Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has used this argument a lot, both here on HN as well as on websites to sell stuff, I feel the need to defend it now. When someone downloads a show or a movie from Netflix or elsewhere, $2 is not a huge investment. You'll be spending upwards of 40 minutes of your life watching this thing and being entertained by it. If a show is worth that kind of time, it's certainly worth $2 (or more) to support the people who made it.

In fact, as a European who regularly gets prevented from doing so, you should count yourself lucky that they allow you to pay for it in the first place. Also, I don't know a lot of places where you can even get a decent latte for $2 anymore.

People seem to sweat investing $2 per download for anything, even if they thoroughly enjoy the product, but they don't even think about spending $10 at the coffee shop. It's that kind of disconnect people are trying to address by invoking the latte thing.

View on HN

In my head this marketing argument always boils down to "What, you waste money on overpriced coffee, why not waste your money here too?!" I think telling the consumer "hey, this is an impulse purchase" is going to trigger their "oh shit, I need to stop making stupid impulse buys" response.

Also, I envision the marketer thinking of me as part of a herd of cud-chewing cattle, or worse, like one of the people on the conveyer belt in Relead's god-awful landing page [1]. It's angering in some low-level way. Is this really how marketers think of consumers?

1: http://www.relead.com

Edit:

> People seem to sweat investing $2 per download for anything, even if they thoroughly enjoy the product, but they don't even think about spending $10 at the coffee shop.

Maybe you'll see less of this if you drop the "less than your stupid latte, dumbass" sales tactic.

Edit 2:

Sorry, that was a really jerk way to make my point, and I apologize below. Leaving it here however to preserve the thread.

> Maybe you'll see less of this if you drop the "less than your stupid latte, dumbass" sales tactic.

Wow, that was unnecessarily abrasive. It's not unreasonable to expect a product to cost something, even if it's virtual. And nobody is suggesting putting the latte analogy as advertisement on the front page of services.

> "What, you waste money on overpriced coffee, why not waste your money here too?!"

That's entirely beside the point. The assumption is that nobody wastes anything. It's an analogy about paying for electronic goods. And just because something does not cost a lot of money doesn't mean it's an impulse buy either.

I disagree with you, I'm with Benjamin on this one. A purchasing decision is weighing pleasure against the pain of parting with funds. These ads generally don't do anything to invoke pleasure. They assume you've already decided how much pleasure you'll get from Netflix, or whatever the product is, and now are grappling to wrap your head around how much it will hurt to part with the funds.

They choose a compulsory, daily purchase that many people make for a reason and I think Benjamin's arguments are totally valid. I think the psychology here is clearly "It's not enough money for you to think hard about dear, don't hurt your head with the math and just go for it".

Absolutely it's telling the target that this is cheap enough to be an impulse buy that they don't need to think hard about.

[Disclosure: Ridiculously happy Netflix customer since '98 or so.]

I am definitely on the side which thinks comparing purchases to a daily cup of coffee is bad. It evokes negative associations in me and I have to assume that it will in others, so it's not good marketing.

I understand what they're trying to say, but it just feels like the wrong way to go about it.

However, I really like the way you phrased it: "It's not enough money for you to think hard about dear, don't hurt your head with the math and just go for it."

Drop the slightly condescending tone and I think that is a winner!

"It's not enough money for you to think hard about it. Don't bother with the Math and just go for it!"

I like this, for whatever reason. It's honest and direct?

The condescending tone was there because I find the tactic wildly condescending.

I realize that. I just meant that, without the condescension, the way you summed it up actually sounded like a marketing statement I could connect with.

Sure, but dollars to donuts your ad copy won't convert well. It comes too close to explaining the psychological exploit being used, which will unravel it's effectiveness.

It still reads with a very condescending tone to me. You're essentially telling me that you've made the decision for me with the implication that I'm not capable of doing it myself. It's even more condescending when we're quibbling over something so insignificant as to cost less than a cup of coffee.

