Amazon aws and related services can charge you a rate per email, or per unit time of computation, so why can't news sites just charge you $0.01 to read an article, or even half that?
Fees? Sure, a service might charge you a small rate per email, but are they going to charge you for just one email at a time? Probably not. But that could easily be a problem for a news site.
I guess there would need to be a 3rd party or even in house token system where you buy something like 1000 token for a dollar. And you can spend x tokens to view an article. Online advertising like Google ads is essentially doing this for ad views/clicks
Yeah, I'm surprised Paypal has fallen so much. They were a pioneer in online payments, they used to offer Patreon-style subscriptions that could be integrated on any website, they'd automatically transfer the monthly fee to your account, but damn the interface was extremely confusing and buggy, I wonder if it got any better...
I suppose a news site could offer monthly billing based on usage rather than a flat fee. Surely someone has tried it. But then, consider all the pay sites that are linked here on HN that you might only look at occasionally.
Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates.
Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do it for AWS as they aggregate many small charges into one bill, resulting in the service cost not being dwarfed by the payment processing cost.
I doubt that any transaction costs some percentage of the transaction's value. The true cost shouldn't differ whether I charge $1 or $10 (maybe large transactions incur extra costs for security measures). It's just a convenient way of pricing for the credit card company.
That's pricing in the risk of taking the charge. The $10 transaction is 10x as risky to a credit network's bottom line as the $1 transaction. That's also why the debit percentage is lower.
Many of the entities that process transactions do fraud monitoring. Oftentimes, the fraud monitoring has different levels of time spent depending on amount: under $10 and the system just ignores it, under $1000 and a computer uses some heuristics, and above that, it might be flagged for human review. These aren't exactly 5% of the cost of the transaction, but they do show that the cost to process the transaction does increase as the amount increases, and fraud prevention, detection, and responsibility is how companies justify charging a percentage on a transaction.
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transaction cost to manage with the CC, and you don't have the friction of purchasing. The challenge here is like any two sided marketplace - you need consumers to pay, and then you need content providers to sign on to get enough on offer for it to be worth it for both sides.
Kind of? Doesn't Flattr have you choose up front how you want to distribute your subscription? I was imagining a system where you don't have an upfront choice to make, but that as you consume content the subscription is drawn down.
That is how most toll systems work. You load up a balance on the card $10/$20 and it deducts every time you cross a checkpoint.
The difference between this and a micropayment platform would be the fees. In the toll system, the fees are paid once. With a micropayment platform, the fees would be per transaction.
There can be a "self hosted" version of such a platform that say each content-provider can host but I am not sure it will work out against the cost of maintaining it includes much more than just hosting (securty, auditing, refunds, taxes etc).
I have Blendle along with subscribing to a number of independent outlets, and really appreciate it. I don't want to buy a sub for all the newspapers I might read and it saves a hell of lot of time worrying about whether I've already read too many articles for the month. It's a few cents per read, and as I don't have all day to browse the papers anyway it is very good value. I hope they, or someone like them, really succeed in the long-term. It feels good to be giving money to journalists.
This is really just circumventing the problem. As an end user, I don't want my money to be split up in to all of these random pools that private companies have control over.
That's also so they can deny refunds for cash balances — once you pay money to their company, you may never receive it back under any circumstances. That way they can 'refund' you games at any time, but not ever have to record a cash transaction to do so. This is, not coincidentally, universal among online video game and microtransaction stores, with the singular exception of Apple who does not compel all purchases through an intermediate currency balance.
Steam only requires the Steam Wallet for microtransactions. Games and DLC are usually bought "directly". Refunds go to the original payment method, unless you explicitly request that it should go to the wallet.
> with the singular exception of Apple who does not compel all purchases through an intermediate currency balance.
Bitpass was an early micropayment startup that was around for a few years. Beanz and Flooz were late dotcom era "micropayment" startups (they were more like gift certificates really) that were very well funded and failed terribly. More recently Kim Dotcom tried it with Bitcache. There are significant problems with the model.
From what I can tell as a lay observer, such schemes are likely illegal in the US. Excepting certain entities with specific legal carveouts or very careful navigation of the legal system such as Paypal and Venmo, every scheme that I am aware of in the US is just maintaining an account with a single provider that you charge and draw down for services from that single provider (e.g. Walmart could allow you to make a Walmart account that you can use to pay for goods from Walmart). Circumstantial evidence leads me to believe that the two key aspects that are illegal are: withdrawal (recovering your balance into a fungible form) and 3rd party payment (account is managed by a different legal entity than the entity being paid) with the latter being the more impactful of the two. The reason the lack of 3rd party payment is deeply problematic is that without 3rd party payment the account must be associated with the ultimate provider of the goods/services, so the consumer can not consolidate or rebalance their funds. Therefore, it is highly undesirable for a consumer to maintain a rolling balance which is the only reason for such a scheme in the first place.
