Slashdot Mirror
Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?
A reader writes: "The traditional support model for content on the net is failing site by site, and with the growth of anti-advertising utilities and the collapse of financial support for risky ventures, this will accelerate in the coming months. Will this vacuum be filled in by people doing content as a hobby, or will a new support structure such as micropayments take over. This article takes a pro-Micropayment stance, and mentions a contrasting article at OpenP2P that presents an opposing opinion. Would you pay for content if the infrastructure was secure, inexpensive, and allowed the content to prosper?"
In my view, contributing to keep sites you like operating makes as much sense as giving money to street performers you enjoy. Hopefully a lot of other people out there agree, and will act accordingly.
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
This will never happen. You may get two of you three requirements but it will never be both in a company's best interests and feasable to implement all three...
Secure and inexpensive? well then it'll probably go bust for lack of funds and the content will suffer... Besides, I doubt any company out there will be able to resist the appeal of dipping in to the logs and selling some data.
Secure, and encourages content growth? They're going to have to charge alot for that... pennies a page at least. That's alot. I'm serious.
Inexpensive and encourages good content? The people running sites have to pay for bandwith. It's pricy... For a smaller site (bandwith is cheaper in bulk) It can cost a few cents per impression (ok, maybe $0.01, but that's still alot if you get slashdotted or such...) If the system is inexpensive, that money needs to come from somewhere. Where? Well they're going to sell your data. How's that for secure?
Maybe beople would buy it if it existed, but it can't so why are we even bothering to discuss it?
That would be OpenP2P I assume, not OpenPGP. (Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
Scott Plumlee
Hasn't anyone been paying attention these past few years? Micropayments have been talked about since the very first commercial interest in the 'Net started bubbling four years ago.
First off, companies learned rather quickly that you simply cannot charge for content to consumers unless that content is porn.
Ad revenue will continue being the driving force in producing income for a content-based consumer dot-com company.
What we're seeing right now with the dot-coms dropping like flies is a good thing. There are (were) thousands of companies that really had nothing even remotely realistic in terms of a business model and plan. Silly venture capitalists were infusing ungodly amounts of money in these flimsy companies, everyone hoping to 'get rich quick' (or get richer in terms of the silly VC's), and now when reality is starting to catch up with everybody, everyone is running around saying the sky is falling.
Maybe ad revenue will not continue being a viable revenue stream for dot-coms. My personal opinion is that it will, but let's say it isn't.
Okay, so we've seen from past observations that not a single company has been successful in charging for content (except for porn) to consumers. There were notable attempts, such as by Britannica and such, but all have abandoned this and went to the ad model. They did this because competition demanded it. If Yahoo began charging micropayments for using their service, then why would anyone in their right mind use them with there's dozens of other web directories that would offer as much value but be for free?
The only way micropayments would conceivably function would be for something like Napster, online gaming, or other sorts of things we're you're delivering something of unique value -- not just content.
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$ chown -R us:us yourbase
With ad companies refusing to pay sites running their ads, affiliate companies refusing to pay sites running their affiliate boxes, what's to stop micropayment companies refusing to pay sites?
How many times have people with smaller sites come within like $2-3 to the payment threshold only to be told they've decided to stop paying and sorry if you didn't earn enough, we'll just keep your money?
If micropayment companies take a cut of the payment, then it'd take even longer to earn your threshold (depending on what type of users your site has).
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Flexible online payment methods make it easier for small players to operate on the marketplace - whether your talking about content providers asking for tips, or super specialized vendors providing better service than their mammoth competitors.
Involuntary micropayments are NOT the way to go, we need something like PayPal, but with universal access and ease-of-use that is comparable/superior to live cash money.
Transaction costs keep mankind down!
This is a perfectly terrible idea! I have a solution, though...how about advertisers get their butts off our precious internet. The internet should be a free for all melting pot of all human knowledge, not a commercial playground. It is ideas like this that may lead to a sudden (unlikely) internet crash. Let's not let our kind do to the internet what we have done to almost everything else we have touched.
Chris Richardson Pembroke, Massachusetts
If these sorts of people can just bung a "virtual tip jar" onto their site with little or no other modification then it makes it a lot more attractive -- at least until they're a little larger. And they do work -- Penny Arcade has recently signed onto Amazon's new "honor system" and they're already 30% of the way to their US$10,000/month target -- although it's slowing rapidly and still needs a lot of support.
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here's a perfect example of it working in the adult world - www.ppvn.com and of course www.TokenBank.com It's pay per view or rather the online equivalent .. Pay per use .. Sheesh you guys are slow if you didn't know about that NEW Url allready !
This probably needs to be mentioned until it's been mentioned to death, because it is the one detail that tends to kill micropayments in reality, yet no micropayment supporter ever (so far as I have yet seen) acknowledges it:
What about the mental transaction cost to the customer? Each click becomes a "do I buy or don't I buy" decision, with accompanying anxiety and time spent to make it.
Unless and until this issue is successfully addressed by micropayments, it does not look like micropayments will be accepted in reality, no matter how much hype people put behind it. (Remember Divx - the discs, not the MPEG format. Remember "push". Would it be too early to say "remember WAP"?) The alternatives - subscription, aggregation, and so forth - all deal with this problem by bundling everything into one transaction. (Granted, this transaction is potentially slightly wasteful of money, if the customer does not use the whole package. But money is not the only thing of value to the customer.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm all for micropayment. remember it didn't work too well for the slate.com as i recall but I'm more than willing to pay for Penny-Arcade. (got my "Got wang" shirt today in fact) I think this is one more of those things that will work for some but not for others. I'd like to see it succeed.(sp?) As for whether i would pay for /. I don't know yet. depends. I've come to rely on slashdot alot. not for the insightfulness of the editors but the responses of the commenters. Some of the things I've learned from reading comments on slashdot have simply amazed me. I think I would pay for slashdot possibly on a subscription basis or a few cents per article basis. but actually I like the ads on Slashdot. some of them are actually things I'm interested in.
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This is a late post. Probably no one will see it, but I feel so strongly about this, I think it's worth mentioning.
I don't like banner ads, but I think part of their limited success is that they're so annoying. Micropayments aren't even as visible as banners, and they request significantly more from the user. Right now, micropayments are an entirely voluntary way of getting money from the user. It's a great idea, but I think it's going to be fundamentally ineffective that way. What about something else:
What if the user has to watch some graphic before the site gets loaded... sort of a "hey, did you guys know we work entirely by your support"? I'd liken it to a PBS pledge drive (only it runs about 10 seconds). And to make the graphic go away fast, rather than waiting for the animation to load, the users clicks it and it brings up a page that suggests a payment and gives an easy way to make it (probably credit card). Perhaps it uses cookies also, so the graphic doesn't come up for two weeks after someone pays. Users will be able to click through and not pay, but at least in this case consciousness is raised about the issue in a direct way. It also means that the people who come to the site most are the most likely to pay, because this graphic is really an inconvenience for them, not the casual viewers.
Just my $0.02 slashdot micropayment.
If every web browser served up its cache of web pages, anonymously to the web, the costs of content maintanence would be distributed to those who enjoy the benefits. Furthermore, it would provide greatest storage redundancy for the most valuable web pages and ensure that valuable information was lost to the world the way it is, all too often, with links going dead or, worse, entire "archives" going off line, like Deja News' pre-1999 archives have.
Seastead this.
The pro-micropayment article had been temporarily removed when I tried to view it, so some of my questions may have been answered in there. I am not necessarily opposed to the idea of micropayments; if ads don't work there has to be some way for sites to stay in business, thats just economics. I don't know exactly what is meant by "micro"payments, but for the sake of this post I'll say sites charge about a quarter to view their content (sounds "micro" to me). Now, it would be a tremendous hassle to put in your credit card for a bunch of $0.25 transactions for every content site you look at. But what if ISPs charged just a little more than they do now, say $5.00 more, and the micropayments came out of that? I don't know exactly how that would work and I'm sure there are many obstacles, but I think that would be the most convenient way.
"Maybe for once in my life people will call me 'sir' without adding 'you're making a scene'." -Homer Simpson
The internet is supposed to be free, and is based on the idea of the sharing of information, freely. Charging would be absurd, and I for one would never pay for it. I already pay enough for broadband access, I don't need to lose more money every month. Plus, what are the sites going to do to attract customers, have an information 'preview' of the type of content they carry, like pr0n sites do? Ummm.... no.
System possessed? # grep deamon
Try Fairtunes.
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OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Actually, Amazon gets 15% plus $0.15 per transaction, so in a typical $1 tip, 30 cents go to Amazon...
I agree with you that macro payments are much more desirable by all parties involved (as opposed to abusive 90%-of-screen/BW adds which I believe will fail in time as well). Though I personally prefer the cable system which uses aggregate subscriber channels in addition to advertisements.
As always, the porn industry leads the way. You subscribe to a "content network" who hires on various content producers. You may then visit the web member web-sites freely and in an unlimited fashion. Because the site can be reasonabily assured a steady income, they're less dependant on the adds, and can thus be more choosy as to what they display. Currently adds are convoluted, so viewers make a point to ignore them all. By having fewer, higher priced, higher quality adds, everybody wins (just like the super-bowl)
Pure subscription web sites like premium cable channels (such as HBO or say the members only section of Toms Hardware which might tout zero commercials), are less likely because you introduce a very high entry barrier for viewers to be willing to surmount. You'd have to be famous on the web from the outset.
Problems I see with subscriber networks are the same sort of beuracracy we currently find on TV: Manditory sensorship, keeping up with what's popular or risking being cut from a profitable network, and others. Sure there'd be lots of options of networks (it's not like they layed the fiber as say com-cast), but bigger names would require exclusive signing and we'd be in a very similar situation as the record companies - an oligopoly.
Lastly, cnn.com is no worse than cnn-the-channel.. It's simple content regurgitation. But even cnn attempts to adhere to the multiple-sources before disclosure of rumors. slashdot isn't the be-all-end-all of rumors/current events, after all. Which furthers the case that what-ever system replaces the failing ad-system, it had better support culturalizm, and not fall into the MTV-look-alike madness - never deviating from the proven formulas - The ubiquitous "bottom line".
