Slashdot Mirror
Testing an Ad-Free Microtransaction Utopia
MrAndrews writes "After reading a Slashdot story about adblocking and the lively discussion that followed, I got to wondering how else sites can support themselves, if paywalls and ads are both non-starters. Microtransactions have been floated for years, but never seem to take off, possibly because they come off as arbitrary taxation or cumbersome walled-garden novelties. Still, it seems like the idea of microtransactions is still appealing, it's just the wrapping that's always been flawed. I wanted to know how viable the concept really was, so I've created a little experiment to gather some data, to put some real numbers to it. It's a purely voluntary system, where you click 1, 2 or 3-cent links in your bookmark bar, depending on how much you value the page you're visiting. No actual money is involved, it's just theoretical. There's a summary page that tells you how much you would have spent, and I'll be releasing anonymized analyses of the data in the coming weeks. If you're game, please check out the experiment page for more information, and give it a go. Even if you only use it once and forget about it, that says something about the concept right there."
Might skew the results a bit.
Go back to when people had web sites as a hobby and not this SEO, per click revenue blog spam shithole we have today.
You need a system that uses real dollars or the results are meaningless. Let people donate to the ACLU or EFF or any other supporters of a free (as in soeech) Internet with the proceeds.
I'd love to help create a real market without stuffing money in the pockets of marketing departments and other corporations that contribute little or nothing positive to my life. Let me know where to sign up.
The hard part is getting people onto some kind of platform that works and where friction and transaction costs don't eat all the money. If, theoretically, one existed, then maybe it'd be interesting when people click 1 cent or 3 cents; but a bigger issue is putting them in a position where they can easily click at all.
The only micropayment-for-writing platform I've seen with significant uptake was Readability's now-discontinued experiment, and it worked (to the extent it did, though it's been canned, so perhaps not that well) because lots of people used Readability for other reasons. So it was more of a revenue-share that Readability was offering to any webmaster who wanted to sign up. I think you need something like that, a platform that people are already on for some other reason.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The data being collected has very little impact on real world results. If there is no cost, then people will simply click the 3 cent link when they remember to do so. Since it has no impact on their finances they won't think twice about it.
Think about gaming sites that give you free unlimited chips to play poker with. People bet the max every hand no matter if they have 2-7 off suit or pair of aces. This completely destroys any comparisons to a real money game.
Johnkoerner.com
Personally speaking, I block most ads, mainly because of bandwidth issues. Slashdot is one of the few that I whitelist, because I don't mind supporting them....
Don't some time share models give you points that you can use at any of their resorts. You pay a big fee once a year, get your points and visit all their properties you want until the points run out. No microtransactions, but tiny fees for each use.
The issue is you would need a large set of useful sites and one payment area for all of them, something like cable or Netflix. You pay one company to get content from a bunch of different places.
Have you teried/seen Flattr?
I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I stumbled across that while reading a blog post and I liked the idea. I have yet to find a page that I would give a Flattr to, but the idea is compelling.
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
I usually spend my mod points when /. award them to me.
I have no issue with this. If I had to pay for Mods, there is no way I would have ever spent 1.
. .
that has been going strong for more than ten years?
you are confusing slashdot commenters with slashdot users. commenters are, in general, a bunch of angry cranks who get a buzz out of spewing bile and hatred through their keyboard. slashdot users generally read the article (or the first sentence or two) and then do something productive with their life.
paywalls do work for some content, otherwise places like the WSJ, slate, etc etc etc, wouldn't use them.
and ebooks are doing a pretty good business on the kindle, nook, etc. even the Kobo survived the demise of Borders.
and microtransactions work perfectly well (too well) in games - theres probably someone in publishing who has noticed this and has implemented/worked on integrating that into a website.
So...you submit something potentially interesting (for whatever reason... to each is own) and then.. don't expect it to be slashdotted? uhm... interesting. I'd like to suscribe to your newsletter MrAndrews.
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
... no one can be bothered to click 2c or 3c every time they stumble on a useful page. It's extra mental processing that distracts from what they're really doing, and the fact a page is useful might not be apparent until much later, long after they have left it. What happens if you make a payment and the advice on the page later turns out to be crap? Then there is the question of who the micropayments are going too: Some struggling blogger or hobbyist (worth supporting), a tenured academic (who is already taken care of financially) or a big company who needs my 2c much less than I do. You will also have issues like hosted content: are the payments going to the author, or the webhost.