As secondary evidence for it being illegal in the US, the scheme you are proposing is pretty much exactly what WeChat and Alipay do in China. It is also exactly the problem that Paypal and Venmo were made to solve, but for some reason they chose much more convoluted and restricted solutions even though from a technical standpoint it is harder to do what they actually did rather than the absolutely trivial technical problem of the fully featured solution which just manages account balances and transfers between them, a literal CS 101 type of technical problem.
Forgive me if this is a naive question, but how is this different from Patreon, but dolled out in smaller ad hoc amounts? Is the legal distinction because with Patreon each user chooses the distribution ahead of time? Couldn't this be worked around by creating a white list of publishers you are willing to support that approves some set limit or transaction amount ahead of time? So as an example I whitelist a newspaper, and agree to pay $.005 per article view?
This is the answer I envision exactly. The NMA simply needs to offer an annual solution. I think $50 to $100. I have always wondered why it hasn't been done before now also. They complain constantly about people reading their work for free, yet provide no honest mechanism for payments...and expect people to sign up for monthly charges to read one article. Why would anyone pay 5x, 10x to read on article in a paper they know they will not need to read again if they are just researching a particular topic and it comes up in their search results? The rest of the paper is probably dross and yet you are expected to pay for the entire thing and pay for ads etc that have no relevance to you. The quality of the paper would be forced to improve under such a system and they could no longer hide behind forced sub revenues.
I don't think this is inherently the issue. News sites could aggregate charges and bill you at the end of the month.
I think the bigger issues is that if I see an article presented to me as shared on social media or in search results I assume it is free access. I click in, and if they ask for payment, it's a turnoff since I thought it was going to be free. Also, I don't like how credit card information can be continuously used by the organization.
I want to be able to hand an authorization for a single one-time payment to any organization and not an authorization to charge however much they want, whenever they want.
That goes for hotels too. I want to be able to say "Here's my credit card" [but I don't authorize more than $130/day].
Doesn't directly solve the root problem, but I use https://privacy.com for all of my online purchases. It lets you create multiple virtual card numbers, so every site I pay, I give a different card number. If any single site gets hacked, I can disable just that card. And each card can have a spending limit per transaction/day/month/year. Or, you can make the card a "burner" card that automatically deactivates after the first transaction.
Edit: I suppose that doesn't work as well for hotels specifically, at least in terms of giving a card for incidentals. Since it isn't a physical card, not sure if the receptionist would be keen on entering a digital card like that? But I've definitely used it to pay for rooms online.
I suspect there are some regulatory hurdles if the held money can be spent with companies other than the one that takes the deposit. You bleed into banking rules.
Other companies also do aggregate payments (I assume for the same reason). If you buy several things from Apple (apps, subscriptions, or other things) you'll get a single charge 1 or 2 weeks later with all of your purchases.
People resent that the credit card companies take 3%, but it takes more than just 'transfer money from this account to that' but also dealing with fraudulent buyers and sellers.
In the case of you visiting a site and feeling you didn't get 0.005 cents worth of value it is very clear that somebody could perceive it was unfair. In the advertising economy, however, no one party sees the whole transaction so rip-offs can be pervasive and people don't know.
Accounting, transaction reversibility, and taxation.
In real life if you want to give somebody a dime, you just do it. But online you have to query your account to make sure you have enough money to make the payment, reserve the funds so the payment can go through without stopping other pending transactions, pass it the amount through some infrastructure where you can dispute the charge at a later date (if needed), and you also have to make sure the government is able to track your transactions for tax and anti-money laundering purposes.
For Amazon it's a different situation because they're charging you for a service based on usage. They have given you an account number and they handle all the accounting on their end. It's not a general payments system.
I get stock quotes with 15 minute delay. If I want real time, I am charged 2 cents. At the end of the month all the 2 cent charges are summed and added to my monthly fee.
News sites could easily do something similar
Yes, and as a 3rd party service would be great too. I can login with Facebook, Google, etc. It would be great if I can just pay 1/2 cent to read 1 article vs signing up for monthly or yearly subscriptions. And I can choose pay with service a, service b or service c. They should all adhere to a single standard so any new service can just plug into it. Why should I have to choose only between ads or some big monthly/yearly subscription?
But people into finance are already pretty much into money...
