DoubleRecall (YC S11) Turns Paywalls Into Advertising Dollars | Hacker News Reader

DoubleRecall (YC S11) Turns Paywalls Into Advertising Dollars

nytimes.com

86 pointstadruj25 comments

This reminds me of the "Free Day Pass" salon.com used to have before it scrapped the idea entirely:

"So we put up an ad over the front door of the site. Subscribers wouldn't see it at all; other readers had to watch a 30-second video ad, then they got a 'day pass.'

"The day pass approach was beloved by the advertisers and hated by many, though not all, readers. More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/memories-paywall...

I'd argue that consumers are accustomed to filling out CAPTCHAs, and thus are less likely to be confused by these ads. As a reader, I would hate filling out a DoubleRecall ad much less than being denied access altogether because I am unwilling to subscribe. Of all of the Y-Combinator companies that I've read about in this batch, I'm most excited about DoubleRecall on the basis of the idea alone.

Really? I'm not trying to knock them, they seem like they'll make money, but the one you are most excited about?

http://www.quartzy.com/

http://marketbrief.com/

http://bushi.do/

https://mongohq.com

http://scienceexchange.com/

All look far more exciting to me.

I think that there is a risk of high quality, New York Times caliber journalism disappearing entirely. I'd prefer not to see that happen, and I don't think that paywalls are the answer. So anything that can make quality content more lucrative without forcing readers to actually fork over cash is exciting to me. I doubt that DoubleRecall can single-handedly save journalism or anything, but it might be a step in the right direction.

I hope they go, since their job isn't to provide high quality journalism, but to expose illegalities, abuses of power and corruption none of which they do much of anymore.

Cute. I can see how it makes sense from a publisher perspective.

But it seems like an audience of the sort of people who would rather jump through hoops than pay a few bucks would not be very desirable to advertisers.

In brand advertising, it's all about exposure. Even one with no money to buy the article (or maybe not enough interest/motivation) can spread the word or endorse the brand to the ones who have money.

According to BJ Fogg of Stanford on Simplicity, one person is always floating in cartesian plane with time/money changing all the time and being a function of age, location, time of day.

One might have time and is not prepared to spend money and vice versa. And this can change during the day. So, if one gets a brand exposure in the morning when they have spare time to re-type two brand words, they might not have time in the afternoon when they're located at brand outlet, so they'll spend money.

In terms of audience... At $120 CPMs, I think this might be NICE for consumers-- ad-driven sites/apps need fewer ads to make a profit, can afford higher quality content with higher revenues, etc.

Read about priming studies and call it "cute" again... I dare ya! :-)

Here's a summary of some of Bargh's priming experiments I grabbed from http://jurylaw.typepad.com/deliberations/2007/05/two_interes...:

In one experiment, Yale's John Bargh gave subjects seemingly random word puzzles, with no apparent point or thread. Some of the puzzles containing a subtle preponderence of "old" words: Florida, gray, wrinkle, lonely, bingo. Walking down the hallway to leave after the exercise, the subjects who had the "old" words walked more slowly.

The same paper describes an experiment in which, when they finished the word puzzles, subjects were asked to find "the experimenter" to get their next task. The experimenter was always involved in an interminable conversation with someone else. Subjects whose word puzzles had scattered words invoking rudeness -- bold, rude, bother, disturb, intrude -- had no trouble interrupting. But a huge majority of subjects whose puzzles were full of "polite" words -- respect, considerate, appreciate, patiently, courteous -- never interrupted the experimenter's conversation at all.

---

With these studies in mind, I wonder about the impact of typing "diet coke skinny" in terms of brand recall AND in terms of behavior after the fact.

I'm not doubting the effectiveness of the ads, I'm doubting the quality of the people being exposed to them.

Do you know whether the effectiveness is reduced if people know they're being primed?

I have no citation, but I recall marketing studies that show that knowledge of priming has little to no effect on the subject. Which blew me away.

Often, the act of paying a few bucks online is sufficiently annoying (fill in billing address, think of a username and generate a password, fish out my credit card because I forgot the CVV2 code, wait for several page loads, etc.) that I would rather avoid it even if I don't mind parting with the money. On the other hand reading an ad and typing a few words sounds comparatively non-stressful, unless it is an overly long video ad.

There are plenty of advertisers who would _target_ people who are worried about a few bucks, namely those advertising bargain products. Also, as mentioned previously, you have to "jump through hoops" to pay for an article anyway. Based on the example site, this method is much faster for the reader than a paywall anyway.

How does this work with people who are blind? Will they be able to notice the highlighted words, or will they be denied access?

any attempt at accessible (that is, text based) content will make it wide open to automated solving and ruin the whole point.

Maybe an audio snippet could be used as an alternative, although actually creating the audio (unless it's done with text to speech methods at the server/creation time) is going to significantly bump up the cost of creating the advert.

The Americans with Disabilities Act may not have much sympathy for the inconvenience of providing accessibility, though.

Another form of advertising that I didn't know existed until today. I'm sure that it will be everywhere in about 5 minutes, and there does already seem to be more than a few companies doing this sort of thing (so clearly money is being made!): http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=capt...

I like the idea but someone technically minded enough could scrape the article from the source (at least from the demo CNN page they have up) [1]. But then again, that would be a lot of work especially compared to typing in two to three words.

[1] http://cnnmoney.transformer.doublerecall.com/2011/08/24/news...

You're correct and this is done by design. We're not a security feature but a soft-monetization one.

99% of people aren't technical enough to go through any other way than retyping.

This seems like one of those ideas where the devil is in the details -- balancing out something reasonable for consumers with what advertisers dream of, while not screwing publishers.

I'm not sure how I'll respond to my first one; looking forward to seeing it in action.

Dear DoubleRecall, I URGE YOU to mandate no video ads. That would be a first step to providing a good consumer experience.

we hear you. SolveMedia has video, I'm not sure about engagement quality on that.

Eww, that's so manipulative. I will never use this service.

This looks interesting. I'd like to try it out but the link to the iOS SDK on their site doesn't work.

Yep, sorry about that!

We've just fixed that (it was an outdated SDK file) with a direct link to our mobile dashboard, where developers can sign up themselves and get their apps running DoubleRecall in no time.

How do you solve the "typing on a mobile phone" sucks?

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