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Comment by littlefish444 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?

I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).

Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article? My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.

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Google actually tried this... at least twice, I think?

In 2011, they partnered with some publishers to offer "One Pass", a pass-through billing system that also had an option for pay-per-article: https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/google-...

Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https://9to5google.com/guides/peachpit/

I don't think either service ever took off. Probably people were just too cheap :(

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Edit, at least 3 times, apparently! See fastest963's comment about "Google Contributor": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622362

I suspect that when presented with the actual "cost" of reading an article up front, most people realize that they just don't actually care that much about reading it. When the cost is indirect (via ads) and deferred (in terms of the effects on the entire system, leading to what we have today), it's a lot easier to ignore.

This could be the end of addictive content. Would you watch an endless stream of useless content if you had to pay for it?

I am not the mainstream user, but a solution like that would have to come from someone other that Google, because it is 100% safe to assume, that Google would be mining my choices of what I want to read or would try to profile me or would put mandatory recaptcha on the pages or similar.

Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off.

The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.

The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.

One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.

Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.

Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.

I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.

FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…

Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.

For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz

> That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.

I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss

I think it's naïve of you to assume that an inefficiency in the financial system is, in any way, for the benefit of the end-customer.

Perhaps. But what I described benefits the institutions as well, no?

> I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it.

The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…

FedNow is helping a lot, but adoption takes time. The middlemen's APIs have to adopt it, test it, then the tools that use the APIs have to do their own round of that, then the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to design, develop and deploy the new features, then the users of the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to adopt those new features, and then you have adoption.

You can see it in action. Plaid for example: https://plaid.com/blog/get-access-to-the-fednow-service-via-...

You shouldn't make up completely wrong claims to use as an analogy. The US grid doesn't run at either 110V or 220V, it's much higher. The 50/60Hz thing doesn't make any sense as an analogy either, because there's no significant advantage to either, it's just arbitrary.

You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoever and makes me completely ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Maybe it's OK for some non-technical audience where they have no idea how electricity works, but this is supposed to be a technical crowd, isn't it? Or is it? Sometimes I wonder.

> You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy

I think you're being unreasonable. False/untrue analogies still work as a rhetorical device and we can appreciate the point being made.

Pedantry has its place (peer-review of scientific papers, for example), HN comments is not one of them. This is how a community develops a reputation for being hostile.

(Now I'm going to feel horrible about myself for even letting myself be tempted to respond to a comment like this in the first place)

Damn sorry I offended you with my stupidity. Like many people, I have a limit to the things I know. Any ideas on what might have been a decent way to phrase that analogy?

The above poster was pedantic, rude and certainly not writing for your benefit... I wouldn't waste time soliciting their opinion on anything.

Your comment was fine. It added to the discussion, and even if the analogy wasn’t accurate, it made your point effectively to a lay audience. So I think that is a net positive. Ironically, the reply to your comment by the poster you are replying to added nothing and actually detracted from the discussion.

I've been trying to find a bank that does consumer-level FedNow outbound transfers. So far, no joy. Many banks have receive-only FedNow - they can receive money, but not send it. The US Treasury's Fiscal Service, the part of the government that sends payments, is going to be using FedNow. So banks want to be connected enough to receive money faster.

There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.

Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?

Singapore handles this well through their PayNow system, addressing can be handled by phone number, QR code, or entity ID. Obviously they didn’t have the same level of technical debt as the US did, but it’s possible to do this in a consumer friendly way.

This doesn't seem that hard to get around, with a bunch of $0.99 games and in-app purchases on mobile stores. iTunes did it too with songs, before Spotify took over. Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month. If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.

The App Stores work-around that by invoicing customers once-per-month for all the accrued IAP microtransactions the user makes.

> Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month

That only works if there's enough independent publishers who agree to band-together and commit to using a single payment processor. I doubt this will happen.

Well, or at the end of my comment:

> If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.

It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.

I suspect it isn't just a technical/billing issue, but a lack of willingness to pay the desired prices...

> It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.