Some sort of payment scheme is a good idea, but not like this. Often you'll find someone throw themselves into a freeware project and get disillusioned and abandon it when issues like paying the rent take precedence. I think the old 'Donate $5 with Paypal' is a good idea, if you can get rid of the Paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any other intermediary who might block payments. http://www.pcworld.com/article/242470/wikileaks_suspends_publication_because_of_financial_boycott.html
The trouble with microtransactions is they'll create an incentive for content publishers to "nickel and dime" readers.
Just look at phone and tablet games with "in app purchase" models. A great idea in theory. In practice, it drives the entire game design from "pay to play" to "pay to win".
If the content industry figures out how to make microtransactions work (a pretty big if)... just watch. Content will adapt from trying to attract and genuinely appeal to readers to a "nickel and dime" them to the maximum extent possible!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
commenters are, in general, a bunch of angry cranks who get a buzz out of spewing bile and hatred through their keyboard.
Shut the hell up.
#DeleteChrome
Aaaand, it doesn't actually seem to work. Turns the current URL into file address, and adds that to your server IP,... For example, trying to use it on SMBC results in: "http://penny.1889.ca/www.smbc-comics.com/#comic", which results in a very good impression of a 404.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
There will never be a shortage of sites/services which you'd enjoy spreading contributions over, but information on which ones are affected by contributions the most is unfortunately a lot harder to find. Nobody wants to overpay for a service, but those against sponsorship models would like reward honesty and transparency in an organisation's dealings. Donations must be able to fight deceit, not aide it. Websites should make transaction statistics clearer, along with a breakdown of exactly what those funds will be necessary for. Just a simple red/black indicator would be a effective way to empower the visitor's choice of how and when they should donate.
At the current time, making one signficant contribution to a website in need is more efficient than a spread of blind microtransactions with higher brokerage fees. As witnessed through the rise of Kickstarter, better transparency and response will drive an effective display of will from self-organised masses.
The real problem with "micro"-transactions comes from every goddamned site that tries them, doing their best to aggregate them back into macro (or at least normal) transactions.
From site-specific microcurrencies - usually one dime or penny per unit - That you can only spend in multiples of 50 (aka "$5.00") or 500 (aka "$5.00") respectively, to tip jars that refuse to process under a buck or five, just about every site out there that takes "micro" payments refuses to actually take micro payments. And they lose money as a result.
Yes, guys, I would send you a few cents - maybe up to a buck if I really, really like what you do - To view your content, if I like it and can do so anonymously and friction-free. I won't, however, send you a Lincoln to read about your recent experience with an obnoxious Wallyworld cashier, no matter how funny you consider yourself.
It doesn't work in the Android browser.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh definitely, and I was one of the first onboard for Slashdot subscriptions, back in the day. But still, after those stats from Destructoid, I wondered if this quasi holy war that goes on between publishers and readers might have a more amicable solution. Instead of "stop spamming us!" / "you owe us!", there could be some "you did good" / "thank you!".
OK, really, I'm just interested to see how much money I personally would spend in any given month, and I thought some Slashdotters might as well.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Slashdot was the same thing. i thought a subscription might last a while, but it ran out much faster than I thought. I think /. is a worthy site and should be supported, but given the rates that are charged for a subscription, it is clear that the advertisers are willing to pay more to get impressions that I am willing to pay for content.
Which is fine. This is how media has been forever. Advertisers are desperate to find ways to reach impressionable consumers. It works. I am not sure if there is any reason to change it. For instance I receive a number f magazine who subscriptions work out to much less than a dollar an issue. Clearly this is not enough to cover more than agency fees, handling, and postage. Therefore advertisers cover all productions costs and profits. These magazine makes money.
There are models already in the media in which end users provide tiny bits of funding, microtranactions so to speak, to support the media. In reality advertising, though much lower key, still supports up to 50% of the media outlets, and these outlets are often nonprofit, meaning corporate and public support is tax deductible. This is clearly not the model proposed here.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
For the readers. Ads obviously work in general, but if you are going to run a site where 50% of the readership blocks ads, ads are pretty much a non-starter.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Your whole test is flawed from the start because there is no 0-cent option. You assume that every web page has some value to everyone who visits it. The reality is that most pages on the web have zero value to most people who visit them. That is particularly true of pages visited from a search engine or a link from another web page.
I smurf everything and everything I smurf is perfect.