Diversity makes the current version of the web very desirable. It was also a fundamental building block of American development: from religion to resources to military organization to banking systems. Unfortunately, it's only natural to wish to replace diversity with efficiency (diversity inherently involves redundancy). We're seeing America approach more traditional European levels of consolidation. What's good for business isn't always good for darwinistic survivability. Sadly it's often only the logistical or ledgislative divides that allow diversity to flurish amid corporatism.
-Michael
-Michael
We need a method of free bandwidth. Ads and micropayments AREN'T the solution. Slashdot and Yahoo are among the few sites that make revenue of banner ads. Yahoo, because it's HUGE and if you want to hit everyone, they're the place to do it. Also with Yahoo, you can key off search words, and they are the most common search site. Besides, Yahoo collects money for reviewing sites and sponsered links.
Slashdot happens to have a GREAT target audiance. A good potion of it's viewers are people in decision-making positions regarding technology. I know that I spent over 10K on a business decision with a company that I found via Slashdot, I know that I'm not alone.
The real solution is cable TV style, but not networks of sites. Broadbands makes it possible.
In the dial-up world, phone lines were part of the infrastructure costs. People sitting online ate up limited resources. With DSL/Cable, there is no "cost" of being online, only bandwidth.
To make things more rediculous, bandwidth is asynchronous. This resulted in ISPs selling downstream bandwidth to consumers, and upstream bandwidth for web hosting, a hack system. The real solution is for ISPs to pay for content.
For example, Akamai has cacheing servers. Eventually, you host your content with Akamai or competitors, but instead of paying Akamai, Akamai pays you. Akamai charges the ISPs for the free "bandwidth" (if I connect from my ISP to the Internet, I use their expensive Internet connections, if I connect to a server sitting in their farm, I use no Internet bandwidth) because the ISPs pay less to Akamai than to their T3 providers.
In this model, I am paying not just for bandwidth, but for content/bandwidth. If my ISP has it local, I use no Internet bandwidth. If my ISP doesn't carry it, they "pay" for me to get it from their bandwidth.
With that model, ISPs try to maximize their free bandwidth (Cacheing) and minimize their expensive bandwidth (non-cacheing).
Think of it as proxy-serving on a mass scale.
For example, ISPs shouldn't be allowed to require a proxy server, they are distributing someone else's copyrighted work for a fee. They should be required to pay for the right to proxy, which would solve the situation.
Good content => more hits => more bandwidth => more money
Alex
While an interesting technical idea, basic economics conlcudes that this is an untenable idea. The best example from economics is an environmental one: the tragedy of the commons in 18th(?) century England. Most are familiar with this example, but for those are not, check here.
Essentially, the same arguments that apply to envoronmental commons apply to shared, freely distributed content. Groups in economic systems tend to optimize thier own personal consumption. This is true despite sincere intentions and ideologies of individuals, at a societal level. No one will voluntarily pay for content as a for-profit enterprise.
Clearly, people are willing to defy economic rationalism for non-profit institutions, but this is a very different proposition. Show me a non-religious or non-profit organization that collects revenues through a volunteer model!
But well ogranized ads can really make money. This is done by Yahoo, or other sites which track "your" interest. Thus for example when you search "KONQUEROR" on google you'll come up with "Nautilus" (which is better as they say), and wonder what it is. A single click, wow, the ad hitted the target.
I get ads on my native language on Yahoo, and even "GoZilla" (i must admit, i still use windblowz for "browsing").
But most of the "little" sites cannot do that, because accessed enough to track user interest. Maybe an online database (GPL'd maybe) of all the interest of all the nodes would solve the problem.
When televsion first came out (well, I wasn't born yet, either, but go along with me on this). Television was envisioned to be a source of information and entertainment, free for the masses?
Yeah, that lasted all of two seconds.
Problem is, this is a capitalist society. Money makes the world go round. The all mighty buck rules, and another half dozen similar sayings that get the point across.
We may find ways around advertising online (with said programs to block banners ect...), just as we can find ways to avoid commercials on TV (change the channel, use a VCR programed not to tape commercials). But advertisers will always find a way around that (putting product placements within TV or movies, for example).
Personally, I've completely tuned myself out from commercials (buy Coke), and they don't affect me whatsoever (no, buy Pepsi). So I say we should just accept advertising on the internet, not try to block it, and just tune ourselves out. It worked for me! (buy Jolt) That way we can avoid this micropayment issue altogether.
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
I may or may not actually pay for content (that might be an a per-article/per-item basis)...but I can definately see myself as paying to explicitly NOT see any ads.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Online content providers have skipped over a "known good" revenue generation model; that of subscription services. I won't participate as a consumer in micropayment systems. Its too risky. I can't afford to pay $0.05 several hundred, or thousand times a month for content whose value is only known after I've paid. Refund systems layered on top of micropayment just waste my time.
I feel subscriptions are well worth my money. If I find an online resource that has a mandate and reputation for delivering detailed, accurate information with a specific focus, I'd be happy to pay a larger sum of money (larger than a micropayment) under the assumption that they'll continue producing similar information.
For example, I'd probably be willing to pay CA$3/month for access to slashdot discussions. I'd be willing to pay $5 or $10 per month for Access to FirstMonday. I already pay over US$100/year for access to the IEEE Computer Society's Online Library (it's worth every penny!).
I don't bother with "free" information presented by CNN and other "news magazines". The accuracy of the information they present is questionable, and the cover is shallow.
Perhaps if web sites generated revenue from subscriptions instead of banner-ad sales we could be rid of these ridiculous three column layouts that impede understanding of the core content they contain.
Having heard a LOT about this kind of system, I wonder why nobody tried to make usable and convenient system for this yet ... Sure, there are some forays into this topic (Amazon, various tip jars), but nothing that would fit under convenient, easy, no BS, 3% max deducted, consumer- and site-oriented.
./ and various other sites right this minute IF there was a convenient, easy, hassle-free way. There isn't.
I'd shell out a buck or two to
Maybe PayPal could investigate doing something like this SOME time. They seem to have a nice infrastructure (although I do miss direct wire transfers, which are a convenient way for me to transfer money (remember, this is Europe) and even allows me to automate the process).
If you keep asking whether I would do something you will never find out whether I actually will. Especially not on SlashDot. Give it a try, maybe give it some backing, if it doesn't work out, improve your concept. People are good. Usually. They are lazy, too.
These days, the net is too big for something really good to be a "labor of love." Somebody has a hobby. They say, "I can afford to spend $X on my hobby." So they find a way to set up a server with their little labor of love, and it costs them around $X.
... contributions, as it were.
Someone says, "What a great site!" and tells all their friends. Sooner or later, the traffic to the site increases way beyond what can be served by $X. So our friendly hobbyist who had such a great site to share has very few options:
1. Shut down
2. Relocate and hope people don't find him
3. Hope some nice sponsor funds his work.
4. Get money from somewhere to increase bandwidth.
Nobody wants option 1. Otherwise you have dozens of little sites popping up and dying as soon as they gather some intertia.
Option 2 is hardly better than option 1.
Option 3 is not going to happen often, and may be unattractive as you're bowing to their control, possibly.
Option 4 is all that's left. So how do these guys get money? Banner Ads? But we know those aren't working -- ad companies refusing to pay sites running their ads, etc. What about asking their dedicated fans to pony up a little
If it works, why not have it?
I visit Penny Arcade religiously. I've told everyone I know who plays video games to check out the site. I've learned about great games from them, I've laughed my ass off at their strips. When they put up a micropayment box I immediately sent my micropayment in.
If your fans love your work enough to pay you to do it...great! You've succeeded. How many sites would I be willing to micropay to get at? 3, maybe. But it's one way to cope with the increased monetary restrictions of what was originally a little hobby turning into something that costs an incredible amount to maintain.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
The second article (at openp2p) points out correctly that micropayments have, are, and will continue to die painful deaths for one simple reason: users hate them. It also points out the flaws in the first argument, namely that the micropayments we have in our daily lives now almost inevitably come from monopolies. When consumers have a choice, they inevitably go for flat pricing instead.
Just because the advertising model failed, it doesn't then follow that the micropayment model must work. In fact, both could fail, and the Net will keep on going. Oh sure, some of the commercial sites might stamp their feet, hold their breath, take their ball and go home. Go ahead, I say. Take your products and leave. In the meantime, the rest of us can enjoy the community of the Net and keep micropayments where they belong: for the use of monopolies.
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Private Essayist
Five or six years ago, when the internet WAS entirely content produced by people for the benefit of others, sans ads, this same thing arose, except people though 'well, them ads will give us money'. The concept of paying to use websites, on top of paying for bandwidth, moves the internet to being a peer-to-peer aol. Being someone who supports, and creates, free content, I think that both positions may prevail. People tend to tolerate ads, which is why ads don't earn money. Hopefully we will wind up back in a time where the web is full of RESOURCES. Websites with research papers, HOWTOs, support documents, and manufacturers websites with useful info are wonderful. But i doubt anyone really cares about some 'portal'.
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
Micropayments will never work, for the following reasons:
- Abuse. People would find a million and one ways to abuse it, from micropayment pop-ups that go off incessantly, to sites that constantly refresh to get payments.
- Content. Am I really going to make a micropayment to CNN every time I check it for a quick update and nothing has changed in the last four hours?
- Too much surfing! Unless the micropayments were almost meaningless, serious websurfers would be broke all the time.
I was more referring to sites like Penny Arcade (online comic), Blue's News (video game news), and the like. It takes a fair amount of time to upkeep a site like that. It starts as a hobby, something you do in your spare time. Before you know it, not only do you need to pay for hosting, but you've hit the threshold where you either have to drop everything but the site, and make it better, or cut back and keep it a "spare time" activity, at which time the quality begins to drop.
If there exist ways for these folks to get paid, and there are users who are willing to pay, then why not encourage that? Why not build the infrastructure?
I don't have time to keep watch on everything in the video game industry. I rely on Blue and his small crew to keep me up to date. Just like I rely on the Ars Technica crew to keep me up to date on new hardware. And Penny Arcade to make me laugh (and point me to timewasting games like Counter-Strike and Bejeweled). Those services are worth a few bucks a month -- and if enough of us think so, enough that those guys can actually make that their day job -- then great. I'm all for it.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
...that you don't measure the success of an ad in terms of the number of times people click on it???
For example, suppose Coca-Cola set up a cable tv channel where you could buy Coke by dialing up a phone number, etc. Now how sane would it be for Coca-Cola to assume that the success of a tv ad is measured in the number of times an individual changes the channel to the Coke channel?
