Can Tipjoy Make Micropayments Into Megabucks? | Hacker News Reader

Can Tipjoy Make Micropayments Into Megabucks?

pberg.com

21 pointsechair18 comments

I think a much bigger player (for example PayPal, Google or Amazon) will step up and do micropayments - simply because they have millions of users, money and connections. I think it's pretty hard for a startup to succeed in this market. [Amazon for example has already FPS (http://aws.amazon.com/fps/)].

Another thing is tipjoy's design, I think it's really bad for a money related site. The design needs more authority (blue colors for example) and not look like something from a cartoon.

The cartoon is cute, but you might be right about the authority issue. We'll see how it evolves. We've already gone from mascot to abstract logo to redesigned mascot in under a year. I'm sure that will happen again.

Amazon and PayPal already do micropayments. Why don't you know about them? Because their payment mechanisms are more painful than microcontent is valuable. An 8 step paypal checkout is braindead for $0.25 content. We're working on mandated payment options and a merchant API to use our 1 click micropayment system for selling content.

The social nature can't be overstated as well. Other payment processors really don't pay attention to that. We try to push the data where we can, and in cases like Twitter, actually allow the broadcasting platform to be the signal to make a payment.

I hope they can turn it into Megabucks; I need Ivan to have poker money to lose ;)

I've always thought the whole "promise to pay" thing was a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you're relying on the honesty and follow-through of people to actually pay their promised debt. But on the other hand, it is awesome that you can pay/receive without having an account linked to some sort of payment method and all the other hurdles that a tipping service would usually have. Plus, the ability to "cash out" at any time helps skirt the fact that micropayments are still very uneconomical due to fees. I don't know their statistics, but I imagine a vast majority of people only pay / cash out after they have at least a few bucks accrued.

Just had a thought: if the money thing fails, they could use their code to just create a karma network. Instead of money, pay with karma points. Might still be useful, even if working micropayments would be nicer.

We have talked about changing the currency of the donations. For example, if a site like Flickr or Tumblr had an Explore section where you could pay for placement, you could "gift" placement there. The currency is more eyes and ears for your content, though it might essentially be a $1 donation.

For content with zero marginal cost that is easily pirated, the pledge model makes lots of sense. I'm certain we have a higher payment rate than iTunes has for music - IF you count those that pirate music. What was it? 2% of music on ipods is bought via iTunes?

We're going to be making mandating payment easier soon. Then we'll have a super powerful triple edged sword. Or something like that.

Yeah, I complete agree with that. I'm probably one of 5 people who still pay for music.

Additionally, I would like to purchase one of these mystical triple-edged swords, when available...

Louis CK on double edged swords http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8d_ry-u-Q#t=0m50s

I actually spend a lot of money (relatively) on RockBand.

The various online newspapers and magazines need to get together in a cartel-style fashion and just force a micropayment system. Just charge one miserable penny to a view an article. Once it gets going, it would work.

The penny gap makes that far less attractive than Adwords, which is already a poor option in most cases.

That kind of slicing might not be a good idea. People don't calculate value that well. Clay Shirky has interesting ideas on this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

I think he has an overly narrow definition of micropayments though. Mandating $0.25 for an article isn't the only way to make a micropayment. RockBand, iTunes, MapleStory, etc. are all excellent examples of micropayment platforms working today.

Micropayments have been tried again and again, and for some reason they never work. I have no idea why.

Lets hope that it works this time. If it becomes popular, this site will be incredibly useful.

The recent article on customer behavior is quite relevant. Can't quite remember which it was on here, but it was saying how "magic" free is. Micropayments are just a massive hurdle for users. Most will fall at that hurdle if presented with it.

Seems to me the correct place to do micropayments, is ISPs. They already have a billing relationship with the customer.

It would be as easy as installing an iPhone app, but for the web. Come on ISPs, sort it out.

I don't like it. Case in point, I have "$168" in my tipjoy from people who have "promised". But only $11 has actually been followed through on.

But if you look up the public information, what does it say? $168. It'd be very easy to make it look like random people were getting MASSIVE donations just by.. promising a whole lot and then not delivering.

All our rankings are based on followed through donations. We bug people to pay, and cancel large donations after a fair amount of time has passed. We don't allow for really large donations without pre-paid accounts.

The alternative to a pledge first model is asking for a credit card before any pledges are made (or something similar). That's lame for donations.

I should point out to you that for myself and probably for a few others at least, we don't much care about the rankings.

We care about the tips!

I should also point out that this campaign has done really well recently, raising thousands, and has a 92% payment rate: http://pistachioconsulting.com/how-we-doing/

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