Or a subscription to the site or group of sites might work. However for any of this to take off, I think it has to be more convenient and secure to do transactions. This includes the security and anonymity of the transactions and ease of transaction including login/password/key management. PayPal like solutions help some with this, but transactions are still risky, inconvenient, and login/password management is still another account that you must create and remember. I look forward to the day where we have a comprehensive and convenient security solution that involves a secure device and secure network infrastructure , that manages your IDs/keys, transaction verification, secure connections, heavily audited, open solution, can be lost or stolen with out worry, and even if someone had a gun to your head asking you to transfer money, you could limit the ability to do the transaction with a number of security safe guards. I should be able to visit the most malicious site, get my computer compromised, and still not be at risk of losing my money or password. Until then, I am going to be very selective of who I give money to.
If the ads weren't so keen to get you clicking outside of the webpage being viewed maybe they'd be more palatable.
Less measurable distracting diversions and more subconscious directions would do wonders for the sales ... even if it is only ever a correlation. TV has thrived on this method.
Let the consumer feel they are in control, not the other way around.
The reasoning here is sound, and the theory has been borne out over the past dozen years since this was written:
A transaction can't be worth so much as to require a decision but worth so little that that decision is automatic. There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small, and it derives not from the interface used or the time required, but from the very act of deciding. Micropayments, like all payments, require a comparison: "Is this much of X worth that much of Y?" There is a minimum mental transaction cost created by this fact that cannot be optimized away, because the only transaction a user will be willing to approve with no thought will be one that costs them nothing, which is no transaction at all... micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free?... users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Clay Shirky, 12/19/2000
Read the whole piece -- it has tons of good info. (And it's an entertaining read.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The problem is people hosting sites taking no responsibility for the ads on it. I never objected to regular old ads (and still don't), but started using ad-blocker when ads started popping up over the text I'm reading, singing, dancing around, popping up, over, and uner, popping up after I've navigated away, or running horrid javascript and flash that managed to consume most of my CPU cycles. Then there's the very much NSFW ads that pop up even when the page I'm reading is G rated. I vener had problems with the virus laden drive by ads since I use Linux, but that is a very valid reason to block ads as well.
There's only so many times you can kick someone in the crotch before they take countermeasures.
If sites ask nicely AND vet the ads they present, people might be willing to allow ads on those sites. It's more work, and so the ads might need to pay more, but they'll also be more likely to be actually seen by someone. That might be a tough way to go though since so many advertisers have effectively salted the earth.
I sat in on a meeting last year where a company was trying to convince a potential advertiser (hand-picked, too) to put ads on their site. The cost was probably about 10x the norm, for the audience. The advertiser said: "Why would I pay that much when I can blast the world for less?" To which the site owner said: "But this is a PREMIUM ad. Premium!" Said the advertiser: "How is it premium, aside from costing me a lot of money?" And that was pretty much that.
Still, companies will gladly spend ten times their online budget, putting an ad in a newspaper for a single day, where you have no idea of impressions, no way to measure follow-through, and really so much friction it's a fair bet less than 5% of people who saw it, acted on it... I still can't quite grasp why print advertising hasn't crashed and burned in the last decade. Leprechauns or something.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
It's a purely voluntary system, where you click 1, 2 or 3-cent links in your bookmark bar, depending on how much you value the page you're visiting.
In this case, there should also be a 0-cent link so people can positively register that they didn't value the page at all. That someone would voluntarily take the time to provide negative feedback means more than simply ignoring the ad.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Everything in life is a value exchange whether you see it or not. Would you start a moving company that moved people regardless of whether they paid or not? Of course you wouldn't. Information and functionality isn't free it takes time to compile and create, it takes money to deliver it to you.
I see alot of "The web was so much better comments" here and on the post that instigated this.
Do any of you actually remember the web in the mid-90s? I'm guessing most of you are younguns living in an idealism hidden in the haze of a hormonal youth.
Do you remember that it took less time to go to the library and find information there than search using the primitive internet indexes that were around at the time?
Do you remember the horrid experiences when you finally found the website you were looking for and half the information was missing and the other half was linked in at a page that was actually a picture of a construction worker digging, because it was under construction?
Do you remember server crashes? Our favorite sites being down for weeks rather than minutes? How about email that had latency in the range of hours or days?
Make no mistake, money makes things better. It allows people to invest in infrastructure and invest in people who are specialists in fields like user experience, data structure, and design. Money is why we can, for no more than the cost of your internet connection, interact with someone accross the world in hundreds of ways, instantly.