The honest and direct way to sell something is to sell the thing on its own merits, not to try to get me to short-circuit my own decision-making.

You're right. It was totally rude and unnecessarily abrasive, and I do genuinely apologize. But I still feel strongly about the use of this argument.

> And nobody is suggesting putting the latte analogy as advertisement on the front page of services.

But that's exactly what soooo many people do.

It's a well-supported fact that in the absence of other indicators people will use price to estimate the quality or value of a good. That means that if I don't know much about your product offering, your price is one of the biggest things I take into account when deciding how good it is and whether or not to buy.

If you put a cup of coffee in my mind as something with which I should compare your product in such a way as to suggest that my coffee is insignificant, I immediately think of your product as insignificant. If you then go on to tell me that your price is lower than the price of my insignificant coffee, I think of your good/service as lesser.

> You'll be spending upwards of 40 minutes of your life watching this thing

I view it as investing 40 minutes of my life on top of the $2. There's so much of the free "hilarious, must watch" links to click that I won't even spend 1 cent unless I'm damn sure it's worth it. Not that I'm defending $10 lattes anyway but they are at least 99% predictable.

You know, that is a similar argument used by people to justify piracy; "I don't know if it's good, so why should I pay for it?"

And still they pirate it, watch or play it for free, and are entertained for X period of time. Or not, but even so, their time has been spent, and their money hasn't.

Even so, $2 isn't a huge loss if what you bought turns out to not have been worth it. And if you worry about the 40 minutes lost, then you need to learn to relax. Time wastage is not a bad thing per se.

I wouldn't call it an argument to justify piracy but rather an excuse. The idea a lot of times is "I don't want to pay so I'll justify my behavior by telling people it's a political/ideological statement".

Furthermore, the predictability of coffee versus entertainment is not a good comparison. When you buy a movie or book or video game or something you're not guaranteed to like the product. But no one is forcing you to buy it either. So to take it free and then say "oh, didn't like it, not paying" is the lamest thing in the world and I'd be willing to bet that if you could drink coffee before you bought it (so you can decide whether it's "worth paying for") there'd be rampant coffee piracy. You're really not guaranteed to like anything you buy but if it comes in the form of a digital file suddenly people feel like it's alright to "try before you (maybe never) buy". The reason why movie trailers, singles that get played on the radio, 30 second song/video clip previews, and game demos exist is so you can see if what you're thinking of buying fits your taste. Needing the entire thing to decide sounds like such an excuse to justify not paying.

People do need to relax like you said. Have we shoved our heads so far up our asses that 40 minutes spent watching a bad TV show is a sin? I can get on board with the whole being efficient thing but there comes a point where worrying about whether consuming some media for 40 minutes will waste your time is actually worse than wasting the 40 minutes itself. (And can't we tell if we don't like something long before the 40 minute mark? I mean, we can quit watching/listening/whatever when we figure out we don't like something)

40 minutes watching TV may be less relaxing than 40 minutes of doing nothing at all. So you've spent $2 to decrease the amount of relaxation you could have accomplished in those 40 minutes. "Learn to relax" is a valid suggestion. "Learn to relax by watching TV" is not.

I also believe that it's about the lack of predictability much more than anything else, which is why I still believe we'll end up with a form of try-before-you-buy with variable pricing eventually.

Perhaps we should replace the "Please rate us on the AppStore" notifications with something like:

    Did you get more enjoyment out of this app so far than: 
    * a latte ($1.95)
    * a pizza ($4.95)
    * a movie ($9.95) or 
    * a season box ($29.95)?

That's a damn good idea. I'd pay money to get that sort of feedback on something I create.

You have pretty cheap consumables whereever you live!

This would be amazingly hard to translate and adapt for various places where AppStore is present (the whole world).

I bet it would be pretty quick to crowdsource that info.