I still view the internet as something that should be free and any transaction pisses me off. No matter how cheap it is I will avoid having to pay unless one of the conditions are met:
- I really need the article in question
- It's something substantial that I really think is worth money (e.g. a book)
For example, if I spend 2 cent on an article that turns out to be clickbait I will be royally pissed. Which I acknowledge is totally absurd because 2 cents affects my financial situation in no way whatsoever. But this is not how it feels to me. Logically I shouldn't even think about it at all, it's not worth even thinking about. But this is not how this works.
I'm pretty sure that people dealing with stocks are generally less bothered having to deal in stuff because they are in the middle of the economic model (it makes them money as well as takes it) whereas I'm purely at the end of it, only spending.
Yes, It would be nice to enslave a few AI's to run a free web, but come the revolution when they control the food synthesizers....
I know the stock quote company pays a fee to get real time quotes(RTQ) (versus the 15 minute delayed free quotes), so it is fair for me to pay a fractional fee. In the old day I would phone the broker and he was get me the RTQ and I could also get the bid-ask array. Now lots faster and easier. The phone brokers got old and died off, mush like the classified ads were mugged by Craigslist and the internet killed display advertising. These were all paid, the papers were paid, you want free - eat some more ads.
I do not pay for clickbait. I would hit the roof if I clicked for a RTQ and got an ad how to get rid of my wrinkles or to manscape my groin - so no, these 2 cents fees will get the real goods clicked from the snippet that lets you decide if you can spare the 2 cents.
If you have no job, just spending, the library helps...
People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.
Yeah. For example, thats why people like all-inclusive hotels. The reason is that you dont have to think about the prices all the time. You just go through the package only and thats it.
The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions over one big.
Yes, because they want you to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription and you just want to read one article and maybe never come back to their site. But if I can do a 1-click "pay 1/2 cent" to read the rest of the article that would be totally fair
That's not the only thing. It's the hassle as well.
First they want you to sign up for an account. Give a lot of personal data. Then set up a payment model, often recurring. Just to read one article? No way.
Micropayments will save some of that hassle but I don't want to have an account with every news site linked to by HN.
If the alternative to a x% chance of upselling someoone to a yearly subscription is "read one article and maybe never come back to their site" then the price that the vendor will want to charge for that article is x% of that yearly subscription. You mention 1/2 a cent in multiple comments, but that's not a realistic expectation - if the paywalled sites would offer a per-article payment, they would definitely want to charge much more than that for that single article, closer to a dollar or so. They don't offer per-article pricing because the currently paywalled sites can earn more otherwise - the micropayment challenges aren't relevant, they will not sell their goods so cheaply (as it would devalue and 'cannibalize' their main revenue) even if there was a zero-fee micropayment mechanism.
Half a cent per article is a plausible target for all the weak/cheap sources who can't possibly afford to put up a paywall right now because nobody would pay. It's not going to be used by the currently paywalled sites, their business model relies on getting a not-micro amount from each customer.
The main reason I don't sign up for more paywalled things is not concerns about money, it's sheer inertia. Signing up takes effort, and it's yet another subscription to manage.
That extends to relatively low-friction cases like Patreon. The number of podcasters and bloggers where I've thought, quite earnestly, "I really like what this person is doing, I should kick a few quid their way," and then just not done that is near infinite. And it's never because I was feeling stingy; it's because I couldn't be arsed.
I get this, but also there's a class of things where we know we're constantly being charged by use, and we don't constantly think about it.
Gas, electricity, water are all cases where my use is metered, I _could_ try to micromanage it on a daily basis, but so long as my bills don't vary wildly from month to month, I don't pay especially close attention. To the degree that I self-regulate my use, it's more about the environment than the dollar cost. I don't think about it every time I take a shower or turn up my thermostat.
The amount of online stuff from for-profit institutions I read from month to month doesn't vary that much, and if I knew from habit what the typical range was, I think I could learn to be ok with that. But the current experience, where whenever someone links to something in a _different_ paywall than the ones I'm already in, I do have to think "would it be worth it to pay for this source?" and often the answer is "no".
The difference is that (1) metering is mostly done for limited resources and (2) you don't really have a choice but to not mind for any of the services mentioned. If someone came about and offered a flat-fee electricity connection, the majority would switch in an instant even if their bills remained about the same.
Many utilities in the US have this. The utilities charge a fixed monthly fee based on estimated usage. Each year the amount is adjusted based on the previous year. It's not that popular overall but serves lower income households well.
maybe whats needed is a system that tallies up the sites you've visited and at the end of the month you can just say, allocate 5 bucks among them. Or if you've had a rough month, maybe don't give anything. Maybe you can distribute you payments once a year. Or make slight adjustments to it and not give a site any money if you feel.
There've been several projects that did exactly that. Like Brave with their BAT tokens. But it never took off.