Right now, there is a Rackspace banner ad displayed on my screen. I'm not going to click on it. Why? Cause I don't need it! But you can bet your dollar that if I ever do need it, I will probably have this vague feeling that "rackspace" is something I should look into, or that Rackspace is something that I'm familiar with and is a good product for "some strange reason".
Ads never were, and never will be, about getting someone to want to "pursue", "possess", "interact with", "get" the ad. They are about increasing your familiarity with product and getting you to want the product.
This is why, if subscription or micropayments or whatever are implemented, the best sites ultimately will get paid by banner ads. When a site is REALLY good, and gets tons of hits, ad smart agencies will pay to have their ads displayed on that site just for the exposure. They won't care if people click or it or not, because millions of people will SEE their product and KNOW about it. The bottom line is the bottom line, not the number of clicks.
I agree. In addition, no one says that it has to be an "either/or" world. Any web site could have a free, banner-suported and micropayment-support "path". Maybe, as a user, you check out the banner-supported side first since you're just browsing. Later, you need to really dive into the content without distractions (and with, hopefully, a more responsive connection since there are no banner ads) so you authorize the micropayment.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Forcing users to fork out for content is going to be too much work on both sides
I would gladly subscribe to CNET News.com without ads of any kind.
However, slashdot, please don't drop your banner ad agreements... hint hint.
"And like that
That's not a bad thought, actually.
I was trying to link the isp payment to the accessing of the web content, since without web content, there's really no need for an ISP. (again, I'm ruling out IRC, email, etc. remember broad strokes)
Reminds me of mid-90's Seattle when suddenly "tip jars" started appearing everywhere. Of course the barrista at the coffee shop has a little more leverage than a mere web site ("Tip me or next time I spit in your latte.")
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
There are a variety of ways ISPs could be coerced into doing such a thing. One would be regulation enforcing it (via international treaty, most likely). A more likely idea would be for sites to only open themselves to viewers from pages that enable this (they're the only ones the site gets money from, so I see why they'd do it). The extra pages accessible to customers (and thus wider customer base) are the benefit to the ISP. Also, in my example where I said +$8 a month, my base cost is $40 for DSL, so by comparison I wasn't talking about very much money. Also, AOL with its $20/month dialup cost has shown that Average Joe doesn't shop around for prices very much.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Send me a nickel and I'll post it for you.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Micropayments are a slippery slope to convert the internet to one big pay site.
Let's say a new movie comes out that has a killer soundtrack. I, as a consumer, could use Napster or Gnutella to download the song for free, but what if the movie studio offered a web site that included not only the ability to download the tracks, but also had screen savers tied into the movie, downloadable trailers and teasers, and occaisonal online chat sessions with the stars and production crew? Essentially they could provide a whole range of products and services that I simply can't get in one place anywhere else. They aggregate the content, making it searchable and easy to get from one source. Consumers might be willing to pay for this service that offers value over and above what the mere content is worth. Perhaps they could charge $1.00 a month for access. This could tie in to a whole service offering for the studio. For a small subscription fee you could access a whole range of services for all their movies. Searchable movie databases, old scripts, etc.
This model is essentially the Free Software model. The content (software) is free. What companies charge for is the service that supports the content.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Setting up an e-gold account is painless and free, if all the open source projects would do it then maybee we would make progress a bit faster.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Then again, I don't have cable.
cb
I already pay a monthly fee to get access to this content. It's that little monthly fee that the broadband provider charges me.
I'm not willing to spend even more of my money to access additional information. I don't like pay sites. Never have, never will. I've always been able to find the information somewhere else.
I'm sure there's a solution out there that would benefit all parties involved, but additional fees are going to turn off a lot of people. Just look at Napster.
Here's how I imagine an ezine conglomerate like TOTK.com Sports using micropayments:
Do I expect to make scads of money? Nope. I could make a shitload more, likely, if I got $5 CPM text ads in my various ezines. If you think that isn't a chunk of change, start running numbers of subscribers in the tens of thousands for a daily ezine--not bad work if you can get it [and run three to five ads per day]. But that's not what I want to do--I just want to cover costs and have pretty toys. If I wanted to work as a "professional", I'd have gone to journalism school.
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-- Geof F. Morris
If micropayments come up, I would start the Napster sharing model on said contents.
i don't buy it. all the stuff on tv is a bunch of crap i don't want and don't have a choice whether i get. yet i am forced to pay because i absolutely refuse to go without nhl and nfl coverage. i would rather have subscription as opposed to micropayment, like $10 bucks a year for unlimited /. access (if they get rid of the warning goatse.cx guy). i would also like to apply this to tv, i specifically pay for a certain program (simpsons) without all the other shit on fox.
I need to find out what movies are playing? seattle.citysearch.com - Do I click on the ads? Never. I dont even need software that removes them from webpages. I just dont see them. But, the site was of use and told me what was playing and gave me the phone number to my favorite restaurant so I could make reservations. Oh? I can tip them for this service? I would be glad to. Darn, no tip jar.
I dont buy the newspaper, I read it online. Can I drop 25 cents somewhere? No, but I wish I could.
Web designers cost money, content costs money, bandwidth costs money, infomation costs money, you get the picture. Im sick of those whiney cheapskates who say the whole internet should be free. Get real. I have countless examples where I would love to tip a website for their services. Im not saying I should *have* to everytime I visit them, because everytime I go there I might not find what I need, but, make it voluntary. You want that website to stay around? tip for their services.
Some people say "I already pay for internet access". So? Do you think your ISP is keeping track of what sites you visit and then making micropayments to them for the content you are seeing? I think not.
It would be cool if Paypal or some other website would come along who would let me deposit, say, 20 bucks there. And any site I visited, I could tip if I wanted to. Im waiting for it, someone please do it! Im tired of visiting sites I like and finding out they went under.
if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans
Most importantly: Anonymity!
I really wouldn't want my fellow /.ers to know that I hang around Britney Spears chat rooms, or subscribe to Dear Abby.
For my part, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount for qualitycontent. There are really valuable resources and it's sure nice to get them for free. But for the contents dear to me (say Google or a huge repository of Linux documentation I see absolutely no problem to shell out a couple bucks a month, if this is necessary to maintain those resources without a streaming video showing a car commercial.
Implementation should be on a broad scale. So that spammers could be charged for their crap and small transactions can be handled transaprently, securely and anonymously.
Anonymity is probably the killer criteria, but I'll have to leave this problem to cryptographically far more competent folks.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
? I will always churn out my half-assed attempts at web entertainment for no pay - I haven't seen a penny yet. Do it for the love, baby.
That's precisely the point. Very often what you get for free is worth pretty much what you paid for it. Few of us want "half-assed attempts" at content, so much as we want content -- and, quite frankly, not so many of us are all that interested in content. TV is still a very cost-effective medium for delivering content the hearts and minds of customers, and until the web turns from a cutesy giveaway of feeble stuff into a true, viable means for delivering content, the advertising dollars will go elsewhere -- the the well-entrenched "standard" media and the next "hot" new medium.
With all due respect, the market has a way of punishing bad content and rewarding the good. Not all of us share the whim of the market, but the problem with free content, particularly on a quality basis, is that it isn't subject to traditional market forces -- which is why we have so many "half-assed attempts" at content on the net.
Why? Becuase if we subscribe to a micropayment scheme then we are going to have to put our Credit Card to the site to charge our cards. Once we do that who's going to need the FBI's systems. Every site we go to will be charged, linked, and marketed to us via those purchases on the card. No thanks. I'll stick with Open content.
What you say implies that there is at least one content type for which people are willing to pay: new and timely information.
This is consistent with what is done with quotes from the stock exchanges: the delayed feed is available for free, while the realtime feed is a for-pay option.
But I think there are other areas for which people are willing to pay. One example: quality. If there's a significant quality difference between the free information and the for-pay information, then at least some people will pay for the latter.
This quality comes in at least two forms: the presentation of the information itself, and the organization of - or easy of locating - the information.
For example, I pay for a subscription to "The Economist". I do this for all of the above reasons.
But micropayments raise a completely different issue than just "will people pay for content". I pay for subscriptions (ie. The Economist) based upon a fixed rate. It's a kind of "fire and forget" model.
If I had to pay for each article (which is the possibility introduced by micropayments), I end up doing a lot more work to read, just in the process of deciding whether or not an article is worth the fee. That work - which involves time - is a cost over and above the actual cash payment being made. It is a cost paid for each and every article, WHETHER OR NOT I DECIDE TO BUY.
That's a disincentive to review a site for possible articles, and will therefore bring readership down. Note that this is before we even consider whether an individual piece of content is worth the price being charged.
That is not a good sign for the "pay per view" model on the Internet.
The guys over at online comic strip Penny Arcade have collected over $2,000 in a few weeks through Amazon's Honor System.
Seems to me a much better way to subsidize good online content without obnoxious ads, etc.
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
His arguments are that current web models for raising revenue don't work. In this case I think he's talking about web pages that don't sell a product, and have just content. Most people have a blind eye to banner ads, and I don't know anyone who doesn't close popups before they even finish loading.
He's been saying for years (completely incorrect every time) that micropayments are coming, probably for those very special sites like Yahoo, that fulfill a functions that few have matched. Probably something like a dollar or two a month.
Most recent article on the topic
Personally I don't agree with him, and if it weren't for that fact that I respect so many of his other predictions and theories, I'd probably ignore it. I think that some people want micropayments to happen because they want the web to thrive, and this is the only way they can think of for it to continue to function economically. They might be right in that it's the best way (I don't know), but I don't think that means that it'll happen.
-j
If a website wants me to give them money to provide content, their advertisers can find a better way of shoving ads down my throat. It isn't our fault that we're smarter than their marketing nerds. If they make it, we can beat it, if they can make it better, we can beat that.. let's see who runs out of money first!
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
Option 5:
Freenet: Host his site on freenet, causing everyone that accesses the site to automatically mirror, reducing congestion. Under Freenet, the more popular a site is, the quicker it loads.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I've always wondered if in some grand master plan, this isn't what companies like Amex have planned w/ their Blue card.. Plug the card into the reader, the content provider/Web validates your identity using two-factor authentication and bills you micropayments as you surf from site to site (assuming the content sites in question are set up to authenticate visitors + bill micropayments in this way)..
