Hacker News Reader

Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

>How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?

Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )

Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.

View on HN

I don't think Contributor is intended to directly benefit sites at all.

If you use Contributor, the site receives $0.00136* and a blank ad is shown, paid for by you.

If you don't use Contributor, the sites receives $0.00136 and an Initech ad is shown, paid for by Initech.

It will make no direct difference in revenue for the site, but hopefully they can get indirect benefits from people being less inclined to use ad blockers.

* $2 CPM at 68% revenue share

How much of that revenue did Google take? Is it a 80/20 revenue split or what?

My point is the middle-man must be paid but if there is no middle-man you keep 100% of the profit.

At 68% revenue share it's a 68/32 split.

I don't think that's how it works. It sounds like the CPM for a particular user's visits is determined by that user -- by the amount they choose to contribute per month and the number of pages on participating sites they view.

So, depending on a site's audience and content, it seems like they could end up with a CPM that is much higher (or lower) than with ads.

What you describe is exactly how my product works (FairBlocker). We split up a user's chosen subscription among sites where they block ads... I imagine it is what Contributor is doing, too. The way it is working out for us is that a ~$6.5 / month subscription is equivalent to a ~$12 net CPM, though it varies depending on how heavy a browser the given user is. So, higher than what many small sites normally make, but also lower than many video ads or top-tier sites with their own sales teams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com