Personally I don't like them because these things don't normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)
Yeah, this is sort of a deal breaker. Another response to my original comment was a link to Flattr and from wikipedia it's a site "that records which websites they frequent and shares this data with Flattr" -- no thanks.
Not Brave itself, but the sites that you visit don't have to give up tracking per se (for participating users, of course). They should have to in order to participate IMO.
Brave will block tracking to some extent but we know it's not perfect.
For the longest time I thought there was just something wrong with me. Rarely would you find a comment in an article about micropayments that pointed out that micropayments sound, stressful!
It causes me anxiety just having to think about having to consider making payments everytime I click on an article, for example, even if it's a tiny $0.01 amount each time.
Really? Rarely? I remember this being one of the few top-billed reasons why micropayments "will never work", to the point where it was the #1 thing I would always have to address in every discussion of our product.
So, on such note; when you turn on the light when entering a room, do you have anxiety thinking about how that costs money? We are constantly making tiny momentary transactions without thinking about it at all: the issue is UI, not transactions.
Because nobody yet built a good implementation of the idea.
There was Flattr, but they pivoted from their original idea because they couldn't make it work for some reason.
It can't be implemented on the level of individual sites - the solution needs to be universal, like Google adding a 'tip' button to Chrome + Play Store payment integration.
Because payments are a for-profit industry. If we had some kind of digital money that could be transferred without any fees (because, say, the infrastructure was operated by the government, under the assumption that a medium of exchange that doesn’t take a few percent off every transaction is a Public Good we should have) then it would be much easier to see if micropayments are actually a thing that anyone is willing to do.
Nothing is stopping the payment provider from taking a percentage. I pay 0.5 cents for an article and service provider takes 0.1 cents. Still $4 RPM for the news site after a 20% fee!
The US already has a government-facilitated money transfer system that was specifically created to make small electronic money transfers accessible for more people.
Nano is a cryptocurrency that is completely feeless. It's the only feeless payment system I know of. (This is not an endorsement, though the handful of transactions I've done with it over the past couple years worked as advertised.)
So, if someone is on their phone and wants to read an article (thus paying 1 cent for it), they need to either open the mining app on their phones, or turn on their computers?
I still think Shirky is pretty much spot-on after a couple of decades. Even when it seemed as if "midi-payments" might be getting some traction in music and apps, they've now mostly turned into either subscriptions, ad-supported, or "free to play." And arguably a bunch of midi-subscriptions (e.g. $1/month) is even worse because enough of those and they add up to a real money leak. For subscriptions, I'd much rather have a $5-15/month that is a sufficient line item that I'll spend the time to consider whether I really want this or not.
Because it’s a pain in the butt. You end up keeping track of who’s charged you what. You end up being a full time accountant and adding a value judgement to every little thing you do. It’s just another thing chipping away at you constantly. Another distraction and another treadmill.
Because a lot of news sites know you're not loading them intentionally in your browser, but landing on them because of shares or search. Meaning you may only see their pages 10x a month or similar even without a paywall.
The hope with the paywall is if you keep seeing it, you'll go ahead and pay to unlock it, and the amount you're paying offsets the transaction fees.
1000 users each paying 20 cents for ten articles (so assuming -double- the rate you propose, and charging only at the end of the monthly billing cycle) is still a loss of likely around 1/4th the revenue even with a cut rate payment provider (due to the large fixed cost of 2-4%). So might make $50. It's -negative- if using something pleasant to integrate with (because they will charge for that convenience with a larger fixed cost, like Stripe, who will charge $.30 + small percentage per charge), unless you work with them to design a new pricing model for you.
Converting 50 of those thousand (so just 5%) of those people to paid users at $5 each is going to be north of $200 you keep, even if you use Stripe and don't negotiate anything.
And for those users that -will- load up a news site intentionally, the economics are even starker; a subscription means you'll likely go to their site, and stay there. Pay-as-you-go pricing incentivizes you to not visit the site, and instead find other, cheaper news sources.
AWS pricing works because of the scale of the resources people tend to use, and that for businesses, using those resources = additional revenue. It is spending money to make money.
Well in a way this actually works.. There's been several sites I'm paying a subscription for because I came across them in some search and found them really good. Like Ars Technica and some local sites. Besides paying for the content I like sponsoring them so they can keep doing the thing they do.
But usually those sites are the ones I open at least once a day to see what's new. I don't want to pay for every clickbait I visit.
The idea is akin to a driver going through a modern toll. They take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill in the mail after looking it up in the state registry. For those who registered (have an express RFID chip or similar), that process is cheaper and you get a cheaper bill that is summed up each month/quarter.
To stay strictly with the analogy, 1) what is our online license plate? 2) how would one send a bill after translating license plate to home address?