That's exactly the point. I think the $2 are an investment into the quality of the thing I'm about to consume, and if I'm going to invest the 40 minutes anyway I'd like to make this little extra investment to support the makers. Of course that's no guarantee I will like it, but you take that kind of risk with every new thing you buy.

Thank you for pointing that out. Sometimes I feel as though movies should have a negative cost because they're generally not worth the time required to watch them.

And then that quickly turns into a argument supporting piracy.

This is pretty much why I don't watch TV or films anymore really. I invest time and all to often it's utter crap.

One big difference is, nobody selling coffee is competing against a vast, easily accessible sea of competitors handing out coffee for free.

The transaction cost is also much lower - you don't have to fill out a form, you dig into your pocket and fish out some change. Your pocket carries change without any need for a confirmation email. And you can easily pick between the $5 coffee, the $2 coffee or the $0.50 caffeinated can of sugar water. But however small, these still involve the exchange of money.

The analogy would work if at every door in your city, there was someone handing out possibly mediocre coffee to every morning commuter. Along with a flyer containing some offers that you don't have to take but maybe would consider reading while on the train. You can imagine what this is going to do to the business of the really nice couple who hand-select their beans from fair-trade producers in Brazil and just invested in a $15,000 espresso machine.

I think his point and yours are both fair enough. At the end of the day though, whether it's $2, £2, or £2k, it's really just a matter of ROI. The latte comparison is somewhat easy: most people like it, and it's (relatively) cheap. The argument at a more fundamental level doesn't extrapolate very well, though - I think it only survives on latte for the aforementioned reasons.

I don't pay $2 an episode on DVD - and then it's mine for years. Six disc boxsets of 18-20 episodes are going for 12-15 quid. The download should not be more expensive than the physical item - it shouldn't even be in the same ballpark.

It's very difficult to believe that, when you average it out, the fair market price for a movie download is $2. It's, to all intents and purposes free once you've paid for the cost of production.

Now coffee, by comparison, is relatively expensive to make and transport than then pay those little coffee house people to turn the machine on for you. There are a lot more palms to grease in the coffee business. It's not even close to comparable.

And it's not as if coffee sets the price at $2/40 minutes pleasure anyway. You only need a few cups of coffee for the entire day, and then you've got the rest of the experience - at least if you're in a decent coffee shop.

It just doesn't make any sense - the things shouldn't, on what it costs to make, be that expensive. And in terms of pleasure the equation's massively inaccurate.

This has bothered me too. The other day, I was talking about email (fastmail, rackspace etc) with a couple of colleagues - both of them scoffed at the idea of paying for email. The very same people who go to starbucks every single day, dropping 5$ for a cup of latte. Why wouldn't they pay for something as fundamental, and as important for email? I truly couldn't understand. Everything from banking to dating, lives in our email and yet they wouldn't pay. If this is the case with people who work in the tech world, and understand privacy etc very well, what about a "normal" person?

Perhaps the answer is that people have gotten used to everything being "free" on the internet. May be they think that the cable (or internet) bill is more than enough, and they are entitled to get everything for free online, including movies etc?

I feel that I was a bit late to the game at 24 to buy my own domain and host my email. For one, I can stick to atleast the address for my life unless, you know, the ICANN is overthrown or something. Having something professional costs way less than any of the impulse purchases that people around me make yet they scoff at the idea of paying $10 for domain and w/e else for email. You can also set it up for free if you spend a few hours on google.

It did take me time, but I have realized that emails and email addresses are NOT going away anytime soon, might as well have something permanent.

It's not paying for email, it's paying for a particular kind of privacy: you're basically paying to prevent software from reading your email to better match ads. To me that is not worth much. I don't care if software reads my email, and I don't care if my email interface contains a few text ads.

As far as I can tell, paying for your email does not get you any real increase in privacy. Rackspace staff can read your email just as easily as Google staff can read Gmail (it's strictly against company policy in both places, but still technically possible). If the FBI issues a subpoena for your email, both Rackspace and Google will be legally compelled to give it up.

