Comment by stcredzero
8 years ago
The vast majority of users are far more ok with being shown ads than paying the equivalent of the cost of the ad to have it go away.
What if the ad were not in the picture at all, and you had low friction micropayments? There are YouTube channels which eschew advertisements and get most of their money from Patreon instead. There are other channels that have been demonetized against their will and have gone this route as well. It's workable, and yet, Patreon is far from the lowest friction it could achieve.
If there was some party able to make micropayments work, and able to make them not ever work, it would be Google.
> What if the ad were not in the picture at all, and you had low friction micropayments?
Again, people don't want to pay for content. Between one website asking you to pay $0.10 to view an article, and another offering it for free but showing ads, people will pick the free one.
And Google has been trying: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/google-co...
But it is really hard to convince people to pay, when they can get it for free.
You wouldn't pay 10 cents though. You'd pay 1 one thousandth of a cent.
I could absolutely image people being willing to pay 1 one thousandth of a cent to read an article.
> I could absolutely image people being willing to pay 1 one thousandth of a cent to read an article.
Oh, no, way more than that. Take a look at CPMs and ad costs. If your claim was true, and an article had 5 ads, every impression would cost 1/20,000 of a cent, and the CPM would be 5 cents.
Actual CPMs are a few dollars per thousand impressions, up to 10+ in developed markets. Which means that in the US, and article with, say, 5 ads would probably require you to pay 5 cents to view that article.
Take a look at the articles of ad-paid publications: you're more likely to see 10+ ads per page.
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There is no way in hell I'd automatically (or anyone I know for that matter) pay for something without having some idea of the transaction occurring even if it is 1 millionth of a cent.
That is the real problem with this strategy and why it won't work. Now if I had a $5 per month allocation for instance, that I could distribute in this way and then after that runs out all other access is free then that might work. But the first time some autobot or something goes rogue and triggers a billion/trillion payments against your account, this entire house of cards would fall down.
And Google has been trying:
Not quite the same thing. It's one thing to be extorted by ads in order to pay. There's a lot of content for which advertisement doesn't work, so there's no extortion to shut off ads. Google doesn't want to facilitate that content for some reason. It wants to squash it.
> Google doesn't want to facilitate that content for some reason. It wants to squash it.
Isn't it providing more tools for easy media subscription? I used it to subscribe to the NYT pretty quickly not too long ago.
But hey, if you really believe that there's a significant business opportunity there, go do it!
What if automatic micropayments were made on content request? Directly from the browser.
Nobody would pay for them.
You're not getting to the real problem: if a user can see an article with ads for free, or pay 10 cents, that user will most likely opt for the free version.
And you can't compete with free.
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Blendle tries but is struggling. It does not seem to work, not enough subscribers, unhappy papers ( uhh, advertisers ).