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Comment by towaway15463 | Hacker News Reader

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

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How do you know what is "one good article" and what isn't until you actually read it?

There is already an increasing problem with clickbait as sites have to fight for eyeballs to get ad revenue. Making online journalism microtransaction based will completely kill whatever is left of the industry.

For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care.

If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.

Think of the number of links you click on in a regular day. The front page of HN itself contains 30 articles. Browsing a few pages of it at 25c each is already $40+ in costs. Is that something you are willing to spend?

No. (Also, I'm confused at how you got to the $40+ figure with each article costing $0.25, but alas.)

And consequently, I'd just browse less. If anything, I might spend more time outside as a result.

"Browsing a few pages". After enough pages, you could end up at any monetary amount.

The signal given by articles that make it to the top of news aggregators would be even stronger if they were all paid content. No one is going to post or upvote something they didn’t like and lost money on. It also sounds like it would be a healthy limit on your media consumption if you’re reading 160 articles per day right now.

The number of links that involve a paywall on the front page of HN is a handful at the most. Not $40 over a few pages.

How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?

The general idea with micro transactions is that you have some small number of service providers that you use to pay the individual retailers with. You know like how credit cards work.

And that’s the real reason micropayments haven’t caught on—there is no universal one-click payment system for the web. Every payment processor requires at least one redirection away from the content at hand. A micropayment transaction needs to be as easy as clicking “Continue {Reading,Watching,Listening}” and the content resumes without skipping a beat.

Sounds like a solvable problem

Indeed, so why doesn’t it exist yet?

I mean Apple and Google have prepared users for it with the mechanism built into apps when someone wants to upgrade to a premium version or add a subscription. I think the lowest I've seen is 99c but a smaller micropayment using the same system/interface is simple.

The counterpoint is that this will produce EXTREME clickbaiting

Will it, though? What's the likelihood that people stop visiting because the clickbait is both unrewarding and financially impactful?

I guess that's the unanswered question. If the likelihood is zero or closer to it, then yeah, clickbait suddenly directly upticks revenue, but if the likelihood is high enough, it might actually force the tide against clickbaiting.

That’s not the case with other paid products. I’d argue it would reduce click bait since the whole idea of click bait was created as a solution to drive more impressions on a page regardless of the quality of the material. Impressions matter because revenue comes from ads so you don’t give a shit if someone actually reads the article, you just want them to click on it or share it based on the headline. If your main revenue source was being paid by people who wanted to read the full article then you would succeed by creating articles people wanted to read. You have to show a small preview to do this but that’s standard practice now. You could also prorate by number of pages read or number of words if you wanted to be fancy.

You will come to rely on publisher branding, following the work of specific authors who you know do good work, etc.

Its no different than knowing if the food tastes good at the new restaurant.

If you rely on branding then why not just subscribe the the publisher...

Sure, but it takes time to build brands like NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc. Until then, personal credibility will have to suffice.

I feel like you're just running in a circle leading to the discovery of a free trial

Even then I don’t subscribe to any news sites. I want to just roll up and say “I’d like one article today please, here’s a quarter” I refuse to sign up to something I’ll barely use.

I think news is a public good, and much like paying for educating our kids, there has to be a sustainable funding model to educate the adults as well. But thats my view, and we may have a disagreement. I don't wish to convince you otherwise.

That's why people with strong enough brand have been moving to Substack.

Charge per token like OpenAI does. If the article is going nowhere, bail.

The "medium" model could be one way around this.

The first 10% or so of the article is visible, after that you need to sign in. Or in this case, pay.

This exactly IS the paywall model, except aggregated. I doubt how expensive this kind of aggregator would be to REALLY allow these media to survive. I heard media on Apple News+ doesn’t get enough money from them.

The point of micro transactions is to get rid of the aggregators that charge larger fees for monthly subscriptions to a basket of content

That’s already been gamed: author just makes sure the actual information you came for is past the wall, and then writes the top of the article like it’s a cliffhanger episode.

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite.

It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

And yet Bandcamp seems to be doing just fine.

Plus, as with everything involving money, this would cause even more clickbait to get those 25c out of you.

Maybe. I surely can't be the only one that avoids otherwise interesting articles because of a clickbait title? I know if I click it, it's likely to be BS, and I'm likely to get more of them because wherever I'm reading it goes "Ah-hah!"

Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (carefully) and find out if they'd be willing to take a monthly check from 12ft that is less than they'd get if your N customers were paying the full subscription fee, but far more than the 0 you're currently getting from those customers. I think it's a good idea. Actually a great idea.

The key is going to be dealing with narrow-minded execs irrationally attached to their current business model(s), and they will argue that this product removes their leverage to get more full-subscription customers. But if they can be rational and at least do the experiment, they'd get an easy OOM improvement in revenue.

Why would any of the existing outlets play nice with a service that got their start pirating the outlets’ content?

Stranger things have happened. I mean, would you have imagined in 1942 that within 20 years German and Japan were going to be staunch US allies?