I will never block ads, and just because you can doesn't make it right. If I disagree with or dislike the method of advertising delivery I will simply not visit the site. Just because I don't like a site's implied contract doesn't make it right for me to steal from them. I don't like airport security, nor do I like the way we are treated once on an airplane any more, yet it doesn't make me feel like I have the right to barge onto a plane and fly for free.
Those of you blocking ads and complaining, grow up, realize that people need to be able to eat and that every business person is not a millionaire. Most business people are just like you, struggling to survive and trying to find a way to give their customers the things they want at the lowest price possilble, and when a site is ad supported that price is free, the least you can do is leave the ads in place.
People want free data, but hosting isn't free, so companies can offer "free" by extracting user usage-patterns and/or hosting ads.
End users don't want ads, but you can't get your stuff for free. So offer micro-transactions! Oh, wait... Those can be tracked and have to be tracked, money can't just come from no-where.
Someone responds, but something like bitcoin can allow anonymous transactions. Well, they don't need to track "you", just your habits. You're still no better off than where you were with ads, other than now you need to pay money and have the inconvenience of registering with each site to pay them, even if with an anonymous bitcoin key.
Wait, it gets better. They can just start tracking your keys, and now you give them the same info AND you pay them money. But you can create many more keys for free you say? But all transactions are public, so they can data-mine and link all of the fake-keys to the real person.
In the end, web-sites need to make money. Either you need to pay them indirectly with ads or something similar, or pay them directly with real money. No matter how you pay them, they can track and associate the money with "you", even if "you" is just another anonymous habit-based data-point.
Either way they will track you, but one way will actually cost you money.
This is my take on the situation.
Paywalls are not a no-go idea. The problem is that nobody want to pay for content that is just refactoring of news from Reuters or AP that you find on a myriad of news sites.
So true. My favorite news site added crappy video ads. I found a new site. This time, I actually spent 60 seconds to email them and let them know. As you said, the implied deal is that they create a bunch of great news stories for me, which I like, and I see the ads. I'm not willing to make that trade with their new, particularly annoying ads. I won't block the ads while taking the content because that would be sort of similar to stealing, if I don't keep up my end of the deal by seeing the ads.
...and will there be a -€0.01 or -$0.01 option if that is truly how much a web page is worth after robbing me of 2 minutes of my life?
It's probably because there are so many sites that will display their ads for next to nothing. In their minds, they separate print, radio, television, and web ads.
It hasn't yet struck them that more and more people are blocking ads entirely, just as they don't seem to realize that what they call television ads, most people call 'bathroom break'.
On the other side of the coin, for micropayments, they need to be actually micro or at least milli (milli-cents per page) and probably will need centralization. I don't want to give my credit card out to every random website I encounter. It's not just a hassle to fill out the forms, it's also a risk of a bazillion erroneous or outright fraudulent charges, and a zillion logins I would have to maintain. It would make web surfing effectively impossible.
On the other side, web sites would REALLY need to up their game to have any chance of people paying to read their content. There's just too many sites that ultimately prove to not be worth the time it takes to read them much less payments. You'd have to find some way to convince people that your site was somehow better. There's a good chance that the same jackasses that are salting the earth for ads would move on to salting the entire web with junk articles, articles scraped from other sites, and effectively content free pages.
It's worth considering that metered services like compuserve were wiped out by the web even at a time when much of the web looked a lot like geocities. It's also worth noting that the Xanadu project (with built in micropayments) tried for decades to get off the ground and got nowhere while the web spread like wildfire in just a couple years. That is, the www more or less IS Xanadu stripped to it's essentials and micropayments are an effort to build it back into Xanadu again.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4834923/iPad-pony-trap-as-Grace-6-runs-up-massive-900-bill-on-free-game-app.html
Microtransactions on mobile devices -- and especially marketed towards children -- can be extremely problematic.
Even microtransactions in online games are getting out of hand, and they're arguably one of the few places where the model excels.
The problem is nickel-and-dime related. When you're not spending much, you don't realize how fast you're actually spending money. This is the reason a lot of people carry cash instead of plastic; it's less abstract.
I'm a big gamer, and many games I play operate on microtransaction models. Over the years, I've spent over $1000 on one game, and over $300 on another. Both games were technically free. Altogether microtransactions have probably cost me close to $6k.