The obvious place to collect the money off the reading public is at the portal. The portal would collect a regular subscription and pay the content providers on a clickthrough basis. A secure cookie on the client machine tells the content providers that this particular client is a paid-up reader and to let them view the information. No secure cookie, no view. I'd like this because it would keep the portal editors on their toes to only link to good information. The price could vary too. $0.000005 for a verbose yet content free page, and perhaps a dollar or two for an informative essay of real value. The amount actually paid could perhaps be tied in some way to the current scoring system. Yes, you would then have to extend the slashdot scoring system to the pages to which you link, but that would be no bad thing. Hopefully we would then be able to read single articles on subscription sites such as The Economist's report on the Microsoft appeal as they would then be getting paid. Also it would give individual authors who create content a motivation to produce good work and keep it updated. I for one would put more effort into my little Notes for C Programmers if I thought that I was going to be paid for the work.
Sounds like www.fairtunes.com to me.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
This won't be possible until Amazon's patent is overturned.
But general advertising on the Internet has been a flop, and probably will continue to be. And that's OK. All the catalogs, brochures, and ordering sites will stay online. All the search engines will stay up, powered by placement fees and kickbacks from the ordering sites. Print and TV outlets will maintain their online sites as adjuncts to their main business. And the few sites that charge (the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports) will have very high quality content. Pure online content sites will be low-budget operations run as sidelines of other activites. (Think Slashdot, not Excite@Home).
As for the Internet infrastructure, you pay for that with your $20-$50 per month or so to your ISP/connectivity provider. And the technology gets cheaper all the time. The free ISPs are on the way out; there has to be some revenue to pay for the service.
And that's the way it is. No problem.
Others have expressed the idea that micropayments would encouage higher quality on the web. I think this is true. Lots of things on the WWW right now are just crummy. Magazines may have archives on the web, but they often text-based. In general, there is a vast amount of information in the printed world that just isn't on the web yet. I'm disappointed by that. Sure, I can find lots of info on computers and technology. Duh! That's what the Internet is built on. However, encyclopedias are new the web, as far as I know. They don't seem to be much more detailed than Microsoft Encarta.
Some sites have a micropayment-like systems now (I guess they are macropayments). An example I'm thinking of is the Consumer Reports website. They have some content available for free. For a small amount of money, you can have access to their site for a month. Larger amounts of money...more access time. However, it is interesing to note that I went to the library and looked at their back issues of Consumer Reports rather than pay - but I did put micropayments into the photocopier to make copies of the article!
I have two minor fears about micropayments:
Some interesting food for thought; if you scrape away all of these internet scavengers, have you really lost any quality content? Not likely.
Also, think about how sites are built now. You get venture capital, you hire 100 (is that enough!?) people, and you try to run it like a traditional corporation, which rarely floats. Was Slashdot built in this manner? Would Slashdot be around if it were?
Back in 1998, I built a gaming site in my spare time (radium... we did Half-Life reviews). It took alot of work, but at its peak I was bringing in close to 15,000 unique visitors a day, which is alot of people for a one-man show. I did the site only because I enjoyed it. I put quality first, and that's what separated me from other sites and brought in visitors.
The fact is, people don't often pour heart and soul into sites anymore, only money. These are very different ingredients.
Of course, what I'm saying does not solve the problem of keeping sites afloat and making the internet a viable grounds for business. What I'm saying is that, from our standpoint, this need not be something to fear. Hopefully some good systems can be developed that will reward the work of people who do what they do because they love it.
Anti-advertising utilities are the worst thing to happen to the Internet. With ads generating the revenue for the majority of the content we know and love, we're shooting ourselves in the collective foot by blocking banners. This only forces good sites to die, and forces adevertisers to devise even more horrible ways than banners to capture our eyeballs.
This so-called "solution" to banner ads is really just the first step in an arms race that will only end when the advertisers figure out some way to nuke us with commercials.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
On one hand, I like ads. Ads don't cost ME anything. Ads show me products that I may be interested in buying. Targeted ads are better, because then there's more of a chance for the 'oh cool!' reaction, which will cause me to go buy something which I may not have known about before, but which will make my life better/easier... (although I shouldn't have brought up targeted ads on Slashdot, because now all the privacy nuts will get their panties in a wad.)
:/
On the other hand, micropayments seem like a good idea. When people are actually paying for a service, there's more of an obligation for the creator of that service to produce a better quality product. There's also more of a chance for the creators to get money. These are good.
HOWEVER, there's one major problem with micropayments, and that's that the user has to have MONEY. Now, what happens to the people who can barely afford to pay for their internet connection (that need it for, say, school), but won't be able to pay all the little micropayments (they WILL add up). Or what about schools that suddenly get hit for HUGE amounts because of all the payments they need to make for their students to access sites required for courses (IE blackboard.com).
I'd like to stick with ads (non-java ones please... thank you.). They seem like the best overall choice... but they apparently are not working out...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It'd be even funnier to see M$ get /.'ed the first time that add appeared.
No. I would pay for content. Why should I pay to read about someone's biased liberal views? I can buy a paper and do that, or I can go to my library and read the paper there. I check the internet for other information.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
There's an interesting possibility I've thought about, and while there're many details which would need to be worked out for a successful implementation, in theory it could work.
Each user pays an additional amount (say, 10% added to the ISP's monthly fee), and this money is distributed among web pages. The way it is distributed is controlled client-side, and can be overriden by the user, but defaults to being in proportion to the number of hours viewing (decided by the browser, based on number of hours with a web page opened and in focus). Web pages which already require paying for content are excluded, web pages on free providers are excluded, web pages from which no *ML or TXT files have been downloaded are excluded (no banner providers, web bugs, etc).
If, for example, in a month I spend 6 hours reading Slashdot, two hours reading User Friendly, and do no other web surfing, then of the $8 extra I'd be paying my ISP, $6 would go to VA Linux and $2 would go to Iliad.
There are many benefits to this sort of system. First, it provides an incentive to provide content. It allows people to control where their micropayment money is going, encouraging quality content. It provides far more funding than banner ads, so annoying banners are no longer necessary for web pages.
Obviously, a potential problem with this is abuses, such as people manually setting all this money to go to their friends (and receiving from them in return). Certain anti-abuse measures could be put in place; ie, a web page which has had less than 100 unique viewers is not included, and users don't default to giving to web pages where they have spent less than, say, half an hour. The system would have to be carefully designed to protect privacy and security. The client's decision on how to distribute payments should be visible only to the ISP, and there it should be immediately pooled with all the payments and not logged separately. The data stays encrypted (private key/public key) during all transfers, and other normal routine security precautions are taken.
------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
What if there was a easy convenient way to "tip" a web site?
Would people put some money in for that?
Of course my fear is we will get lots of pop-up ads begging for money.
Like on PBS
I love my dose of Slash-irony.
Today, ist this article, wailign and bemnoanign the possabiltiy of having to PAy soemthing for web sites, right under the one wailign and bemoaning that ads might get more intrusive.
Make up your minds folks. You aren't a charity and noone is interested in feeding your entertainment habit out of their own pockets.
It's OpenP2P as in peer-2-peer, not OpenPGP the message security software.
What would be interesting would be a micropayment scheme that could work with email. That way we could price spammers out of existance :-)
I had heard of the Amazon Honor System, but hadn't really looked into it. It seems like a really good idea. Sites that hire dozens of people to run them might not be able to survive this way, but individuals or small groups who create really cool content might be able to make enough to devote more time, or even full time, to their sites. Sounds good to me. Are there any other services like this, besides Amazon?
- W
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
Just think of the all the irritating hassle involved. I mean somebody send you a link telling you to check out a "great website". You click the link and you get a "This site requires ACME payment server -- register at ACME now".
You then have to give ACME you credit card or billing details etc. etc.
The you can checkout the "great website" and find out it wasn't worth the effort. Next time you just won't bother. The practicaly only micro-payment system that exists in the "real" world is parking meters and they are annoying by design.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
The main problem with the ad-sponsored system is that ads are meant to be seen. With eyes. If someone now tries to place a non-HTML site on the web, which is mostly to be read by a machine, this is difficult, since machines do have emotional responses to ads, unlike humans. Lets take an example. LEts say I have a site with a great newsfeed on some topic. I want to put out the newsfeed in XML, so people can go and format it anyway they want. Now they don't see the ads anymore. No more sponsorship. This is actually a serious issue, since XML has been touted as a good way of distributing content with much more semantic meaning. If more sites publish it, search engies will becmoe better. Classification. Indexing. Querying. Understanding. However, meta information simply cannot use a sponsorship system which is based on the idea of a patternof pixels throwing an actuall pattern of pixels on someone's retina and triggering a neural response. For that, we MUST decouple web content from such a simple-minded revenue system. Only in such a way will the web be opened to its true potential. Of course,one can talk about thing such as using Ads to sponsor a pre-formatted HTML view and using Micropayments to access semantically much richer data in XML. Or Tex, or whatever. Imagine paying for the meta-information on a site such as IMDB, Stratfor, CNN, Encyclopedia Brittanica or, for that matter, Slashdot and formatting and searching the goods on your own machine with much more powerful tools. This is what XML is about. And ads are hampering it. If micropayments are the answer, I dunno. But ads aint.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I'm in favour of an OSDN subscription. If it guarantees Sourceforge will still be around in a few years time, and that Slashdot will still be here. Its simple economics. Maybe some of the OSDN sites are loss leaders for VA, but sorry, I can't see it staying for much longer. The free ride is over. Thank God, now lets get down to using useful sites, get the hell rid of those darn banners that are getting bigger and selling me more worthless crap than I care about and paying people to produce sites that frankly are often just dire to look and and contain little original content. At least if you rely on subscriptions you can guarantee that your content is worth something, or you die. Darwin rules again. :)
Anyway, point me to the page where I can subscribe to OSDN and get no banners taking up a third of my screen and I'll pay...
My life is on display at http://www.deardiary.net/ if you really care
Set up two Slashdot servers -- one like the current system, free for all and subsidized by ads, an ad-free server that only paid subscribers (say, $10/year) can access, both connecting to the same database on the back end. The paid-by-subscribers server could also be permitted more database connections per user than the paid-by-ads server, so that it would be more responsive, and thus people would have an incentive to pay for a subscription instead of simply running Junkbuster to block the ads.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Well, PBS and NPR have been breaking even for decades by merely asking their audience to send in donatations...
