Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Funding model for the web, users choose between ads or micropayments

satotious.com

49 pointssatotious43 comments

Hi HN, long time lurker, first time poster. We've been working on a new funding model for the web as we believe content creators should be paid for their hard work. satotious.com is a unique twist on paywall, users can access content by viewing ads or with micropayments(on the Bitcoin Lightning Network).

We think the time is right to try micropayments again as an increasing amount of content is going behind subscriptions and ad revenue is declining. Reasons we are different: 1. We have a free option with ad views. 2. We run on the Bitcoin Lightning Network as it makes micropayments feasible without the need to track users. 3. We tackle cognitive cost associated with micropayments with our browser extension/app which can auto-pay the paywalls.

For more details of our vision have a look at our site and blog posts, satotious.com. Right now we're in beta and are looking for content creators, no matter how big or small, please get in touch: ruby@satotious.com

You can test out the paywall on our site, all feedback welcome :)

Hi! Super cool extension for readers, seems easy for publishers too. I like that it isn't baked into the browser like the Brave BAT.

Just curious - what split have you seen so far between readers picking ads v micropayments?

Question before I try it out -How do you serve up ads? Are you a part of a network? I noticed you collect all data from sites with the extension, curious to know if the ad alternative is collecting my data and targeting me with personalized ads.

Thank you so much! If you email us(ruby at satotious.com) your userID, we will credit it with a small amount of btc so you can test the extension auto-pay feature for free.

So far we are getting 95% picking ads vs micropayments, I guess thats to be expected as most people dont have bitcoin lightning wallets yet.

Right now we have demo ads which we create. Our ads are slightly different as they incorporate a captcha.

The permissive permission on the extension is so we can inject the auto-pay functionality. We dont collect your browsing data. Open sourcing the browser extension and paywall is on the road map. The future plan is that users connect their own lightning wallet to the browser extension and publishers do the same for the paywall, therefore we wont see any of those interactions and keep everything private

How does the paywall know to let someone through?

Disclosure: I am, in theory, a potential competitor through work I've done off and on over the past decade.

The content is encrypted, users get the key when pay or view an ad. We dont host anything

Hey! Really love this concept, especially because a lot of smaller creators/bloggers/etc are getting pulled between hosting and owning their own content on their own platform (but getting very little in ads) vs. hosting on someone else platform where they may get more in ads but don't own their content.

Can't wait to see where this goes!

Hi :D, thank you for the positive feedback. Hopefully this will incentivize people to host their own content and not rely on centralized platforms.

This type of thing is exactly why I was excited by the bitcoin whitepaper a decade (ish) ago and why I have been so frustrated by the day-trade lambo culture that bitcoin grew into.

I would be much more enthusiastic about Satotious if I had any remaining confidence in the stability/security of BTC or its derivatives; BTC Lightning in this case.

Why don't you convert to USD immediately?

Yes, I believe theres a few startups(escher, lastbit, strike) working on converting lightning BTC <-> USD

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

If you know of a system for friction-less person-to-person transfer of small amounts of money (Like handing someone a dollar bill, but digital) with widespread adoption on news/entertainment websites please provide a link.

I'm currently using my time+attention as payment (via ads) for most of the content I consume online. I would prefer to have the option of "carrying" a wallet to pay with cash instead.

Edit: Maybe I should have been more clear about what I meant by "stability" and "security". I mean that any time I make a transaction with BTC, I have an extremely low level of confidence that the goods/service I've purchased would have the same value or that my money would have the same purchasing power even in a very short timeframe. "I have $50 to spend this month on news and content. Should I hold off buying anything until next week and hope that all the articles I want to read are cheaper??"

Maybe in a world where I receive a BTC paycheck and pay all my bills with BTC it would make more sense.

Yes I see where you are coming from but I dont think it matters for smaller purchases. You have $10 this month, maybe $10.25 next month, you want to read an article which costs $0.005, are you going to hold off for such a small amount?

Add more options to micropayments.

Many people don't know/use bitcoin/crypto. Then your platform isn't of much use.

The problem with traditional payment methods like credit cards, visa, paypal etc is the transaction costs. You can't make a $0.01 payments unless you aggregate those. The problem with aggregation for us is the fact we would need to track the sites users visit(huge privacy problem)

I wouldn't mind creating a user and getting "tracked". It's not like you need to save those after you're done aggregating.

Congratulations on the launch!

How does this contrast with Brave Attention Tokens (not technically, but how different is it product-wise)?

How do you solve the problem of an average Internet user having to setup a bitcoin-wallet etc; Is it seamless / friction-less for them?

Do these micro-transactions count as donations?

What kind of attack vectors do you foresee especially when the user is an average reader and might not be particularly tech savvy? How do you plan to overcome them?

Did you consider stellar.org as possibly creating your own coin? Or, is something of this sort on the roadmap? This would be exciting since, if whatever Brave was doing with BAT was made opensource and deploy-able to any and all browsers, such a product could take off, imo.

Nevertheless, I think you're aiming for simplicity above all else. So, keep at it.

Thanks :) In terms of our difference with BAT, we are much simpler. Content creators set their price and users pay, we dont track the amount of time spent on a site, we dont make a browser, we haven't created our own coin. It takes 5minutes for a content creator to add the paywall, as easy as adding a script tag. We hope to bring micropayments to the masses, having the option to view an ad hopefully solves the chicken and egg problem as users dont need to convert to micropayments straight away for creators to make money.