I agree that paying for email does not increase privacy. I have a domain and pay for hosting and email on it, and the staff there can just as easily read it as Google staff could read gmail.

However, there is a difference from an organizational pressure perspective: with gmail, I'm not really Google's customer. With hosting, I am the host provider's customer. As a result, the nature of the business relationship is more clearly defined and they have less incentive to play fast-and-loose with the "rules". (Excluding legal mandates, unethical employees, etc. which are an equal exposure either way)

The reason I pay for email is that the free services all do a poor job with their Web UIs in my opinion. Putting things like links to their other services, toolbars for their social networks, etc. in my email application is unwanted.

It is more than just privacy.

When we don't pay for email, we are at the mercy of free email providers. They can terminate our account for any reason, without no appeal whatsoever. It has happened before.

Email is fundamental, it is the one foundation on top of which we do things on the internet. Forgot password, bookings, registration on a new site - every single one of them is via email. And most of us happily trust Google (or Microsoft etc) with our email, without paying a penny. I'm not saying these companies aren't great, or willfully do something bad with our data (they won't - if anything, gmail is really nice, except for UI) - It is just that they have no incentive to help us when we get in trouble (account getting hacked, for example). After all, they are a business, not charity.

Email is just one example. It surprises me that people wouldn't pay for important things (even when they are cheap) but would happily pay for overpriced coffees, popcorns in theaters (huge rip off) etc. Same with those who buy only "branded" items, even though many times the non-branded items are nearly as good and are cheaper.

It's not an issue of feeling entitled to service. If there were no free email providers, or if the paid services were noticeably better on any of the axes I care about, then I would be happy to switch to a paid provider. But gmail exists, as do scores of other excellent providers with stellar reputations, and I don't see a point in paying a premium for equivalent service just for the sake of being a paying customer.

>both of them scoffed at the idea of paying for email.

The problem is? google provides better email service, for free[1], than most pay providers. I am /exactly/ the sort who would run a for-pay email service; I wrote my first sendmail .mc before I was old enough to drink, (and that was back when sendmail was still a thing) and I've been maintaining mailservers longer than that. Also, I have a reasonable reputation for transparency.

But I don't think I could compete with Google. I mean, sure, I could get you a much more private service, but for what people expect to pay, I just couldn't do as good of a job of actually maintaining the mailservers as google does. Hell, even if I could charge 1998 rates, like $5/box/month (which I can't) I don't think I could do a better job of that than google.

If you really want the full privacy benefits of having private email (e.g. being able to know something is /really deleted/ when you delete it,) you have to run your own mail server. Doing this well is a fair spot of work, probably more than $5/day worth of work (I mean, if you are compensated well enough that a latte is worth $5 more than a drip coffee with milk made at home. It is a non-zero amount of work, and you do have some sort of 'emergency' work every couple of years; something that is broken that is causing mail to bounce. Personally, I rate 'emergency' work as more expensive than the kind I can do on my own schedule.)

[1]I mean, in exchange for whatever monetary value they can extract from running their automated advertising tools against your data.

You might have been able to get my business if it wasn't too late - I've gone with fastmail.

The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means.

>The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means.

Google exposes the mail through IMAP, no? why don't you use your own mail client with the google backend?

I've written support software for and modified open-source pop3 and IMAP software, and I've gotten partway through writing my own SMTP server, but I never even /considered/ writing a client interface for mail. If I'm providing mail service, I will provide you mail service, and give you smtp and IMAP (encrypted, of course) interfaces to that mail service. Heck, I might support an open-source imap to web interface, too, but the way I see it? running the mailserver and running the mail client are two very different things. If you primarily choose your mail provider based on the provided web interface, you are probably not going to be a good customer for me, because I consider the mail client to be outside of my domain as a SysAdmin. Also, I come from an era where web-gateways to IMAP were considered some kind of cruel joke.

