Hacker News Reader

Comment by happybuy | Hacker News Reader

We've relatively recently launched a new adblocking app on the App Store (and Mac App Store) with a subscription based business model.

In our first year we've found many of the same learnings as this article and have written about our experiences; https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...

We believe that subscriptions - although currently going through an adjustment and acceptance period - are the future for apps that provide ongoing value.

For apps that don't provide ongoing value, then yes, it may be difficult to survive & one-off payments are probably the only feasible revenue model in those cases.

View on HN

It’s kind of weird to charge money for an ad blocking service. Instead of me giving $20 to the content owners by putting my eye balls/clicking on ads, I’m paying you $20 to remove the ads and the content owner gets $0. At least when the ad blocking is free, nobody makes money. But charging for adblocking is essentially stealing and I’m not sure how I feel about that...

We need some kind of internet-wide micropayment infrastructure that distributes a cent per website visited. Like the Spotify of the internet. I'd happily pay $10/month for such a service, with the proceeds going to Youtubers, Streamers, News outlets etc. Google or Facebook would seem in the perfect place to manage such a system, but they seem more intent on slinging ads.

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

People would spam and make junk content by the ton in order to catch some of that sweet web traffic money. Your eyeballs would be even more precious to the black hat SEOs.

Multiple implementations would be possible. Even begging me for 5c to read an article or watch a video would work. I would be able to make 200 such 'payments' per month.

Its simple aggregation - a payment of 5c to a Youtuber would be swallowed up by credit card fees. But aggregated with millions of other people and done monthly (against a $10/m subscription for the end user, where they get a certain number of credits to use), and it becomes a much larger transaction where the fees become negligible.

This is exactly what the Brave company is setting up.

New chromium-based but privacy-focused browser, also called Brave. You pledge a certain amount per month (this is opt-in). The time spent by all Brave users determines how much of that pool of cash is distributed to all of the sites that they visit.

See https://brave.com/ -- they have just released their beta and it's pretty amazing. Payments in the new beta are not yet live though.

Its a good idea - but its missing the killer feature which I think would be the ability to access certain news article (NYT etc) through micropayments. Right now it seems like giving money away for no recognition or reward.

If it requires installing something extra that you otherwise don’t need the mass market won’t join...

Also in general the masses probably will never see why to pay 10 bucks or whatever for quality content as they are happy being served the other stuff... i mean, ads wouldn’t be so successful if there weren’t people viewing the crap content they are placed in... even less being clicked on.

But there are thousands of people even responding to spam mails and sending money to some Nigerian Kings...

Wait. How about paying quality content from these. I mean, just telling them your brother has a million in the bank and they just need to pay 1000 to get it out and be rewarded with 10% etc... instead of nothing as usual, they get quality content! Ok after reading too much of that they won’t do it anymore. Selfdestructing Business.

Isn’t that what flattr is about?

In a world where the major advertising companies (Google & Facebook) respected users privacy and security I'd tend to agree with this assessment.

We do not live in such a world.

Without some form of counter-balance they will continue to erode what is previously acceptable behaviour re individual rights. Adblockers provide some of that counter-balance.

The other dirty secret of the largest 'free' adblocker services (other than some purely open-source options) is that many of them are funded via kickbacks from Google. Google pays such services to allow their ads to continue to be displayed. When users pay for a service it is clearer what the incentives are for the service's behaviour.

> It’s kind of weird to charge money for a security service. Instead of me giving $20 (and much more later on) to the malware authors by letting them steal my credit card numbers & personal information, I’m paying you $20 to remove the malware and their authors get $0. At least when malware protection is free, nobody makes money. But charging for malware protection is stealing from the malware authors and I’m not sure how I feel about that...

Fixed that for you!

> malware...

There's an easy way to fix that. Setup an ethical Ad company that serves ads without malware and responsible advertising.

But how to do that on a scalable and profitable manner is something else.

Ethical ads do exist. Look at Carbon or the (self-hosted) ads on Read The Docs.

The issue is those ethical ad networks don’t pay as much as the others because they actually screen their ads and a lot of the garbage ads (that keep the entire advertising industry afloat) wouldn’t make it past review.

As a result, rags like the Daily Mail and a lot of other major news sites simply wouldn’t be able to stay afloat (which frankly would not be a big loss - if your business can’t make money legitimately - without bad ads that is - then maybe it’s time to close down or rethink your business model?).

Stealing it would be if they block ads and show their own ads(as some blockers seem to do). Providing people who don’t want to see ads with a software that enables them to hide them is a valuable service of it’s own, and i don’t see what’s wrong with charging money for the significant development and ongoing blocklist management effort.

It’s the content providers that need to find ways to get paid for content and the users who need to understand that content needs someone to create it and these people need to make a living. That being said, a lot of content out there is low quality abd even written fir nothing but attracting search engines - creating traffic and views which get paid by advertisers. So there is a psrt of content and providers nobody will want to pay for and nobody will be missing if it’s gone. The people creating that stuff need to find a way to make a living off something that actually somebody wants and needs...

> We believe that subscriptions - although currently going through an adjustment and acceptance period - are the future for apps that provide ongoing value.

The real question is - how do you precisely quantify what value your app provides ?

You don't. And you don't need to. Your users are either willing to pay a recurring fee – or they're not. If not, you could try one-off fees. If people don't even pay that, your product is probably shit.

Yes on the pay as you go monthly / weekly fee. Cancel anytime. I am testing $7/week 7 days. If i get $0 paying then i'll test other prices or keep testing until i sink or swim! sink is $0 and swim is anything greater then $0. Cash is like oxygen for a start up. You can only hold your breath for so long.

People are willing to pay you $1 per day for an app?

I have to test. Its early. Its a tracker app. So if they want to get notifications then they'll have to pay for it. I will make it free for maybe 30 days when i launch it next week. Its a web app / subscription. Testing $5/week , $20/m $50/year OR $7/week, $25/m or $70/year. I'll keep jacking it up until people stop paying. Ideal would be $99/year $9/m.

Same question i had when building my app. Customer told me my app saves him a LOT of time and his time is very valuable and he was more then happy to pay for it. It depends on your market though.

>We believe that subscriptions - although currently going through an adjustment and acceptance period - are the future for apps that provide ongoing value.

> For apps that don't provide ongoing value, then yes, it may be difficult to survive & one-off payments are probably the only feasible revenue model in those cases.

How about the third option, which has proven to be very successful in the past - one-time payment and payments for larger upgrades. This leaves control in the hands of the user, keeps the old software actually running longer and incentivises developers to actually keep bringing value to the customers. While still giving them steady stream of income.

Of course, you'll first have to kindly beg Tim Cook to allow you to use this business model on Apple hardware.

How about a free app that requires one-time web payment & authentication for paid features, bypassing Apple's 30% tax? All the feature code would be available in the app binary, but not enabled until authentication against the developer's license server. Same could be done for major feature updates, with a one-time payment for unlocking the new features. It would be a QA challenge to have a single binary supporting customers at different entitlement levels, but not impossible.

What stops developers from using this model? There are already free apps which requre SaaS subscriptions. Amazon Kindle famously requires books to be purchased via website, then downloaded in their app.

I believe there are App Store rules in place that mandated that if you offer a subscription service or unlock features you have to sell them for the same price, in-app, paying the 30% cut to Apple. And you’re not allowed to encourage people to pay / sign-up outside the app instead.

Do SaaS apps and Amazon get an exception from that rule? It seems to be acceptable if people learn about the service from the web and are already customers from a web subscription or hardware device purchase, then they download an iOS app as an accessory to the service/device. I guess you can't advertise additional features within the app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com