In all actuality, I like many other /. readers I imagine, would pay a small amount each month to keep /. going.
The thing is, I realize that this site provides value to me and I have been to an extent taking a free ride since I have never purchased anything that has been advertised here. Also, I realize slashdot is likely not bringing in nearly as much money now as when ads sold for $34 per 1,000 banner hits. I'm not sure what the going rate is now(anyone?) but I know ads don't make nearly as much as they used to.
Given the fact that advertising is starting to really suck as a revenue model, and the fact that I really would like to see this site keep going, I would be happy to pay a small amount each month as a subscription fee. Especially if the subscribers got some perks the freeloaders didn't.
I am sure many readers wouldn't pay. However, if that was a veiled question, Hemos, I am also sure that many of /.s readers would ante up. I say go for it.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Free Software/Open Source/napster etc. mainly evolves because the end user thinks the pricing is unfair. The creator gets only a smal amount and the distributor(chain) earns big money. Further the distribution channel it selve often does not add value (download via internet does not add value to a song, distributing it on a CD only marginaly, printing a book does)
/.! Because now I know what I get and what I pay for!
Informations is not free(of charge), never was and likely never will be.
Our society is transforming away from manual crafting(even if done by machines and only controlled by some few humans) to a knowledge and information society.
Currently the patent law and copyright law *AS IT IS*, not as it was intended, freezes the society to remain a material one.
The reason is: the one who deserves credit for "aggregation", "commenting", "creating" knowledge or information does not get it. Value/Welth is lost in the distribution chain.
No one can realy earn money by "crafting" knowledge except a teacher/consultant or one who transforms it into a patent and exploits that one in a material way(or in court to get "license fees").
A micro payment system would only charge a cent or even less than a cent for a page visite.
Slashdot e.g. would not have banner adds (which do not realy annoy me here, but I think they are a waste of money, during the last 3 years I klicked at max 10 adds).
Surely I would pay my 10 cents a day I browse through
I live in Europe, I pay for seeing banner adds by my increased phone bill! Micropayment is much better than paying the telco for something I'm at 99% not intersted in.
A micro payment system would make it possible for EVERYONE (thats what I call free as in freedom) to earn money by their intellectual work, without need of an distribution chain. Giving fair income if the content is "used" often. Giving a marginal income for the one who publishes for his recuration if no one is interested in his stuff.
In my perfect society only intellectual property remains as all material needs are funded.
If material needs are all get cheaper and cheaper to fullfill, only knowledge, art and information remains as a unit of work and money.
In my opinion, because of this, information will never be free of charge(in the big picture). As the whole economy will transform into a true information/knowledge driven economy.
Micropayment systems might be the first step to come closer to that vison. It is not the final one, as it does not cover distribution chains. Those also will need to get transformed. Napster e.g. is a distribution chain. Something like this of course deserves credits, but the increased information flow (increased flow of welth) needs to get distributed fair.
Napster failed in being a fair system(as it even more ripped the artists of as the labels did) and in court it fails because the society is not ready so far to provide a fair system(as current copyright law is no longer fair, it was when it was invented, at least in europe it was and mostly it still is).
Yes, I will pay in a micro payment system. I hoped each single line of source code in a software product would be payed by the user *once* or *per use* with micro payment way to the *creator* of that line of code.
THAT is fair.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ahem.
My point is NOT that the public library has any more or less information then what is available on the internet.
My point is that the informatin in the public library is free.
One of the things that I learned while I was working as a journalist in the U.S. Navy was how to properly perform research in a library setting. There are vast amounts of information available through fiche, periodicals and books that are simply NOT available on the internet.
Yes, there is a great deal of information on the internet. No doubt about it. But I would NEVER use information garnished through the internet as a reliable source. Information on the internet is only a STARTING place for real research. Facts found on the internet should ALWAYS be confirmed through some other means.
But none of that is the point. If you start making me pay for internet content, then I will find other forms of retrieving content that doesn't cost me. Why? Because in addition to being a great information database, the internet is also one of the biggest purveyors of mis-information. And you want me to pay for that?
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
And I've been reading the above "I wouldn't pay for slashdot" comments. Well, you do anyway by having the banners, but would you pay a reasonable price for a generic OSDN pass, that let you enjoy slashdot, slashcode, sourceforge, freshmeat, thinkgeek and other Good Things without banners?
The banner-run sites could still run alongside, but it would be nice for those of us that wanted to pay and feel a greater "part" of slashdot to be able to do so without making a donation that gets forgotton or clicking on the banner ads and buying something you don't want.
You could also have things like different posting scores if you wanted... +2 for paid user acct, +1 for paid AC or unpaid user, 0 for unpaid AC.
Dave
What happens to free web servers like Geocities that depend on ad revenue to stay alive? If micropayments replace ads, say goodbye to them...
Would YOU pay a certain amount a month to view geocities pages? I know I sure wouldn't. 99.99% of them are utter crap. There are a few gems out there, and I'd hate to miss them because I didn't pay my geocities fee.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
If I can tip the author whatever amount I want, without hassle, whenever I want, then you bet. If I have to pay before I see the content, no way.
OpenPGP != OpenP2P
Various ramblings
The micropayment system is a type of honor system. Some think of it as a type of "tip-cup" system. If you find site xyz.com's content super-helpful, funny, etc. Or you visit daily, etc, etc, why not pay $.50 a month, or maybe a whole dollar!
For example, I really like PA's content, thus, I'm willing to chuck a dollar their way every month. With their volume, if even a third of their viewers did this, they'd have more than enough cash to stay afloat! I'd pay a buck a month for /. too. Why not? For all of their bandwidth I use, they might as well have a dollar of mine!
As far as current methods of micropaying, Amazon.com has their Honor System, and there's always PayPal. I don't really like Amazon's though, because they take a cut, but I suppose they have to cover costs. But dang, you can't go wrong with PayPal.
Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?
I gather that they are to replace ads, but what exactly is "?"?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
...if micropayments will take off.
Recently someone sent me an invitation to join their "payment based" web page group - basically a group of web popular gaming web pages would be accessable only by "paying customers" (folks paying $3-$5 a month for access), then share the profits according to who was the most popular.
I'm still keeping my eye on that one (because you never know), but for now I'm rejecting the idea. Mainly because the Internet has fostered an attitude that "Information wants to be free" - an idea that I support. (That's why all of the info on my site is free - you can contribute if you wish, but you don't have to).
But because "Information wants to be free", the other idea is "So why should I pay for information?" Micropayments will help a little, but I'm guessing that a majority (over 90%) won't ever pay. It's just the way it is (as Napster recently proved - how many people were downloaders as opposed to uploaders?).
Micropayments and subscriptions probably won't work with the massive amounts of people willing to volunteer information (look at the number of computer gaming fan sites). I'm not saying its a bad thing - it makes us all compete that much harder. And I imagine that web-based advertising will come back in force - it will just take it a few years for people to a) grow used to the idea and b) businesses to get that you can't advertise Jock Itch Cream on Womengamers.com.
Of course, I could be wrong.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
All we need now is the 50,000-word JonKatz editorial on why we should have banner ads and they'll have the whole of slashdot in the palm of their hand for paying subscriptions :)
Dave
The Wall Street Journal has been profitably charging for content since '95 or '96. They have a one-day (or is it one week?) subscription option on their site for a few dollars US. Also the yearly sub is about US$50. That's about what they get for the dead tree edition after overhead.
I don't think that slashdot could charge for content; maybe ads are the only way to go for Slash. But I'd be willing to pay to download, e.g. KDE2.1 on a fast line with no crowding. I'd even be willing to pay US$1 or US$2, which is about ten times what it would cost to provide the service. Likewise for RPM updates; the public servers are very slow and the downloads are big.
This will be a progessive and evolutionary process. There will be more and more minipayments, more subscription services (especialy as CNN or WashPost find that online content is a money loser with no reliable ad revenue), and more bandwidth guarantees out there as broadband, PayPal, and other technologies prosper or fail. And the system we get could be a combination of existing systems or something completely new.
I think that ad-blocking is great and will help promote some sort of realistic long term system for rewarding quality content. STop the ads and promote a sane net.
I wish I could stop the teevee ads, too. Why should I waste five miniutes on advertisments for unhealthful sugar water, expensive cheap shoes, and gigantic status motorcars every half hour on the teevee when I need only one minute to pee and get a glass of orange juice? It's insulting and a waste of my time.
How much would it cost to avoid the ads if everyone did it? Nothing, because I wouldn't have to pay he higher prices for things that pay for ad prices. Of course, it would cost more for me because the things on which general ad money is spent are all things I don't buy.
Targeted ads are another matter. Who can really be upset that Penguin is advertising hardware to the /.'ers? IT just makes sense.
Those will be a part of any future, because targeted advertising is a very good idea that won't go away no matter how irritating.
But my disorganized thesis here is just that the future will look different and maybe we will have more options. I hope those options will support better content. And I am certainly willing to pay a little for quality.
-Brian
I think micropayments will turn out to be as popular as metered telephone access. When people have to worry about an item costing them for each use, it suppresses the frequency with which they use the resource.
Worse, I doubt that all sites will have the same cost, so the user will have to juggle in his head "OK, this site is $0.05 per page view and that site is $1.00 per page view and this other site...."
And even worse still, the payment rates for sites will be intentionally confusing. For example, the page-per-view rate might be kept low, but the sites will then be arranged to maxamize the number of pages you have to view. Moreover, expect sites to develop differing schemes which make comparing costs and services difficult - sorta like the banking and insurance industries do.
Consumers want flat-rate pricing. If the industry wants to find a model to replace advertising, they're going to have to come up with one where consumers pay a predictable, flat fee which gets distributed to the various sites they visit in a way that they don't have to deal with or think about.
... assuming that you know who you're paying and when. Do I want my credit card number embedded in my brower to get sent off everytime it's requested? Hell no, of course not. But if, say, a gpg signed authorization key was embedded in my browser which was sent, after I ok'd the transfer, to a site author for him to collect money from a micropayment broker (not really any different from a credt card authorization company), then yeah, I'd do that.
This is how cookies work in good browsers. For all it's problems, KDE's Konqueror has excellent cookie handling -- as soon as a request is noted it asks if I should accept or deny this cookie, all cookies from this domain, and then remmebers. Why not the same facility for micropayments. "Do you wish to pay this site $0.50 a month for access?
