Show HN: Atri: an experiment in web economics
atri.me
atri.me
Most consumers of web content (>99%) don't care about this in any way. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I'm only mildly interested in exploring alternatives to the ad-supported web. I almost never see ads anyway.
You should be selling this as something that will give access to paywall content. That's it. Because that's the only possible thing that there is even a sliver of a market for. Recruit content providers (the bigger, the better), figure out how much they are currently making off paywall revenue, possibly sell at a loss to build a user base (and demonstrate traction to more content providers and possible investors).
Once you have a user base and demonstrated traction, allow future content providers (of any size and viewership) to join your "platform" and earn payouts based on viewership. Obviously, still target large, valuable content providers directly.
As the number of content providers grows, your value proposition grows.
As it is, you're charging $10/month for a service that offers less value than what most people get for free through AdBlock.
The real economics experiment is if people will pay more money for less value. The utility of "fixing the web" doesn't even come close to spanning the value deficit.
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
edit: To be clear, I like the idea, and I think something needs to be tried in order for something to work. These are just my initial skeptical criticisms.
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.
One of the things I think publishers probably want with stuff like this is an open standard for letting people hop over paywalls.
We'd be happy to cooperate with Atri or Blendle or anyone else on this. I think if companies give up on the fantasy of owning the entire distribution channel there is still a ton of other ways to build products that add massive value in this market.
There was a lot of learning that went on during that time. The biggest difference in implementation though was that In-a-Moon required sites to install JavaScript snippets, and we tracked at the site level. For Atri, we're bypassing sites and going straight to individuals by looking for Twitter handles.
That said, we think it usually works itself out automatically, based on attention.