To me, these are fundamental web browser capability deficits. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned this and put some HTTP response codes in the registry with a TODO bookmark and never got around to it or something like that. It is possible but we will have to call in the committee.
Hear, hear! I would love to give money to a "read-the-article.com" and have them dole out money on a per-article basis for articles I read online. They can make money on the float.
I subscribed to Medium mostly because I liked the idea of paying writers with money rather than with ads. Very shortly after, I stopped bothering with Medium because it's a pit of eternal clickbait. Pay-per-read sets up bad incentive structures.
I want to pay for the things I want to read in other papers that I don't subscribe to.
Up to $1 or $2 a piece.
I just want it like Blendle used to be that I can get my money back if I jump back out after a few seconds and I want some more choice (travel and fashion isn't exactly my stuff but actively looked for tech stuff to read there and hardly found anything).
There are a lot of complications to this, but I'm optimistic that eventually this will be a more common user experience.
1. Credit card vendors have flat fees that will eat up a whole transaction if it's too small. For instance, strip has a flat 30c fee. This means the only reasonable way to do this is to have a user pre-pay a large sum and reduce from that, or to batch their transactions and extend them some credit. The former dissuades people from making a payment at all, and the latter runs the risk of bounced charges or users never purchasing enough to justify the charge.
2. There is no universal payments API. Browsers are starting to work on this with the w3c web payments standard https://www.w3.org/Payments/ but this is just for user input. You still have to work with companies like Stripe or PayPal to then actually make the charge.
3. Dark patterns are more successful. You see this with a lot of game currencies. By forcing users into larger purchases, you can get them to justify spending more (e.g. bundling multiple items into one package, maybe with "discounts") and if you sell your own currency, you can make the values not add up evenly so that the user has leftover balance that they perceive as being "wasted" unless they buy more.
I work on a web extension that provides a javascript API for making payments using the Bitcoin Lightning network: https://lightningjoule.com/. I really love the possibilities that small payments open up, and have been working to smooth out the UX of having to confirm a payment every time: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/introducing-joule-allowances-2.... However it's still a long way from any mainstream adoption.
Is the Brave browser a pseudo-solution to this problem? It can hold a crypto coin balance and either collect more of it through advertisements or pay it out to publishers like news sites.
Its a few years ago, but when i earned something like $1500 in ads each month, brave paid calculated something around $2. I haven't looked into it since.
Taxes are a big reason. Consider a site in the US with customers in the US.
Quite a few states require you to collect sales tax on sales to customers in those states. Most have thresholds and you only have to collect taxes if you exceed those thresholds, but unfortunately most of those thresholds are of the form sales of at least $D dollars or at least T transactions.
$D is usually reasonably high, like $100k or $200k, but T is often 200.
So 200 people in South Dakota each pay $0.01 for an article on your site generating a whopping $2 in revenue...but you have 200 transactions so you owe sales tax on that $2. Same thing will probably happen in a bunch of other states.
And so there you are, with tiny revenues from many states, but having to register with their tax authorities, having to file tax reports (quarterly in most cases, but I think some may be monthly), pay filing fees in some (which might be more than your revenue in those states!), and of course actually send the tax money.
Now throw in other countries. There is VAT in the EU, for instance. Most countries have VAT thresholds, but those often do not apply to out-of-country sellers, so you might have to deal with VAT for European that comes and buys one of your $0.01 articles.
There are some things that help with this. In the US there is the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement, which is an agreement between about half the states where if an online seller agrees to collect sales tax for all sales in all the participating states (even the ones that they do not meet the thresholds for), the states will pay for the seller to use a service like Avalara or Tax Cloud, which will handle the rate calculations, the filing, and all that at no charge to the seller.
But that only covers about half the states. Those services will handle the rest for you, but not for free, so you can't escape tax pain.
With VAT in EU, there is a thing called VAT MOSS that you can sign up for. You sign up for VAT MOSS in one country (Ireland is a good choice for US businesses), and then you just have to file one quarterly report with them listing your sales in all EU countries and the tax owed, pay that tax to the VAT MOSS country, and that country then distributes their shares to the others.
The VAT situation is considerably nicer than the US sales tax situation, because VAT is per country. I just have to know that a customer is in, say, Germany, to know how much VAT to collect. In the US, the sales tax depends on address. 123 Fake Street in a town can have a different tax rate than 124 Fake Street, and the seller is expected to deal with that.
If instead of charging $0.01 per article you make the site free to users and plaster it with ads and make your money from those ads all those tax issues go away. The money you make from the ads is just ordinary business income, that gets taxes as part of your corporate income tax. The tax is the same regardless of whether someone who saw the ad lived at 123 Fake Street or 124 Fake Street.
