Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails.
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
If it isn't conscious site by site, you're not volunteering your payment data to the site: you're giving it to a middle man.
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails.
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
If it isn't conscious site by site, you're not volunteering your payment data to the site: you're giving it to a middle man.
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
1 reply →
Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
1 reply →
There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...