That would require users to install an app in order to take advantage of IAP (which then means losing 30% of the revenue to Apple or Google). People aren't going to install an app just to view (and pay for) articles on whatever blog-host the writer is using.

It is the fate of any (and every) "Viewer app" to turn into a web-browser, and a sub-par one at that.

I thought batching like this was Patreon's main value add.

I don't want this - it creates very bad incentives around even more engagement bait crap except now I'm directly funding stuff that pulls my attention before I can even tell if it's garbage.

I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.

Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.

The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.

Apple News Plus is exactly what you describe.

The main problem (and reason I cancelled) is that is doesn’t disincentivize clickbait.

If you could curate the homepage to only include feeds of publications you want to pay, then the incentive would be to create a good stream of articles.

As it is, I got sick of clickbait from a few big publications, so their fucking clickbait headlines showed up, but grayed out with a notice that I’d blocked them.

Also, the recommendation system recommends exponentially more clickbait if you click on a few clickbait articles, then it goes into a spiral of garbage.

Isn't Apple News Plus just subscription news? That's not really the same as pay-per-article, where readers (not the middleman) can choose which individual articles to pay to read -- kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.

> kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.

Most of the actual payment to read papers are from universities subscriptions funded by taxpayers money. And this particular example is why people will always be skeptical of this model.

This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with Google Contributor but has shut it down. There was also Scroll that recently got bought by Twitter that did a wallet-type of deal though it was more complicated than a flat rate per article.

Brave, the browser, started with some cryptocurrency micropayment idea. What happened to it?

I'm not sure if publishers could get enough from Brave Payments to make it worth it. Brave also blocks ads so they aren't exactly in the publishers' good graces. Some publishers would rather block Brave than try to work out a deal to accept cryptocurrency.

Blocking the publishers ads while putting your own on top is a scam at best and extortion at worst.

Take a guess :)

Hmm interesting.

But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?

It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it). The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.

I think the answer is, that in sexual matters part of our brain is hardwired to attach to individual humans.

Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.

The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography: Big Pharma and computer games.

> But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content

The impression I've gotten from articles about OnlyFans is that the business model consists of a mix of monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view content on top of subscriptions, neither of which are typically priced at the levels that would be described as microtransactions. Is that not the case?

tangent: do we have to censor words here as well? i thought it was for youtube and tiktok recommendation systems (unalive is particularly funny imo)

I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.

Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol

Right. I've been a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud for almost 10 years now - which means I've paid them upwards of $6,000 by now - even though I only use 3 programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) and even then I only really use base-level functionality that's been present in those titles long before they became subscription-only: if it weren't for (normal and understandable) platform-obsolescence (high-DPI support, support for new formats/codecs, etc) then I'd still be happy with a boxed edition of Creative Suite I could have bought for $1200[1] back in 2013

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130808023019/http://www.amazon...

Have you tried Scribus, Krita, Inkscape, say. Is familiarity worth the cost?

I haven't tried any of those suggestions, regrettably; as I've heard good things about them.

But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.

Pay per click is also user hostile. We’ve all accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or, especially with touchscreen devices, clicked when we didn’t mean to. I really don’t need my misclicks costing me a bunch of extra money.

All business inherently know that the most difficult thing is to get a customer to open their wallet. A subscription commitment is far more valuable than an impulsive/interest driven one time payment

Because all customers know that the moment you open your wallet, you're marked as a sucker and there will be no end to the appeals to repeat the mistake.

I dream of the day that I can pay 0.25 to read just one WSJ or NYT or WP article that I found interesting. I think they don't want to do this though. Not because it is not possible.. but because they prefer that I get the whole darn thing AND consume the ads (or at least that's what they tell their advertisers).

They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).

I like to say that the problem with microtransactions is microfraud.

The cost of having a human investigate is substantial, and independent of how large the transaction is. There's also a substantial fraud problem in advertising, but consumers don't have to get involved with that most of the time. Until they're blocked by cloudflare occasionally deciding they're a bot.

> E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?

Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.

Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.

Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.