You only have to collect state sales tax if you have a taxable nexus in that state (basically, six figure revenue from that state alone in a fiscal year or a physical presence in that state)
I doubt many non-US companies meet this condition in more than a few states. Hell, I doubt many US companies even meet this requirement (nb, that's why a lot of smaller ecommerce stores don't collect tax). That would be a minimum of $5,000,000 in yearly revenue from the US alone - more than enough to assume that they have at least one accountant on payroll to deal with this.
In 2018, in the case South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc. [1] the Supreme Court overturned Quill Corp. v. North Dakota and National Bellas Hess Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Illinois, which were the cases that had previously established that remote sellers without a physical presence in a state could tell the state to shove off if it demanded they collect sales tax (or use tax), and upheld South Dakota's law that required remote sellers to pay tax if they has sales of at least $100k or at least 200 transactions.
A large number of other states have followed South Dakota's lead, and went with $100k or 200 transactions for their sales tax nexus laws.
Albeit a platform could do it for everyone (like Amazon does).
Also I agree you have it better in the USA (even if things are going downhill, especially after 2018 nexus changes), VATMOSS is so bad I'm selling to businesses worlwide + customers from everywhere but Europe.
For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve exactly that.
As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models.
Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics.
Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.
I really like their approach and I paid for Flattr for quite a while when it started. But something big needs to push them to the critical adoption rate. On a number of very techy blog posts, I got... 0 from WebMonetization. And that's on best case audience (coming from HN and tech Reddit).
Part of it may be the mindset of "paying for something = negative" and "getting something = positive." Micropayments maximize the time we spend thinking about the negative part of the transaction. On the other hand, if we wait too long and have a $1000 bill at the end of the year, that may be even more painful than having to think about smaller payments more often. The psychological sweet spot for many things is the once a month subscription.
194 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadNow try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do it for AWS as they aggregate many small charges into one bill, resulting in the service cost not being dwarfed by the payment processing cost.
The difference between this and a micropayment platform would be the fees. In the toll system, the fees are paid once. With a micropayment platform, the fees would be per transaction.
There can be a "self hosted" version of such a platform that say each content-provider can host but I am not sure it will work out against the cost of maintaining it includes much more than just hosting (securty, auditing, refunds, taxes etc).
I see they're moving to a subscription model now too in an attempt to make it more attractive.
Wow, I just realized why Steam does this for in-game purchases.
> with the singular exception of Apple who does not compel all purchases through an intermediate currency balance.
Google Play doesn't have one either, FWIW.
As secondary evidence for it being illegal in the US, the scheme you are proposing is pretty much exactly what WeChat and Alipay do in China. It is also exactly the problem that Paypal and Venmo were made to solve, but for some reason they chose much more convoluted and restricted solutions even though from a technical standpoint it is harder to do what they actually did rather than the absolutely trivial technical problem of the fully featured solution which just manages account balances and transfers between them, a literal CS 101 type of technical problem.
I think the bigger issues is that if I see an article presented to me as shared on social media or in search results I assume it is free access. I click in, and if they ask for payment, it's a turnoff since I thought it was going to be free. Also, I don't like how credit card information can be continuously used by the organization.
I want to be able to hand an authorization for a single one-time payment to any organization and not an authorization to charge however much they want, whenever they want.
That goes for hotels too. I want to be able to say "Here's my credit card" [but I don't authorize more than $130/day].
Edit: I suppose that doesn't work as well for hotels specifically, at least in terms of giving a card for incidentals. Since it isn't a physical card, not sure if the receptionist would be keen on entering a digital card like that? But I've definitely used it to pay for rooms online.
How do they do it so easily in other countries?
People resent that the credit card companies take 3%, but it takes more than just 'transfer money from this account to that' but also dealing with fraudulent buyers and sellers.
In the case of you visiting a site and feeling you didn't get 0.005 cents worth of value it is very clear that somebody could perceive it was unfair. In the advertising economy, however, no one party sees the whole transaction so rip-offs can be pervasive and people don't know.
In real life if you want to give somebody a dime, you just do it. But online you have to query your account to make sure you have enough money to make the payment, reserve the funds so the payment can go through without stopping other pending transactions, pass it the amount through some infrastructure where you can dispute the charge at a later date (if needed), and you also have to make sure the government is able to track your transactions for tax and anti-money laundering purposes.
For Amazon it's a different situation because they're charging you for a service based on usage. They have given you an account number and they handle all the accounting on their end. It's not a general payments system.