To make the process are simple as possible for non-crypto users we are working on a browser extension/app which will act as a wallet and autopay to create a seamless experience. We are working to integrate with an exchange so that users can top up straight from their credit cards and don't need to know anything about Bitcoin.

I guess the biggest threat for the user is the wallet/extension being drained. We recommend users don't store lots of money in there, but given that we are dealing with micropayments there shouldn't be need for high amounts anyway. Giving users more control comes with more risk, but that's the tradeoff and we aim to help educate on ways to mitigate these risks.

We use Bitcoin Lightning Network as it lets us do micropayments without tracking users, we aren't interested in creating a coin or doing an ico.

Thank you for your feedback

I chose to pay and was presented with a QR code. I wondered how to use it from my phone, where I was reading the article.

I touched it... nothing. I saw there was a text code above in a box with a copy button, but nothing right there told me how to pay.

It did say that if I didn’t have. ‘Satotious’ wallet then I could get one... but I think if you’re hoping people will get themselves a wallet and use it, it might be better to optimise first for the case of not having one.

Yes, our initial target audience was users that most likely already had wallets so we didn't want to make it difficult for them to pay. We will be focusing more on UX for non-cyrpto users for the future. We actually hope that both regular and cyrpto users will opt for the extension as it acts as a wallet and also has the auto pay feature. It is very new but if you wanted to test it today then download it and email us (ruby at satotious.com) and we will credit your account with 10 Sats so you can test it for free.

Thanks for your feedback :)

Congrats, first of all, its always a great achievement if you launch.

I remember a discussion on why flattr did not take of. The user argumented, that micropayments are not interesting for normal content creators, cause they will only get peanuts at the end of the month. Macropayments instead, which you receive via patreon are much better. You may have a couple of supporters whos payments still might accumulate to a couple.of hundrets.

Well I would argue ads are micropayments, roughly an ad view is like $0.001. A model based around few users making macropayments, influencing the content that is produced, doesnt speak for everybody.

Also, whilst the patreon style model has been successful for some, for most creators it simply isn't effective. Unfortunately, a tipping system just doesn't seem to work

Technically true but the payments are ads are inherently aggregated by the ad provider and the transactions of buyers as opposed to a one to many model of tipping.

Speaking for everybody oddly enough is almost never the goal of any enterprise. Content creators generally either produce their content and care about finances to support it full time (they would try to do so even if it cost them money) or just do so as a means to the end. It is all a trade problem in the end it seems to get people what they want.

Micropayments seem to work well in wechat. Users can tip article writers small amounts.

I think it's been successful because they have reduced the friction for tipping.

I'd choose ads and adblock them

One of the six top level key features highlighted on the home page: "Captchas stop adblocker"

Then only valid option remaining is closing the page

Or micropayments :) I understand the aversion to ads but content creators(journalist, musicians, artists, programmers creating oss, etc) and the web as a whole produces useful stuff, it would be good to find a business model which supports them.

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

"I ate a chocolate bar and regretted it, so I won't pay the shop".

Buyer's remorse doesn't make this more ethical.

Nah, more like "I won't eat chocolate that they specifically produced at such a low quality that it's financially viable to give it away for free."

The flow we are aiming for: users visit a site, they navigate a paywall and see the content is good. They add that domain to the auto-pay list. If it's clickbait, they dont. Hopefully by letting creators charge whatever amount they want, we can produce not just clickbait but well researched articles.

I'm paying for the newspapers that I read, and I usually close a clickbait website once I find out.

So then, the question here is: How many websites are there that are worth my time to read, but not worth purchasing a $5 monthly subscription for?

So I'm not sure that there is a use for micropayments here. Either it's good quality, then they charge $5+ anyway, or it's "ad level quality" and then I'm better off not wasting my time.

Id also like to add, maybe the reason there is so much clickbait/rubbish is because there isn't a viable business model for good quality content? How many subscriptions can people have?

Articles that are not clickbait and YouTube personalities that are differentiated and not conspiracy theorists definitely exist and are worth supporting.

You are on Hacker News, so presumably you click some of the links. Some clickbait of course does end up here but linked articles are mostly not clickbait.

Similarly, you should pay attention to youtube links in comments (here and elsewhere) to start building a catalog of creators of content that you enjoy.

Also, incidentally, the apparent deluge of "haters" and "conspiracy theorists" you have noticed and pointed out here relates to a topic of frequent discussion in this forum (regulation of social media networks) and it is worth thinking about how it impacts us in these seemingly unrelated ways.

I fully agree with you, that there is good content. But in my experience, the good content on HackerNews is freely accessible without ads or paywalls because the author has another job and is writing just to get his/her story out, and not for any financial reason.

I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.

I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.

In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.

Blendle (another one in this general space) had a mechanism where you could decide not to pay after seeing the content.

Disclosure: I have previously pursued a business not dissimilar to the one under discussion.

Yes that would work for them as they aggregate and pay publishers at the end of the month. Problem with that is Blendle needs to track what users are viewing. If something like that ever got big, it would have everyone's browsing history

It's interesting that Twitch has no paywalls. Users pay after consuming the content if they want to. Do you support this model as well?

No, we are focusing on paywalls for now. There are quite a few tipping systems using bitcoin lightning if you're interested

Congrats on the launch!

If you are trying to pay on the paywall: You will see a QR code if you click pay - you need a Lightning wallet to be able to scan it. Or, our browser extension acts as a wallet so makes it accessible for non-crypto users. It is very new and a goal for slightly into the future but if you wanted to test it today then download it and email us (ruby at satotious.com) and we will credit your account with 10 Sats so you can test it for free.

Awesome! Congrats on the launch!

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