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Comment by DarkTree | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. What I took away from this article is that, despite everyone being frustrated by the inoculation of ads into our beloved 'free' services, we are still not frustrated enough to actually pay the premium to eliminate these annoyances. It's the old cliche, "you can't have your cake and eat it too".

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Or it says that there's an untapped opportunity for low friction, micro-transactions instead of "ads" or full-fledged purchases on unknown websites.

It's clear by now that ads are for lazy. If your plan is to monetize your site with ads, today just like 10 years ago, you lost.

Edit: surprised by the negativity on her reaction for _hacker_news. She's rebuffed by the $ and time investment for a single song ("unknown website, takes time to create an account, multiply by times she wants to buy a song). As she says:

> and not enough to pay to risk giving my credit card to an unknown third party.

This is a UX challenge, not some morale lecture.

The UX challenged has been solved, though; there are multiple well known websites selling music and which allow you to bundle all songs in a single order. You just can't force the artist to use them.

Yes and no - streaming and iTunes are pretty good for most things "mainstream" music. Soundcloud though: there's no excuse for them at least not to _try_. Just like for her, ads and passive aggressive song selection are killing the experience.

Then for content at large, there's pretty much everything to do. Not surprised if Stripe and ApplePay, both focused on this micro-amount market, take it all.

Microtransactions have a minimum mental cost to the user. This is why even the services that could track your actual consumption and bill you to the penny don't.

If micro transactions break into public awareness it might get significantly better. There could be a joint meter app like mint to track usage. You could just sort by a few things like recent cash flow and trivially manage your transactions at scale. Transactions should be tied directly to user level constructs like playing a song or a period of time in a game. These should have consistent costs so that the user can form reasonable expectations without needing to sign off on every transaction. You don't think about how much water costs every time you use the faucet but you're aware enough not to just leave it on. That's the only mental cost that's ultimately necessary.

What about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453821 then ?

I've been thinking about an idea that would solve this for bloggers and other small-time publishers: Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. They now get to consume as much as they want on those sites.

After they read an article, they can click either a "worth it", "meh" or "garbage" button. At the end of the month, all subscription fees are distributed to each publisher proportional to their "worth it" votes. This will drive up quality. If "garbage" votes are penalized, it will discourage bad content as well as link-baiting, dishonest titles or any other gaming of traffic.

Yeah, except I want to read, say, 6 blogs, and they'll be on four different federations, so I'd have to pay $40-80/month, which I definitively won't.

We're seeing the same problems with all the streaming platforms.

We can all handle 3 or 4 subscriptions. The dollar amount I came up with was an example. A small federation might charge $1. The invisible hand of the free market decides. The federation would fail if it charged more than the amount of good content it produced. An author could also syndicate her/his content to more than one federation.

If we're not willing to pay for good content, i.e. the writer's livelihood, then we're all fucked. If you read my other comment herein[1], you'd know we're all paying anyway, even though we are fooled into thinking it is free.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

I'm willing to pay for good content. But I also live in a place where a good software developer (net) salary is €14k/year, and that's still much higher than the average national salary, so I'm wary of these subscription services. They usually end up with a single price (since geo restrictions work poorly on the web), which the invisible hand pushes up to accommodate the disposable income of wealthier places.

As bad as advertisement is, it still helped subsidize my reading when I couldn't afford to pay for it, while the subscription model would create a tiered Internet for the more and less well-off.

So would you be in favor of the advertising business model for books? All books would be free, but there would be ads on the cover and interspersed throughout the book, sometimes on separate pages, sometimes in boxes between paragraphs. There would be product placements, as well as “native ads” which appear to be integral chapters of the book.

What if authors who refused ads just couldn’t compete against the deluge of free books?

What if books had a way of tracking who read them, and this previously private information was sold on the information markets?

No, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't like if most authors published in "book subscription services" either - ads might actually be less bad.

Thankfully, they don't.

You're thinking of flattr, I think

Actually, it's different. See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960

he with the biggest voting ring wins

Ehh… no. The subscribers in the ring would only be gaming its own payments, no one else's. They'd be paying themselves, less the federation's operating fees.

> Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. They now get to consume as much as they want on those sites.

Federation isn't a very catchy name. Maybe you can think of it as a bunch of strings, all wound together. Like a cord, or... or like a Cable! Yeah, call it "Cable".

Exactly. Except that this supposed ratings system could potentially have a bigger impact on quality than the cable model, though I'm not entirely convinced.

I assume most channels make their income almost entirely off of advertisers, and channels which are not watched as frequently are presumably not paid as much. In the proposed system I would assume the idea is to decrease/remove advertising and content providers would be given a share of the revenue based on user ratings? Seems interesting, but probably not terribly practical. It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly.

@Roodgorf:

> It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly.

Avoiding clickbait and rewarding actual quality is the point of the simple rating system. The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further.

Clickbait happens today because of the advertising model, where the click not the content generates revenue.

Sure, but the level of responsibility required by the user as a curator doesn't seem like it would hold past a critical mass. The insane amount of reposts that Buzzfeed-esque garbage gets just isn't all that encouraging to me. Short of the decidedly undemocratic method of only counting a certain group of users' ratings, I'm just not confident it would change things at scale.

> The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further.

But the reason that clickbait works, is that people like clickbait. So I'm not sure you'd get much success with getting people to rate them "garbage" when they like them. Sure, maybe not en masse, but on an article-by-article level, people do like clickbait.

> But the reason that clickbait works, is that people like clickbait.

No, the reason that clickbait works is because the clickbait itself (which is the thing which is presented before you click the link) looks like something that the user is likely-enough to like that they are willing to click it to find out.

The whole reason that its called clickbait is that that impression is often deceptive. So, getting feedback of the quality of the target of clickbait links would be potentially useful in weeding out the garbage.

> No, the reason that clickbait works is because the clickbait itself (which is the thing which is presented before you click the link) looks like something that the user is likely-enough to like that they are willing to click it to find out.

I think at this point if a user clicks on a link titled "12 Best Disney Princesses", they know exactly what they're going to get—and they click on it, because that's what they want to see.

#2 Our users punish clickbait by refunding

In 2015, sometimes it feels like the best example of modern journalism is Buzzfeed. Go to any journalism conference, and their logo will be on many, many slides. As a journalist today you might feel that it’s more valued to write clickbaity headlines than to write pieces of well-researched journalism. But, Buzzfeed doesn’t work if people need to pay per article.

At Blendle we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print. People will only pay for content they find worth their money. So in Blendle, only quality journalism starts trending.

From: https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

I swear I remember some bank or company generating single-use credit card numbers specifically for this kind of concern.

Did it fizzle out due to lack of use, or improved security on the banks' part, or am I just another victim of the Mandela/Berenstain effect?

You can still buy virtual Visa cards from various vendors: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=virtual+visa+card

My bank still does this, and someone else said Citi does too.

a block-chained digital currency would work pretty well...

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