Sure, all it took was the complete decimation of their existing governments. I think the equivalent action would be the 12ft.io domain gets transferred to a different owner with a different business plan.

I think it is an inditement of the crypto space that this obvious use case never materialized.

Yet…

I point the finger directly at regulations.

Who has the time to track lightning transactions for IRS capital gains reporting.

Hopefully we see a bill where small amounts aren't taxed.

My bank sends me a 1099 when I earn $0.14 of interest on my checking account. There is no reason this hypothetical crypto company couldn't do the same.

Wow. HN really has no clue. 26k karma dude thinks Bitcoin is a company.

Where did I mention Bitcoin?

The micropayments use case was highlighted in the Brave Browser's whitepaper:

https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/Basi...

I will admit that this venture has user-related problems, in that similar to ads on a website, it relies on an honest userbase that's willing to give/pay BAT to the creator of the website's content.

The infrastructure for such a system is still not fully developed, but it is technically possible to do so right now by minting an article-exclusive NFT in response to a user's micropayment, and then using SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to link a session with said address that has paid for the article. In order to facilitate cheap transactions, it'll have to be performed on a rollup like Arbitrum or Optimism, or on a sidechain like Polygon PoS.

It does still suffer from the archive.is problem where a cached version of the unlocked article can be shown to everyone else, but such an endeavor will have to be funded out of pocket and is orders of magnitude more expensive than current archive.is bypasses.

This is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails

Does proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.

Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.

Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?

> Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?

In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with <1 min block times.

I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

> Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots).

The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.

Moving to PoS is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for reducing transaction fees. The Ethereum merge will reduce them slightly (as it will reduce the block time from 16 seconds to 12 seconds, or something like that) but it won't make any big difference. In the coming year, there probably will also be general ZK-rollups on Ethereum mainnet that will reduce transaction fees substantially. (You can already use ZK-rollups for some limited things like transactions, but not for arbitrary Ethereum operations.) Also, way out in the future, there will be data sharding which will reduce fees on mainnet significantly, look up "proto-danksharding".

It wouldn’t even need crypto, you just need a company with a ledger that has some big partners in news and entertainment. Apple could do it with their existing Apple Pay system. It makes me think the real difficulty might be regulatory.

This suggesting is frightening.

The whole point of decentralization is to stop centralized power from abusing their ledgers. Yes crypto is a record of transactions (a ledger) and yes any single company can provide the same service by “simply” recording transactions in a digital ledger, but then you end up with exactly the situation we’re in: companies devaluing balances or making them expire (air miles), companies freezing accounts to save themselves (paypal), and all sorts of other feckery.

At their best, regulations stop the outright theft that companies are capable of (let’s not talk about the worst of regulations). The point is that any central authority can and will use their position to further their own profit margins at the cost of their “customers”.

The gas fees can be mitigated by moving the process over to a rollup scaling solution like Arbitrum or Optimism, or to a sidechain like Polygon PoS: I mentioned it as a necessity for cheap transactions with ETH-level security in another child comment to GP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768

Is there a proposed solution that’s both low/no-fee (like $0.0001 for a transaction of $0.01, and <$0.01 for a transaction of $100) AND properly sustainable?

That’s where I think we’ll start opening the door for all the transformative microtransactions.

Blendle might be what you're looking for. Check it out: https://blendle.com/

(Today, the landing page loaded in Dutch for me for some reason. No idea why, probably some 'very smart' lang detection gone wrong? Either way, it _is_ available in english, so don't be deterred if that happens to you as well. After logging in, I saw eng again.)

I am also seeing it in Dutch and I'm in Australia

I think internationally it never went beyond beta: https://launch.blendle.com/

They also changed the concept (in the Netherlands) from micro payments to a monthly subscription.

How does it work? Their landing page is vague

Most publishers let members "gift" articles. But only so for members.

I think the worry is that 12ft.io can "buy" the article and then have the legal claims to also distribute it as an owner through this model? I'm totally guessing

Coil.com are doing something similar, you pay a subscription to them, and they send microtransactions to the site/user whose content you're consuming.

Totally agree here, I'd pay a quarter to read most of the articles I click away from right now because they are paywalled. The pain of unsubscribing from some of these places is obscene, and a major reason I avoid subscribing to many of them. That and it's hard to pay $10 for a site I might read an article on a month, or I might read 10.

Isn't the Brave browser trying to build in micropayments? I keep hoping that will get some traction.

I love reporters and investigative journalism. It's worth funding and I hate seeing it die off. But I also don't have many good ways to pay for it. Though a couple days ago I did read a good investigative piece, without paywall, so I sent the place $10 via one-time payment.

I like this idea, why does this not exist yet?

I've worked in paywall industry previously and microtransactions never work out due to the fact that for the newspaper it's not a predictable source of income that you need to manage your budget as an organization. It doesn't build loyal subscriber bases.

The other issue is that this only promotes click-bait journalism. If you want investigative journalism the newspaper needs to invest and they need to invest before the revenue happens. How can you afford that without a predictable revenue stream.

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