Comment by SteveNuts
2 months ago
There must be a reason someone hasn't invented a browser plugin for microtransactions on the internet?
I'll gladly pay 25 cents to read an article from a news website, but I won't subscribe for a whole year for $25+, especially when there's dozens/hundreds of sites.
Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem, but that could be mitigated by depositing say $15 at a time and deducting from the balance each time.
This is the great white whale of the internet. A platform for this would clearly be a thing of value, but extremely difficult to do because you need to booststrap a two-sided market in an environment where all the existing established players are incentivized NOT to participate.
Blendle did exactly this, actually. With similar pricing. For many years. It generates very little money but maybe that’s because German/Dutch news isn’t valuable.
At first I scoffed at this idea, but then I had a tangential thought: what keeps me shopping at Amazon or ebay all the time instead of smaller retailers? It's not product quality or selection, that's for sure. It's mostly the friction of signing up for another site, entering my payment and shipping information, adjusting my mail filters, etc. What would really help would be complete automation of this process, where I click "Checkout", my browser goes through its workflow of asking me once if I approve, and a day or two later I get my product. So I guess if you had payment processing built into the user agent then you can have all the micro transactions you want.
So what's keeping this from being a reality?
There are integrations like checkout with Amazon, Shop, Google Pay, etc that do this.
No idea but I'd use it over maintaining 15 subscriptions
> Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem,
Card transaction fees here in Norway can be extremely low if the merchant uses BankAxept, much lower than Visa, Mastercard, etc. And it even works if the network is down.
https://bankaxept.no/en/services/backup-solution
This is something I explain too. I’d gladly pay maybe 10 cents for IntelliJ but it’s the Pirate Bay otherwise. Just set the pricing appropriately. It costs $0 to make a copy so it’s an infinite margin. Same with most SaaS. About 20 cents per month should be the maximum. Any more than that is gouging.
Hiring engineers is even worse. I think about $20/hr should suffice but there’s this big fuss kicked up about “they’re not willing to pay enough”.
I mean the alternative is they get nothing from me at all once I hit their paywall..
And I don't think ad revenue is paying the bills so I'm not sure what other options there are. I just went to a few major news sites:
Wapo: $120/yr Reuters: $45/yr WSJ: $349/yr NYT: $195/yr Bloomberg: $299/yr
That's just a few. Is it better if I just choose one and only get my news from a single site? Or should it really cost thousands of dollars per year to be informed?
Yeah, that's what I mean, it's either 10 cents or 0 cents, so they should just charge everyone 10 cents to capture the marginal value from me.
The problem with microtransactions is, who defines the minimum unit? Instead of just publishing a $0.25 article, a site could publish a $1.25 five-part series, each part duly ending in its own cliffhanger. And they'll do it as long as enough readers still keep reading it. (It doesn't matter how you'd prefer to read it, it only matters what they can get away with before profits start to decline. And it wouldn't have to be as drastic as this example, it would be a more subtle trend of less information expressed in more words over time.)
Also, with 10x or more value on each reader's copy of the article, say hello to more stringent copyright enforcement (either legally or socially: how dare you replicate the work of this beloved blogger and deprive them of income!). And the complete death of independent search engines.
I just don't see ubiquitous microtransactions leading to anywhere good on a social level. And of course, without a ban on advertising (however that's supposed to work), you'd just end up with sites full of ads on top of microtransactions.