value" I would get from giving you money is not being annoyed and tracked then you'll never see a penny from me.
There are a few unicorns who have figured out how to have good free content, have no ads, and make money, like the Thrilling Adventure Hour, and Welcome to Nightvale podcasts. They get my money because their model is actually adding value with swag and live shows rather than making their content worse.
Anything that involves moving money and comes out of the valley is always US only for a long time.
The problems boil down to tax laws, money laundering laws and the fact that all banking is local. Moving money is just incredibly painful.