[yes] (no)
[this month only] (always)"
And if you change your mind, change your setting in the browser preferences.
Clean and simple. Banner ads suck. The web is NOT tv.
-krb
Yes, I would pay.
I wish sometimes I could read the full version of my favorite magazines online (instead of toned down versions), or pay for just the articles I wanted to read.
This system would be very useful in some cases.
Advertising would remain useful in some places.
Some information will always be given away.
I think there is a vacuum when it comes to making small donations (tips or micropayments) on the internet, as Visa/Mastercard are overkill for small amounts. There isn't enough incentive for big banks to go into this, or they don't know how. There is a need however.
mike
The author specifically states that the customer authorizes micropayments on a per-merchant, per-time and per-amount basis. If a merchant did this to you, all they would get is the amount you authorized them for, money you were willing to give them anyway.
This is exactly the problem with micropayments. If a user's browsing is interupted to ask him to confirm a payment of $.02 (or LESS!) for the usage of site XYZ for the next N hours (and please click here to read our 40 page license agreement), that is a significant transaction cost (the "amount" it costs the user to think about whether or not to pay the $.02). In fact, I believe that the transaction cost for micropayments is higher than the payment itself! Which means that micropayments are doomed to failure, because people will hate them, unless they are invisible -- which absolutely allows the type of attack this poster is suggesting is possible. And think about it. Would you fight your ISP (or whoever was recording the micropayments) to get that $.40 back? Unless you do it on principle, it's just not worth your time -- so that crook just got away with stealing your money.
There is more evidence that users will not accept micropayments. Users prefer flat fees. That's why the $19.95/month ISP model win out over AOL's old price-per-minute model. Read Why the Internet Won't be Metered for more information.
Yes, we've all heard how the Net would be a great equalizer. Everyone would be able to use the Internet to access information or conduct business. No more segregation of the rich from the poor.
OOPS! So much for that idea. I'm not exactly poor, but I sure can't justify spending any more on this stuff than I already am. There are a lot more people who just plain will be locked out with this plan.
BTW: Will libraries have to pay micropayments when their patrons access websites? Or will our great socialist machine just divert funds from real library content to subsidize their use?
Looks like the Internet fad is about to fade.
you can not place the same information, it would be copy right infringement or a plagiat.
you ned to rework the information to give it your own touch.
if you can get a micro payment for that, why do you think one would rework it for free?
just to piss of the original creator/publisher?
Most of you seem not to get it: micro payment means basicly you pay about $30 a month, and only for those pages which have a fee installed.
You can not even exceede the $30 as you can never visite enough pages for that, even if each page would cost something.
Currently you pay for bandwidth wich is wasted by banner adds whith suspicious low(or none) effectivness. I rather pay *micro* for contetn I *want* to see instead *bandwith* for contant I like to be filtered.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why should the end user pay for anything, having a company who wants to be seen as the bringer of news is quite worthy. On top of this, if a content provider is providing any services based out of their content (as a smart one should) then you tack on micropayments to all your extended services. I think we have just begun to see a shaping of the net. Anyone who says they know this or that about whats going on, has about as much luck as a meteorologist.
If we do recede into a micro-payment time, I will avoid them like I do anything else I find distasteful. I don't want a bunch of microcharges popping up in my quicken.
People need to think more,
-M
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
Scott McLoud has a comic/essay on this at: http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-5/ics t-5.html
Like Nielsen, I've been saying for years that eventually micropayment will be the way - at least for users who fall in the mid-range between couch potato and expert for the information in question. For example see here from 1997 (it shows) and the capsule version here.
The key points, it seems to me, are:
Mike
People are more willing to pay for porn then their local news.
Would you be agreeable to Andover putting the pinch on your credit card every time you visit slashot or: every time hit "Read More"? every time you post a comment? every time you go to a new page within the slashdot domain? Thats part of the problem with Micro-payment systems... at what point do you charge?
'sapientia potestas est'
Option 5:
.. A better option would be usage-based fee deduced from your account. So if you really like some site and visit it every day, you might not mind paying a bit more for it..
Make it subscription based.
Everyone and their dog including the information wants to be free-crowd will disappear and you're left with a small-ish group of "hardcore" hobbyists.
Poof goes the bandwith problem, paid users get faster access and everyone else migrates to some freebie site (that'll run into trouble sooner or later)
<A href=http://www.combatsim.com>Combatsim</A&g t; did that and yeah, they did get lots of people saying their rip-off site will keel over in no time now.
When they did that exactly to drive away the mass of users that was killing the site.
Ok, in my opinion the payment scheme is flawed ($39.95 flat fee)
But if you only check out a site every other week, you might not want to shell up $39.95 up front for it.
I'd pay something to read <a href=www.theregister.co.uk>The Register</a>, but cannot really think of another site that I'd pay for right now.
Micropayments in some form or another are a necessity, aren't they?
Take small, recurring payments for, say, access to some information service.
The alternative to making these small payments would be subscription, right? But if the service is sufficiently cheap (like 0.10$), how much would we be willing to pay for a subscription? For how long?
First, the price for a subscription must be high enough to justify wasting transaction fees on. I'm not entirely sure that this price would be proportionate to the amount of usage expected. If one changes the payment model (to micropayments) transaction fees would have to almost vanish. (This is one thing that makes it hard to get going, of course.) However, if we stick to "old" models, like a subscription, the rules of that game is less likely to change, and we will be stuck with the transaction fees after all. (My guess anyway..)
A norwegian company, called Subclearing (no web page) now want to offer micropayments through your phonebill. You enter your mobile phone number on the merchant website, they SMS you the password. Of course, that SMS will be more expensive than a regular SMS-message. Here's the article (in norwegian, sorry) from a norwegian news site.
I don't want to think about how much every web click costs me, but I do want to encourage the sights I like, and discourage the ones I don't. I'd rather pay a a flat rate to a content conglomerate, but have them keep track of what I view, and divvy up my fee between their content providers based on my feedback. (both implicit and explicit)
That's OpenP2P, OpenPGP is an under construction consortium founded by Phil Zimmerman, whose PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the standard OpenPGP originally derived from.
Remember when the commercialization of the web was getting big, and everyone said it sucked and "down with them" and shit. Well, don't let the door hit you in the ass, we don't need sites that shove banner ads in our faces, and we certainly don't need to pay for content. It has brought nothing but trouble, from stupid domain name battles and ridiculous 1-click patents and shit. Get out, you won't be missed.
You pay a subscription because you know the Economist is likely, on balance, to give you enough good articles to make it worth your while.
Paying article-by-article wouldn't work so well : you'd want to be confident that a given article would be worth paying for, BEFORE YOU READ IT.
There are, I think, a relatively small number of sites that could generate the confidence it takes to have people pay a subscription. Nowhere near as many as there are ad-supported sites now.
The problem with micropayments and substriptions is that the net is huge. I mean really, really huge. If you are going to charge money or ask for "donations" you need something the users can't get for free easily somewhere else.
This means you have to be different or better than the other guys.
Ad you have to provide you're worth it to the users before they will pay. I will not shell out even a tiny bit of money for something on just a promise that it's cool. Show me first, maybe even let me decide if it's worth the money after I've already seen it.
The problem that "Micropayments" have is the name carries a lot of baggage. Usually people interpret it to mean metered compulsory payment (albiet a small payment) of every page you hit. This will never work because people just don't like to pay for anything before they know if it's worth paying for or not. In a world where infinite copies can be made for nothing it just doesn't make sense to pay for information up front.
Voluntary payments are the revenue model of the future. It's how artists were compensated before Copyright, it's how it'll work after copyright. The difference now is the entire world can potentially toss coins into your hat and you don't have to actually stand on a street corner performing to collect the tips. Artists will find that the most revenue will be made by letting your work spread as far and wide as possible while at the same time making it as easy as possible for your fans to enrich your no matter where they get your work from. The ones that try to lock up their work and force people to pay for it in advance will fail.
burris
Now, I don't know RMS's opinion on micropayments, but I doubt that he's against worthy content providers being reimbursed for their expenses. I don't know of a single instance where he has claimed that anything should be free as in beer, period. Free as in freedom, yes.
Obviously, someone has made some fairly rash generalizations about these ideologists.
The internet is about information. And what makes the internet what it is today is that its free.
Companies need to realize that the "net" is not there to get rich off of. That this e*crap* is crap. The internet is a way to: expand your existing customer base, better server your customers/potential customers.
However, I would pay for some features, like a really good pure web based e-mail, or my online bill paying company. I will not pay for "content", nor will I pay per use type charges.
I think the online adds need to change. They should pay for a number of visitors they are shown to, much like any other add industry. They also need to start using effictive adds. I think "ThinkGeek"s adds are good at this, but most adds don't even spark my intress.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
That comment was supposed to be a joke... okay, not that funny, but still a joke.
I agree with your point, however.
(buy Jolt)
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Amazon.com has a good idea with the tip jar system. But, I dont want it controlled by someone else. We need an Open Tip-Jar Standard !! That way we spend our $$ were we want to, securely, with no middle man. I would give $1 a month to /. and $1 a month to Freshmeat. and so on. I would give $$ to linuxmafia.org and they dont even have banners !!!!!
"I know where you wanted to go today, But we decided to stop here instead!"
1. Trust me. They work! ;)
2. That's because if the free sites had all of the great pictures, then there'd be no point for people to sign up for the good stuff, and nobody would make any money at all!
The author specifically states that the customer authorizes micropayments on a per-merchant, per-time and per-amount basis. If a merchant did this to you, all they would get is the amount you authorized them for, money you were willing to give them anyway. But you're not going to back after they pull this scam, so it's not profitable.
Nice try, but you're going to need a more substantive objection to micropayments than this minor technicality if you wish to convince me of its inadequacy.
Back in the old days... 1995 Yahoo had an ad free service and there were countless attempts made by content sites to charge a subscription for their services. Slate.com is one that comes to mind.
With very few exceptions they failed. In fact, the only one that I can think of that has had any lasting success it the Wall Street Journal.
I think the reason that they all failed is that they were ahead of their time. The Net was new and the greater population didn't see the any benefit to paying for content that they had near free access to already.
Today of course, the Net is indispensable. And I think it may be time to reconsider a subscription system as an alternative to shitty ass banners on our pages.
You ask if I would pay $12.95 a year for slashdot without ads? The answer is yes.
