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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot.

I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to.

But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.

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Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it.

EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html

Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform.

Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs.

EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.

i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.

The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.

Or they could just be… in a regular old database of the issuer, who is the one that will validate them anyway when you redeem them for articles?

If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.

do clubs count as payment processors? do hotels/bars who keep a tab with pen and paper?

I don't know what counts or doesn't count as a payment processor exactly in these states (GP brought that up, not me).

In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.

I think most places get around this by having you pay for so many months at a go, instead of each month. Less flexible but I don't mind it.

> EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.

We've not already tried blockchain for this. The rails are there, just a small matter of implementation. Everyone's too busy building shovel factories and not enough people are mining for gold to make a web3 micropayments product.

I can, right now, buy $5 of solana on Coinbase, give you $0.05, with an inconsequential fee of $0.001 or so using Solana, and with enough $0.05 payments, you can cash it out via Coinbase. It works on web on desktop via a chrome extension, I'm still working out a solution for mobile.

I'd love to have an Internet reading budget for the month and have that automatically get disbursed to the writer if I read past a certain point in the article. The rails are all there, just a small matter of code and then getting adoption.

I've always thought (wished?) this was a killer app for crypto currency. I would love to have a pool of news "coins", that get auto spent on articles I choose to read. As the OP stated, I'd prefer to pay for content, but I dont have an infinite pool of $9.99-a-months..

What would you say are the main barriers to adopting a solution like this more widely?

More technical points I can think of: how fast do transactions get confirmed (If they have to wait 5 min to read a news article most people will go somewhere else)? If this becomes more popular, what stops processing fees from going up (I think this is a problem for BTC).

Too many damn choices. Too many shovel builders leading to a paradox of choice. So many different wallets, so many different coins. The larger community is so utterly totally fractured. Which is by design, if I don't like what you're doing, instead of working together, I can take my ball and go do my own thing. Decentralization is great, except it's not. And then there's whole cryptocurrency angle. In order to buy into this, you have to buy some cryptocurrency. Maybe with something that's actually useful people won't automatically tune you out when you say "crypto" these days, but that always seemed like an uphill battle to me.

Anyway, Phantom*, with Solana can do micropayments today, on mobile and desktop, it's just a small matter of coding and adoption. Transactions take 5 seconds, which isn't awesome, but is stomachable. Gas fees are fixed at 0.00015 SOL, which then varies with the exchange rate, but that's currently (Jun 2024) $0.02. This does mean it will go up as the price of SOL goes up, but, well, it's not 2016, so I don't know that anyone's expecting wild swings in the exchange rate. I am not a cryptocurrency economist though. (Nor a regular one, for that matter.)

The supported golden happy path for this is anybody who can buy Solana, which would include a US person with a Coinbase account, who's willing to install their Chrome extension. The problem is mobile. The platform I'd like to support is Safari on iOS with a Safari extension, so it's seamless, but that's not there yet. What's there is to install a new app and use that app to browse, which I guess isn't the worst thing.

That's all technical implementation details though, the real barrier to adoption is getting writers/authors to use this. You'd have to setup a medium/substack clone, get a bunch of content producers on it, and then get readers will appear. But once you're there, then anyone else can setup a clone and cut you out of the picture. In fact, that's the whole point, that in using Solana as the base currency, people aren't tied into your platform. So then what's the incentive for setting up the medium/substack clone if the whole point of your clone is that people don't need it. So there's no VC-level funding to build this thing because there's no VC-level payout, but you're out there competing with well funded firms for talent to build this thing.

* https://phantom.app/ (non-affiliated)

Is netflix a payment processor?

I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc.

I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.

Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.

> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)?

Money handling is expensive.

Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example.

As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges.

Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.

A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow.

Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer.

How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare.

Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.

You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor.

And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer.

If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.

in my experience, payment processors charge $.30 - $.50 + 2.X% per transaction (for credit cards). No other monthly fees required, though they'll gladly sell you some.

You definitely don't need an engineer dedicated to monetary transaction flows. We use Braintree and haven't had an engineer touch it more than once a year in the past 4 years.

if you want to go engineering free, shopify has subscription plugins that can handle everything for $20-$80/month...

I feel like your comment is from 10+ years ago, back before competition led to payment processors becoming a commodity... has it been a while since you've looked?

Or some sort of system to pay per article. I’d toss a quarter here and there for content.

I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary.

This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.

Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$

The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested)

K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.

I chose to go with a $3 subscription model myself, at that cheap it's just a waste of time to go through the unsub process. Cha Ching.

Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now.

This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...

It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever.

Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!

I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'

It went the same way as a $5 lunch.

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