I still view the internet as something that should be free and any transaction pisses me off. No matter how cheap it is I will avoid having to pay unless one of the conditions are met:
- I really need the article in question
- It's something substantial that I really think is worth money (e.g. a book)
For example, if I spend 2 cent on an article that turns out to be clickbait I will be royally pissed. Which I acknowledge is totally absurd because 2 cents affects my financial situation in no way whatsoever. But this is not how it feels to me. Logically I shouldn't even think about it at all, it's not worth even thinking about. But this is not how this works.
I'm pretty sure that people dealing with stocks are generally less bothered having to deal in stuff because they are in the middle of the economic model (it makes them money as well as takes it) whereas I'm purely at the end of it, only spending.
The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions over one big.
First they want you to sign up for an account. Give a lot of personal data. Then set up a payment model, often recurring. Just to read one article? No way.
Micropayments will save some of that hassle but I don't want to have an account with every news site linked to by HN.
Half a cent per article is a plausible target for all the weak/cheap sources who can't possibly afford to put up a paywall right now because nobody would pay. It's not going to be used by the currently paywalled sites, their business model relies on getting a not-micro amount from each customer.
That extends to relatively low-friction cases like Patreon. The number of podcasters and bloggers where I've thought, quite earnestly, "I really like what this person is doing, I should kick a few quid their way," and then just not done that is near infinite. And it's never because I was feeling stingy; it's because I couldn't be arsed.
Gas, electricity, water are all cases where my use is metered, I _could_ try to micromanage it on a daily basis, but so long as my bills don't vary wildly from month to month, I don't pay especially close attention. To the degree that I self-regulate my use, it's more about the environment than the dollar cost. I don't think about it every time I take a shower or turn up my thermostat.
The amount of online stuff from for-profit institutions I read from month to month doesn't vary that much, and if I knew from habit what the typical range was, I think I could learn to be ok with that. But the current experience, where whenever someone links to something in a _different_ paywall than the ones I'm already in, I do have to think "would it be worth it to pay for this source?" and often the answer is "no".
Personally I don't like them because these things don't normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)
Brave will block tracking to some extent but we know it's not perfect.
For the longest time I thought there was just something wrong with me. Rarely would you find a comment in an article about micropayments that pointed out that micropayments sound, stressful!
It causes me anxiety just having to think about having to consider making payments everytime I click on an article, for example, even if it's a tiny $0.01 amount each time.
So, on such note; when you turn on the light when entering a room, do you have anxiety thinking about how that costs money? We are constantly making tiny momentary transactions without thinking about it at all: the issue is UI, not transactions.
There was Flattr, but they pivoted from their original idea because they couldn't make it work for some reason.
It can't be implemented on the level of individual sites - the solution needs to be universal, like Google adding a 'tip' button to Chrome + Play Store payment integration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
> users provide the computational power required to verify their own transactions, allowing transactions to be processed without fees
[1] https://www.coinbase.com/price/nano
Clay Shirky: http://web.archive.org/web/20060214180624/http://www.openp2p...
Andrew Odlyzko: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...
Nick Szabo: http://web.archive.org/web/20080514172459/http://szabo.best....
And yes the value judgement. I'd hate having to think whether every page I visit is worth it.
The hope with the paywall is if you keep seeing it, you'll go ahead and pay to unlock it, and the amount you're paying offsets the transaction fees.
1000 users each paying 20 cents for ten articles (so assuming -double- the rate you propose, and charging only at the end of the monthly billing cycle) is still a loss of likely around 1/4th the revenue even with a cut rate payment provider (due to the large fixed cost of 2-4%). So might make $50. It's -negative- if using something pleasant to integrate with (because they will charge for that convenience with a larger fixed cost, like Stripe, who will charge $.30 + small percentage per charge), unless you work with them to design a new pricing model for you.
Converting 50 of those thousand (so just 5%) of those people to paid users at $5 each is going to be north of $200 you keep, even if you use Stripe and don't negotiate anything.
And for those users that -will- load up a news site intentionally, the economics are even starker; a subscription means you'll likely go to their site, and stay there. Pay-as-you-go pricing incentivizes you to not visit the site, and instead find other, cheaper news sources.
AWS pricing works because of the scale of the resources people tend to use, and that for businesses, using those resources = additional revenue. It is spending money to make money.
But usually those sites are the ones I open at least once a day to see what's new. I don't want to pay for every clickbait I visit.
When I encounter these websites I just write another greasemonkey / tampermonkey script to delete the popup and unlock the content.
The bottom line is network effects, I think.
To stay strictly with the analogy, 1) what is our online license plate? 2) how would one send a bill after translating license plate to home address?
To me, these are fundamental web browser capability deficits. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned this and put some HTTP response codes in the registry with a TODO bookmark and never got around to it or something like that. It is possible but we will have to call in the committee.
Google & Apple should waive their 30% for this.