... that is, that it went to the content creator and not an agent, distributor, middleman, or some other breed of fuckwit five-percenter
As a (hopefully) non-fuckwit (but definitely) less-than-five-percenter, let me suggest that you consider using my favorite currency (e-gold) and others that don't rely on making any merchant/consumer distinction. If you want choice on where your money goes to, that's got to be what you want, whether it's us, PayPal, or whoever fails next -- (probably Amazon's little scheme, if you ask me).
I'm hoping that sites like www.fairtunes.com catch on soon for more than just music, and I can simply put a free e-gold tipjar anywhere with www.two-cents-worth.com (but I've gotta go now!).
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle. And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered. I'm not saying Slashdot will fail, it's already achieved critical mass. I'm saying the entry cost for web sites is getting large enough that some form of payment will be necessary, and ads won't cut it.
:)
As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not
To attract traffic you let search engines index your site.
You present snippets and precis of your content. It shouldn't cost too much. It will establish your copyright or ownership.
To break-even with your site, you charge a micropayment for any hit onto something useful on your site.
If they surfers aren't already using a micro payment service provider, you spawn links to services like BTarrray, et alia so your prospective customers can make their purchase.
Those who are interested enough to pay the ten-cents will get their info. Those who aren't won't have cost you an arm and a leg.
Sounds reasonable to me.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When I've pinned the meter to the max on my credit card, will my access to the internet go away? That would suck. What about access at work? I'm sure that my employer wouldn't want to pay to have me surf.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
No.
Lengthier explanation:
The whole infrastructure of the net is such that if one person charges for information, someone else will likely put similar information up for free. Or alternatively, an entire "infowarez" culture could start.
I don't think people will pay for *information* alone...
I think the micropayment idea is good. Goats.com uses it and it seems to be working ok. And I, for one, would give a dollar or two every month to sites I really enjoy useing. For example: /. and PA.
I'm talking about voluntary payments here. Not "Have to pay to use" sites.
I wonder why Hemos chose this topic today.. hmm.. nope... I am not planning to pay to keep Slashdot up and running, if thats what you ask me.
:)
however I have heard that M$ pays handsomely for sites that choose to display their "Freedom to innovate" ads.. That would be so cool, to have slashdot to display that ad.
Dont moderate this up or down..just leave it as the way it is.
Rapid Nirvana
magi_caspar
"Every mistake that I make / I couldn't have made without you" - The Get-Up Kids
Okay, it seems someone needs a healthy dose of reality.
People don't like paying for things.... PERIOD!!! People used napster because the could get music for free. None of them ever complained about not having a convenient voluntary pay mechanism to reward their favorite artists for their hard work. If they did go and get the CD it was with much complaining because they couldn't get the songs they wanted from napster.
I would accept your appeal to history, but in order for such a model to work, the music has to have more than temporary value. Case and point: Who still cherishes their Vanilla Ice albums?? Exactly, it wasn't good music, it was just hype. People paid for the hype, not the lasting value of the music. And besides, how much of that money actually supports the artists, and how much lined the pockets of record company execs??
Now if they made music like they used to this wouldn't be much of a problem. And if musicians were more than pre-packaged music industry money machines, we might be compelled to voluntary give money to them.
However, one case where this may work is independent bands where their fans have a strong interest in seeing them make more music and succeed. But 95%+ of the music out there won't sell with such a model.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
(Also, micropayment systems out there are 100% incompatiable, and this is unlikely to change.)
Instead of buying "less", maybe the model that's needed is that which the Internet as a whole uses, which is to not buy any "thing", but rather a certain slice of computer time, bandwidth, whatever.
(The more efficient you are at utilising the resouces purchased, the more you can get from them. So, instead of paying $0.02 for someone's opinion, you might pay $10 for a million clock cycles on some opinion server, and you can access all the opinions you want, within that clock cycle limit.)
Also, the Galactibanks refuse to deal with small, fiddly change.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Applying my M$-esque buisness plan, I've determined the way to gain infinite wealth is as follows...
Lets charge people over and over for something that:
(a) they already own
(b) they could have for free
(c) isn't worth half of what we're charging.
It is quite simple
Haiku should not be funny
Try a Senryu
Personally, I'm rooting for BYONDimes.
You are paying your ISP to move bits around; that money isn't intended to pay for content.
However, I think micropayment systems that allow charges to be added to your ISP bill might have a better chance of survival because the ISP already has a billing relationship with the user.
I very much hope that the IEEE is a temporary aberration when it comes to on-line publishing, because a model in which a few on-line publishers can dictate on the basis of their market position what they pay content creators and charge subscribers is not desirable.
I was peripherally involved in a smart-card-based micropayment project in '95-'96, and I seem to recall that a typical "on-line debit card" transaction had processing costs of at least $0.25, while they were trying for a per-transaction cost of a few pennies. This $0.25 cost rendered most transactions for less than $10 or so uneconomical (this is why many grocery stores have a minimum for debit card use in excess of this -- the cost wipes out their profit margin). It seemed like some of the micropayment technologies discussed were just front-ends to online debit transactions -- I am not sure how these schemes overcome the per transaction costs of the underlying system (unless these costs have declined significantly in the past 5 years).
One of the _effects_ of micropayment technology that wasn't discussed as prominently as I would have thought is editorial independence. It is difficult for a publication to maintain editorial independence if it is beholden to advertisers -- for instance, a PC hardware site would probably not be able to harshly criticize the products of a major advertiser. Consumer Reports (which was mentioned by others) maintains its editorial independence by charging subscriptions. Basically, micropayments give publications incentives to serve primarily the interests of their readers (to whom they are selling information), rather than primarily their advertisers (to whom they are selling eyeballs). Thus, I think there is a good freedom-based argument in favor of micropayments.
Even if micropayment technology took off, I do not think that the bulk of the web would adopt it. Many sites have other justifications -- eCommerce, support for other revenue-producing activities, educational --, some few can be supported by ads and others are pure hobbiest activities. Additionally, I doubt that those that do adopt micropayments will use a simplistic "penny a page" approach, but will rather use subscriptions or some other form of aggregation. Also, as the O'Reilly P2P article points out, micropayments might come in handy in the services or "ASP" realm. One can imagine an online-tax preparation service doing simple tax returns for a few dollars.
It seems as though most of you are missing. You wont be forced to make micropayments.. the information is free as always there is no place on PA that tells you to make the donation because thats what it is A DONATION, just like your local museum its open to the public people put a buck or two in the plexiglass bin and look at the art others walk past it, some even walk up to the desk and offer gobs of money. point is those places and this structure has been around long before the 'net came about. it seems to provide enough dough to keep the (super expensive) art coming it could probably provide a better subsistance to websites than banners ever would. if you need more proof PA has been running their "honor system" for about 5 days now and they have already raised this much. i think the honor system is a great idea and as soon as i get a credit card i will be supporting my homies, gabe and tycho and help them to pay the bills, just like a buck in the plexiglass, a few clicks and i help out something awesome
My favorite example of a site that needs micropayments is The Oxford English Dictionary. It was and is hugely expensive to reproduce, and if it can't generate revenue, it will die. As a dictionary of the English language, it stands head and shoulders above anything else. If I had access to it, I would look up words in it by default; nothing else comes close.
But I don't have access. Currently you can gain access to the online edition by paying an annual subscription fee of $550! Who's going to do that? Academics and a few professional writers and editors. At that price, it's useless to me and most of the other people who might use it. Worse (and more to the point), it could be generating a lot more revenue if it were available to a larger audience through micropayments.
---glv
The content would have to get a lot better. Would you pay for Salon.com or Wired.com? I read parts of these sites every day, but I wouldn't pay anything for them. The content just isn't good enough. What about OldManMurray.com (IMHO the best site on the internet)? They would have to actually update more than once a month.
The business model isn't invalid, it just can't support massive amounts of waste. Remember reading about the indoor slides between floors at Excite? How cool! I wonder why they don't have those kind of things at Random House? Because Random House is evil, dammit! They don't care about our freedom and personal amusement, they just want to make money.
Which is, of course, what all businesses are required to do.
Ever since those idiotic banner ads started showing up I've been using proxy filters for Web browsing. This breaks some services, and I live without them. It is now breaking fewer services than my unwillingness to run Java does.
The idea that ad delivery costs browsing time, and that ad creators are willing to make me pay with time in advance to see the ads, is all I ever needed to know about them.
Advertisers, instead of advertising/annoying people, spend your money making a -usable- Web site without a lot of 'experience management' crap. When I want to buy something, I'll come to your Web site if you have it -but try to get me to sign in or have a username/password pair and I'll leave. Show me a "x-shockwave-flash" error and I'm gone. Insist on cookies, Java, Javascript, ActiveX or whatever and I'm history.
And don't spam.
Once you've got through all these criteria you have a site from which I'll -buy stuff-. There aren't many. Amazon spams, so does Elstead Maps. They're two of my former suppliers. McMaster-Carr and Mouser Electronics meet all the criteria above (well, OK, for McM I'll turn on Javascript) and they have been selling me stuff for years. Textbooksource.net is beginning to look good.
So - do you want sales, or do you want to create a user experience? If you just want to sell stuff, get on with it and lose the cute graphics. If you want to create a user experience, forget it, because -my- experience is going to be locate, purchase, leave. If you want a 'relationship', forget it. We'll have one if -I- say so. I'm the one with the money, remember?
Have any idea how much the average porn site rakes in in a year?
There's a lot of money out there to be grabbed at a nickel a shot (pardon the pun.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Your library (not the Library of Congress...)doesn't have a 10th of the information that the Internet contains. Plus, most of the useful content on the internet is currently not published, so no library will even have it archived.
Try searching for at your library for solutions to uncommon/tricky IT questions (coding, admin, database, etc...). Good luck finding a decent/current resource for just about anything.
The tricky part is avoiding abuse and making all of the systems work together (good luck.) Pay pal is great, but I don't know if it would support micropayments well.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
I am going to take a trip back to my formidable years, when I was BBSing at the sweet age of 13. And I will disregard the fact I was pretending to be much older.
I remember my favorite sites: the people, the interface, and the online games. Those sites were all free and they rocked. You dialed up in you were in. It wasn't too complicated.
I also remember the other sites which charged a membership fee or some other gimmick to attract people and get them to pay. But I don't remember those sites as much as the free ones.