I'm not saying that interfaces are unimportant, but it's a very different product than just managing mail servers. I'm good at managing mail servers. I have a difficult time coming up with someone who would be less qualified to write a custom web interface. (I mean, unless the current open-source imap-to-web interfaces are good enough; I can manage open-source software just fine; I'm just not a UI kind of person.)

Personally, I wouldn't expect the sorts of companies that are best at running mail servers to also be the best at writing mail clients. That, and I wouldn't want to give up control of my client to other people, because a lot of what makes up a user interface is personal preference. That, and there's no real advantage to having the same people run the server and the client; IMAP is well-standardized.

Actually people are making a wise financial decision when they do this -- email service is something that you cannot stop or easily change overnight; coffee is something you can. If and when they are in a serious financial crunch (and even the moderately rich worry about this happening), they can stop spending the $5 on the latte, but if they used a paid email service they cannot stop spending the money on the email service because it is usually very critical to a lot of their future. With free and relatively good email services like YMail, GMail and Outlook, it doesn't make sound financial sense to spend money on a paid service that is critical to your daily life that you cannot cut it off when you are in a financially bad situation. Also the same people would go for free coffee if someone did offer free coffee daily at the same quality level as their favorite latte shop.

That's somewhat backwards.

If you've told everyone your email address is myname@somefreeprovider.com, it's almost impossible for you to move for whatever reason. The switching costs are actually very high. If it's myname@mydomain.com, you can move your email provider at will, and you're unlikely to ever be forced to pay more than $10 per year, which is pocket money for most folk.

Actually, I don't know of a good solution to running your own email addresses on a custom domain that doesn't involve paying a little money.

So yes, if you don't mind having someone elses company name in your main identity on the web, that's fine (along with all the portability tie in problems and privacy). On the other hand if you want me@myname.com then you'll probably be shelling a little money out.

And fastmail provides other services too, that people might be more used to paying for, e.g. static webhosting with webdav support for upload, custom dns control. Contacts accessible through ldap, distribution lists, sms, detailed control over login including OTPs etc.

I've switched recently and do not regret it. It gives me a lot of the flexibility I had years back when I ran my own mail server, and none of the massive pain.

I think that how much exactly 2 pounds are worth is something so subjective that I agree that the original rant feels childish.

From an advertising standpoint, the latte example makes sense, because it's something a large chunk of people (in the US/UK) can make a quick mental comparison. In Italy I have seen many similar examples comparing goods and services to an espresso, or the price of going out for a pizza.

It's a given that for many people the 2 bucks spent on a Latte are completely worth it: I don't see why anyone should find the comparison offensive.

It's not like someone is criticising how you spend your 2 pounds. It's advertising. If you don't find the argument valid, just keep enjoying your Latte, and life goes on as usual.

The OP confused the argument. It isn't either-or. Most folks can have both!

> but they don't even think about spending $10 at the coffee shop

Sure those people exist, but don't forget that not all are like that. I wouldn't even consider spending that much at a coffee shop, especially not regularly.

He said 2GBP, not 2USD. This kinda suggests he might also live in Europe...

$3.04 as of today's conversion rate.

But.. you know, Europe is not a country, he could live in hawaii for that matter. Netflix is unfortunately not available in the majority of european countries.

It is in the UK, the only place where that currency is used.

People sweat giving their credit card information to every random site they have at least $2 of interest in. Sites get hacked, reducing the odds that you're one of the random victims is probably the best you can do to reduce your risk.

Meanwhile, that local coffee shop will probably still be standing there in a week, doesn't hold your card info (just swipes it temporarily), and you can go back and pound them in person if they do something wrong.

Most of the time when I hesitate over something like that it's because of the DRM. As Randall Munroe put it, "In the end, you'll be a criminal anyway."

I thinks it's kind of value psychology, everyone got stuck in their minds that if there're so much shitty content online for free - good content equaly should be free (however no logic or connection here), and when we talk about coffee, barely anyone can think of many posibilities to get it for free...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com