YT recently announced plans for "microtransactions". Paying for access to certain channels. Problem is they envision people paying over a dollar per channel per month. Even Valve doesnt understand micro, they charge couple of dollars for few pixels.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Yep : "Slashdot users" versus "Slashdot consumers"
http://revj.sourceforge.net
I thought the word 'Utopia' implies a ideal, but unachievable society
Why not just run the JavaScript Bitcoin generator on your site the only downside is your end users will be donating some processor power whilst they visit your site.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
And sorry to read about your wife. Carry on, man !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Just like Cable TV - we pay for it, and then we don't have to watch ads, right?..... Right?
If this ever gets implemented, it will end up doing nothing more than driving revenue further up so that popular sites can have ads AND "premium content". Maybe fewer ads at first, but they will start to creep in, mark my words. Learn ye the lessons of history.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
Consumers are a subclass of users, and commenters is another subclass. I think you need to study OO and inheritance -- you appear to be stuck in an outdated procedural paradigm....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I think the idea is that acting as you imagine you would behave correlates more highly with how you actually would behave than randomness does. Take the data as a correlation, be cognizant of the possible degrees of accuracy, and extrapolate from there. You maybe get broad strokes showing you the directions things could go in an actual situation, but that's not nothin'.
Many news sites
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Microtransactions ARE how the web is funded currently. The majority of commercial web sites use advertising to monetize their content.. By placing ads on their pages they receive a minuscule sum of money for each unique user who views a page. The cost of the advertising is made up in the price of goods. ie just as in a classic microtransaction system the user puts money into an organization that pays small amounts to the owner of pages they visit.
Imagine if instead ISPs charged slightly more and paid a tiny amount say 1000th of a cent to the owner of websites you visit.
Some idea could work but not this one.
As one comment notes, nobody can be bothered to click all the time.
Also, people cannot grasp the meaning of 1 cent per click, or the difference among 1,2 and 3 cent buttons. Instead those will translate to a 1,2 or 3 star "I like this" system which does not need to be arbitrarily connected to 1, 2 or 3 cents but would be used to divide a fixed pie among authors, which is a totally different system. And some not getting it will just give 1 star if they are cheap, or 3 stars if they just see it as popularity but not realizing it translates into money coming out of their account.
What is needed is a fixed monthly fee and the ability to pay for media from that at some very low rate (only sustainable if huge numbers of people download the media) so it is like a cheap cable tv subscription. The monthly fee should be collectable by ISPs or by some other method such as paypal or maybe bitcoins, or itunes type gift cards bought at the convenience store, bookstore or kiosk (would need some way to get credits through library terminals for free viewing in a sponsored library (possibly a virtual one).
People don't have a good handle usually on the monthly budget they have available when it is an impulse buy, so best is to create an extremely low friction ubiquitous service that can be used for any type of media purchase, withdrawing (manually or automatically) from this budget.
It is like the way SkypeOut withdraws from the money in your Skype account, but making the platform available to all services.
Are street performers entitled to tips from everyone within earshot of their performance? Advertisers seem to be making this assertion.
I've put together a page showing results as they come in, grouped by domain, sorted by money "earned". You can find it here: http://penny.1889.ca/results
There have been a few quirks along the way. First, most people who hit the site seem to have clicked the links on the penny site while moving them to their bookmarks bar, so I'm just filtering anything at penny.1889.ca entirely. Probable noise, I think.
I'm not merging domains into bundles, because there are some cases (code.google.com/mail.google.com or anything blogspot) where the subdomains are vital information. So in some cases, a site owner would actually be collecting from multiple entries at once.
The default behaviour of the bookmarklets appears to have confused some people... after the site is tagged in the system, I do an immediate redirect back, which may be too quick to see, so the buttons get hit multiple times in quick succession until the user notices a flicker. I've left all those "duplicate" tags in, only because I can't absolutely be sure that the user wasn't doing it on purpose, to show heavy support for the page they were tagging.
Other general stats:
- 1600 entries recorded in 24 hours
- 356 users participating so far
- The heaviest user recorded 105 donations, 177 users recorded just 1
- 594 users paid $0.01, 256 paid $0.02, 751 paid $0.01
- If the first 24 hours could be extrapolated over a full month, Slashdot would earn $260. At this stage, that doesn't seem to be a viable alternative to paywalls and/or ads. But it's early yet.
I also just realized I was calculating these stats off the live dataset over the course of an hour, so numbers may not actually add up. Oops!
The world's only surviving livewriter.