Agree, have been thinking about this for a while. Bitcoin on lightning could do it for really cheap if you had say a browser extension wallet or something you could do sub penny payments. https://yalls.org/ (not mine) already made a demo

Nice! Cool demo

You have a lot of great answers here but an additional issue is payments being an unconsolidated network with high trust requirements, which adds a lot of friction to payment in aggregate if not for everyone.

I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts.

I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.

I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I was online was costing more and more money. The sense of freedom I felt when I got fixed cost, always on broadband, was liberating.

Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.

Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.

I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.

There have been various attempts to do this but no network effect has been large enough to make it work. And by network, I mainly mean you’d need a network of popular sites to get it started.

Flattr did this, I saw a few sites with it enabled around when it launched, in 2010 apparently. If i remember you could click a link on an article that had it enabled, which was recorded. Then, weekly/monthly funds were distributed from a pool you had added to the service, to get around the cost of making individual micro payments.

Apparently it's now owned by Adblock Plus and is hooked in to their compensation thing.

So besides the problems with transaction costs, there is the problem that the businesses selling these things would much, much rather have you pay a subscription than a one time cost. They would rather risk people willing to pay the one time cost not paying anything, then lose out on recurring revenue from a subscriber who might have preferred to pay a la carte instead.

This is not useful for the Economist as it currently exists. They'd have to charge a significant amount for an article so the engaging articles also cover for the 'boring' ones, and at that point you might as well get that full package. Which you can already buy at the store, or read at the library, but either way the entire edition is funded. The occasional $0.25 is nothing when they're looking for $209 per year from Americans or €300 from Europeans, the single issues are for the people who want to occasionally buy or gift it. The people only interested in single digit articles per year can already get given gift articles from people with a digital subscription.

It's usually because people tend to pay much less money then how much advertisers are willing to pay. Also, there's much less flexibility on customer price changes while advertisers are kept happy as long as they can have a good ROI.

The Economist costs $30 per month, which would be a 120 articles per month. I doubt anyone reads that much. I also doubt more people would pay the $0.25 rather then $30, due to mental transaction costs. I think to some extent this is also just a gym-style business model, where people pay for things they don't end up using that much because they want to be the kind of person that reads the Economist or goes to the gym.

Blendle in the Netherlands tried it for 5 years (2014-2019), but stopped because they couldn't make it profitable. I don't think it was the news outlets complaining, but just not enough articles sold to make the margin they needed, so internationally this still might scale (lots more work contracting publishers, of course).

Afaik Blendle is now a subscription service with a flat fee all you can read model.

One of the Blendle founders described this as cyclical in nature. People get bored with paying for a lot of content they don't need, so they switch to a pay-per-item service. Then they get bored of the nickel-and-dime experience (and perhaps pay more than they anticipated), so they get interested in an all-you-can-eat model again. He pointed at cable TV as an example, continually bundling and unbundling popular content to either persuade people to pay for a bundle or to pay for pay-per-view.

I'm waiting for a smart content provider that has a 'never pay more' model. Stream a movie for 6 bucks, but since the all-you-can-eat bundle price point is 30 bucks, once you watch 5 movies, the rest are free for the remainder of the month.

I think the Brave browser supports this. Give brave $10 then they provide small amounts of money to content providers. This allows money to pool up and avoid the astronomical transaction fees. I'm not sure how well it works in practice.

Also wish something like that existed. I imagine friction of payments could be an issue. I would only use something like that if it was as easy as doing an Apple Pay transaction.

I won't pay $0.25 for an article that's likely to be clickbait. I won't spend time fighting a refund on those $0.25 either. I'll just go elsewhere.

They probably have some success with the subscription model, because there are probably people who want to read the Economist to get a competitive edge in their business (owners, investors, etc.) They probably haven't even considered that most people who bounce off of their paywall are not just cheapskate version of these owner/investor types, but are an entirely new class of user that they could monetize if they could provide the right payment structure.

Isn't this what Brave attempted to do with BAT attention tokens?

archive.is + adblocker + reader view in FF and it's just like an actual newspaper. Just text.

This is something crypto can solve. There I said it

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