I subscribed to Medium mostly because I liked the idea of paying writers with money rather than with ads. Very shortly after, I stopped bothering with Medium because it's a pit of eternal clickbait. Pay-per-read sets up bad incentive structures.
Up to $1 or $2 a piece.
I just want it like Blendle used to be that I can get my money back if I jump back out after a few seconds and I want some more choice (travel and fashion isn't exactly my stuff but actively looked for tech stuff to read there and hardly found anything).
1. Credit card vendors have flat fees that will eat up a whole transaction if it's too small. For instance, strip has a flat 30c fee. This means the only reasonable way to do this is to have a user pre-pay a large sum and reduce from that, or to batch their transactions and extend them some credit. The former dissuades people from making a payment at all, and the latter runs the risk of bounced charges or users never purchasing enough to justify the charge.
2. There is no universal payments API. Browsers are starting to work on this with the w3c web payments standard https://www.w3.org/Payments/ but this is just for user input. You still have to work with companies like Stripe or PayPal to then actually make the charge.
3. Dark patterns are more successful. You see this with a lot of game currencies. By forcing users into larger purchases, you can get them to justify spending more (e.g. bundling multiple items into one package, maybe with "discounts") and if you sell your own currency, you can make the values not add up evenly so that the user has leftover balance that they perceive as being "wasted" unless they buy more.
I work on a web extension that provides a javascript API for making payments using the Bitcoin Lightning network: https://lightningjoule.com/. I really love the possibilities that small payments open up, and have been working to smooth out the UX of having to confirm a payment every time: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/introducing-joule-allowances-2.... However it's still a long way from any mainstream adoption.
This was revealed in a recent HN thread where webmasters shared the browser breakdown for their traffic.
Quite a few states require you to collect sales tax on sales to customers in those states. Most have thresholds and you only have to collect taxes if you exceed those thresholds, but unfortunately most of those thresholds are of the form sales of at least $D dollars or at least T transactions.
$D is usually reasonably high, like $100k or $200k, but T is often 200.
So 200 people in South Dakota each pay $0.01 for an article on your site generating a whopping $2 in revenue...but you have 200 transactions so you owe sales tax on that $2. Same thing will probably happen in a bunch of other states.
And so there you are, with tiny revenues from many states, but having to register with their tax authorities, having to file tax reports (quarterly in most cases, but I think some may be monthly), pay filing fees in some (which might be more than your revenue in those states!), and of course actually send the tax money.
Now throw in other countries. There is VAT in the EU, for instance. Most countries have VAT thresholds, but those often do not apply to out-of-country sellers, so you might have to deal with VAT for European that comes and buys one of your $0.01 articles.
There are some things that help with this. In the US there is the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement, which is an agreement between about half the states where if an online seller agrees to collect sales tax for all sales in all the participating states (even the ones that they do not meet the thresholds for), the states will pay for the seller to use a service like Avalara or Tax Cloud, which will handle the rate calculations, the filing, and all that at no charge to the seller.
But that only covers about half the states. Those services will handle the rest for you, but not for free, so you can't escape tax pain.
With VAT in EU, there is a thing called VAT MOSS that you can sign up for. You sign up for VAT MOSS in one country (Ireland is a good choice for US businesses), and then you just have to file one quarterly report with them listing your sales in all EU countries and the tax owed, pay that tax to the VAT MOSS country, and that country then distributes their shares to the others.
The VAT situation is considerably nicer than the US sales tax situation, because VAT is per country. I just have to know that a customer is in, say, Germany, to know how much VAT to collect. In the US, the sales tax depends on address. 123 Fake Street in a town can have a different tax rate than 124 Fake Street, and the seller is expected to deal with that.
If instead of charging $0.01 per article you make the site free to users and plaster it with ads and make your money from those ads all those tax issues go away. The money you make from the ads is just ordinary business income, that gets taxes as part of your corporate income tax. The tax is the same regardless of whether someone who saw the ad lived at 123 Fake Street or 124 Fake Street.
I doubt many non-US companies meet this condition in more than a few states. Hell, I doubt many US companies even meet this requirement (nb, that's why a lot of smaller ecommerce stores don't collect tax). That would be a minimum of $5,000,000 in yearly revenue from the US alone - more than enough to assume that they have at least one accountant on payroll to deal with this.
A large number of other states have followed South Dakota's lead, and went with $100k or 200 transactions for their sales tax nexus laws.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/south-dakota-v-w...
Albeit a platform could do it for everyone (like Amazon does).
Also I agree you have it better in the USA (even if things are going downhill, especially after 2018 nexus changes), VATMOSS is so bad I'm selling to businesses worlwide + customers from everywhere but Europe.
As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models.
Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics.
[1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/
Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.