I know some people did pay the monthly fees but I never stayed on a BBS which did. Maybe it was because they didn't offer the things which I wanted. Or didn't offer a sense of community which I felt on the other BBSes. Plus when you are 13, you spend your money on other things of great importance.
I remember my favorite BBS had get togethers in the park during the summer and we could meet the people behind the aliases. It felt good to belong to such a group. The closest I feel to a sense of "belonging" nowadays is Slashdot. And they don't even have TradeWars.
Sites, as BBSes, will come and go, but it is what you do with them which will create the fondest memories. And being free don't hurt either. If fact it probably helps a lot. Not to say micropayments won't work, but I am from the old school and the best things in life are free.
I think /. needs to have a annual barbecue somewhere. That would be nice.
I love the idea of micropayments in an abstract sense, but can't see how they'd work for the user. The questions are: What is the user experience? Where do you put the pay box?
The models would seem to be:
The basic problem, though, is that most of the stuff on the Net is currently free at point of use, and getting people to change their habits after all this time will be very very difficult indeed. Look how successful Slate was when they tried it.
My favourite approach would probably post-payment, but with a user-entered amount. Enthusiastic readers can really display their enthusiasm then.
Failing that, there's always merchandising - but you need a very specific kind of site for that. It works for Sluggy, but I doubt it would be quite as effective for Pigeon Racer's Monthly.
--
Dunx
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
I wouldn't mind paying for contenet if I didn't haveto pay for internet access. It's a bit like paying for cable, and paying again if you want programming.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Are any of these things regional or local? I mean, I'd fall for the Thai place down the road on a daily basis if a banner popped up each time I surfed the web.
mmmmm... gang phed ...rrrrgghhhh...
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Micropayments = Bad. If that kind of system goes into place, my web surfing stops cold. Why? Because it's too easily abused. Pop-up windows for one. Click to a page and suddenly ten windows pop up, each with its own micropayment. The user will get screwed by this and even more involved scams. The cable TV system is a better approach. Pay for content, but pay one bulk rate for a wide selection of sites (channels). Instead of 50-500 TV channels, one micropayment network could have a stable of 1000-5000 sites all under the same fixed payment umbrella. Who knows? I will always churn out my half-assed attempts at web entertainment for no pay - I haven't seen a penny yet. Do it for the love, baby.
Well, that was an answer to the question, I don't have more to say.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Bring the web back to the little people. It was great when there wasn't money being thrown all over the place. Web advertising is stupid anyway...hell I don't really know what to do about all this. I am a web developer, but working on finishing up my degree since I kind of forsee companies NOT having a full-time webdev on staff.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
If you think about it, such a small payment will add up to large monthly sums for the sites that carry content users are really interested in. This will also result in a "survival of the fittest" kind of an atmosphere, eliminating a lot of fluff sites out there.
So I say, bring it on.
Ñ'
I ain't paying.
I access content on the internet because it is free and readily available. Start charging for that content and it will be back to the old public library for me.
Ads still work. As always, the adult industry is ahead of the curve on this one (due to large amounts of money and traffic involved, as compared to non-adult sites). The adult industry pays for transactions based on ads, not simple impressions (page views), or click-throughs. Check out the adult industry. Ads work just fine there. It'll just take a while for the non-adult industry to catch up.
Micropayments probably wouldn't. There's still too much trouble attached with setting up an account, using web sites affiliated with your micropayment system, etc. I doubt that most people would want to surf with a credit card handy. Many attempts at pay-for-surfing have failed (most notable: Slate.com).
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
A little blunt, if you ask me - but an option.
I pay quite a bit more for my DSL line, but it is always on and I don't have to worry about usage. I'm not an inordinately heavy user, but the Net is important to me on a day-to-day basis and I much, much prefer not having to think about the minutes I am using.
For this reason I'm resistant to micropayments. I would have no problem subscribing to services I like. I was one of the (idiots?) folks who paid for Slate when it tried to go subscription. I subscribe to several online info sources and am budgeting for twice that much. But I don't like the idea of paying by click because then I have to think about it. It tends to restrain my urge to dig into a new idea or a new site.
I also am very concerned about the tracking capability. Anytime you have a payment system, you must have some method of accurately tracking how the billing and payments are done. That means that, absolutely without question, there is a record of what sites I am visiting. And we all know how long anonymity lasts in the US -- right up until someone gets interested enough to file court papers. Bush has even come out as being opposed to anonymity on the Net, which is horrible.
Anonymity matters. Lack of tracking matters. I won't subscribe to any micropayment system because of that. Yes, subscriptions to online services is a form of tracking, but showing that you subscribe to a site (no matter how politically uncorrect) is not the same as showing that you are actually reading it.
Call me paranoid, but the era of thoughtcrime has already begun, and I imagine it will go a lot further.
Services like Freedom are important -- support them.
If you look at bandwidth prices (e.g. $2.8/GB - not intended as advertising, might be cheaper elsewhere) or prices for a web server (a few thousand dollars) - this can be easily financed by advertising, even if prices have collapsed to $.10/AdClick.
Don't worry, Slashdot is a very wealthy site. You only need more, if you want to profit from the site.
It's a different issue, of course, for sites such as the New York Times, who have to pay journalists and can't rely on trolls for their content.
things. take. time.
I would only pay for online content that is unavailable for free. I sort of bristle at the term "people who do content as a hobby" to describe noncommercial content. "Publicly generated content" would be a better term. I favor letting commercial interests fend for themselves, and providing a certain amount of publicly owned, publicly available hardware, with load-sensitive automatic mirroring that makes the most popular content most accessible. In other words a PBS that actually is Public.
Let's say Billy sets up a gaming review website and charges a small amount of money for each of his articles. If enough people like his articles, he could quite his job or take a part time job and spend all his time creating better content.
Now Billy starts overpricing his content and slacking off on the quality of his content. This is where Bob steps in. Bob sees he can give better quality content cheaper and make a living off of it. If Billy doesn't start producing better quality content, he's not going to get enough money anymore and go back to his day job.
This is basic economics (which a lot of Slashdotters seem to try to ignore), but on the Internet it's a little bit different. Unlike the real world, all the user has to do is click on over to another site and pay them if they have better quality content. This can cause some extreme competition and with money involved people will compete as hard as they can for the consumers money.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I mean, I pay a monthly fee to access the internet. I pay my ISP a monthly fee to access the internet on their network, So aren't I already paying a subscription fee for the 'net?
Maybe the ISP's need to start kicking into a slush fund for web sites to dip into, like PBS for the internet.
(the above commentary was painted with very large brush strokes to provide a wide sweeping opinion to generate discussion. No animals were harmed or used for testing.)
Micropayments won't work. Even though I visit a handful of websites consistently, none of them are so indisposable that I couldn't go somewhere else (even Slashdot can be done away with) for similar content. Even pure voluntary payments will create NPR/PBS style pay your dues banners and splash pages. Although, that isn't that bad of an idea. A website is one of those odd things that can get sunk by its own popularity. It can become so popular, the owner can't afford to pay the bandwidth fees. Some alternative method needs to be developed. I'm not smart enough to figure out what it should be, but the advertising model is failing, at least at the low level scale. I'm willing to display Coke,Pepsi, Holiday Inn, 7-11, and Pep Boy banners on my site, but for some reason they don't advertiser on the web.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
There are sites I'd consider paying for, but I'm pretty picky. I might pay something ($5 a month? $10?) to get the New York Times. I'd pay to read lumthemad.net. Etc.
;-)
I really think that the only way pay would work well would be to pay for a network of affiliated sites. The whole micropayment thing doesn't work for me, because I end up worrying about the meter running. Consumers like macropayments.
But I'm skeptical that it can work in the long run, because most users are cheapskates, and will just skate on by with free sites (or do without).
I already pay for newspapers. I already pay for magazines. If someone can get me better information in a better package than what I can currently get on the Internet, then why not?
Look, I know full well I can go to, say NY Times (free registration required) and get a pretty good read that way. But what if I'm looking for something that's a bit more insightful? Let's face it. Alot of the web sites out there right now are nothing more than, say, a fancy newsletter. Sure, they get updated everyday, but there aren't really alot of Pulitzer prize winners writing for Ars Technica for instance.
What if there were a service that paid the authors a small amount, and you were able to customize which authors you received. So each morning, your favorite writers would show up, bring you the news and their opinions (since anyone can give you the news for free), and you'd pick which articles you liked, and the site would continually customize itself for you. Now THAT would be worth something!
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
If it meant that I got to choose who the money went to - that is, that it went to the content creator and not an agent, distributor, middleman, or some other breed of fuckwit five-percenter - then yes, yes, a thousand times YES!
I don't think the problem is that - as one poster put it - that the 'Net will become one giant pay site - content creators should get paid for good work. The problem will be keeping scumbag content-control freaks (Sony, RIAA, MPAA, the U.S. Congress) from mucking it up and taking a cut.
I think it would be the ideal way, though, to pay for good independent content like Penny Arcade, Sinfest, and even Jennicam - and all the other content-based sites I like, but for whom I'm not willing to enter into an expensive revolving subscription agreement.
We'll see if it actually happens...
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Hell Yes!
Same reason I go to the more expensive movie theater in town: better seats, larger screen, and fewer riff-raff to deal with.
I'd pay whatever it took for a website to give me what I want, ad-free, feature-rich, and know that it would be served 100 times faster since all the free-loaders have trimmed back their web-surfing and pR0n downloading since it now costs them something more than zero.
I've been begging Yahoo to set me up with something ad-free (and yes, I know about all the filters/blockers/etc) and give me more customization. Maybe two tiers of service are needed. As I use the Internet practically all day long, I'm willing to pay a bit more for something better.
...I both want and need micropayments to become a reality. Why? I look at the Consumer Reports business model--no ads--and see something that should easily work on the Web. However, I don't think that our sports content is good enough--yet--to merit charging CR-level prices. And in trying to go lower, we will get up by transaction fees and be in the same position as we are with Flycast.
Soon, I think a whole lot of DIY e-publishers are going to be with us. We love what we're doing, and we don't want to become rich sports boors [say hello, Mr. Sheffield], but we would like to cover costs and maybe even take a little home one of these days...
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-- Geof F. Morris
But whether it works or not is a different matter. Might be worth keeping track of Penny Arcade to see how they fare
-- Michael Lee Martin