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.
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The data being collected has very little impact on real world results. If there is no cost, then people will simply click the 3 cent link when they remember to do so. Since it has no impact on their finances they won't think twice about it.
Think about gaming sites that give you free unlimited chips to play poker with. People bet the max every hand no matter if they have 2-7 off suit or pair of aces. This completely destroys any comparisons to a real money game.
Johnkoerner.com
Most of the proposals are based on aggregating the "give this person 3 cents" indicators through some kind of intermediary platform, not processing them all on the spot. For example, with Flattr you pay Flattr once per month, and then you indicate how you want the money distributed by clicking on various things. The money isn't sent immediately then either, but accumulates in the recipient's acocunt, and is paid out when they reach a threshold. So on both the pay-in and pay-out sides the transactions are fewer and bigger.
The trick is getting enough people to sign up for such a thing for it to be at all viable.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
... 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
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.
Why do some people call Wal-Mart "Wally World"? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081023123342AAjStgd
Actually, maybe I just didn't explain it properly. There is a zero-cent option, which is to just not click anything at all. This isn't something mandated or integrated into the sites, it's client side, so it's 100% voluntary, and only worthy content stands a chance of getting rewarded. "Worthy" being a very subjective concept in this case.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
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.
Its not paying the three cents that concerns me so...
What concerns me is sharing my banking info. I am doing everything in my power to limit the amount of charge numbers floating around I am responsible for. Some joker gets a list of those numbers, and I end up seeing unwarranted charges showing up and I am faced with either having to spend valuable time trying to straighten up the mess or let it ride. Its not the three cents.... its the irritation of supervising yet another financial obligation where others can incur charges against me that can easily take hours, if not days or weeks of my time to recover misallocated funds.
There are many "businessmen" out there who have figured out clever ways of getting one's banking info ( Call Now! We will send you one FREE!!! - Just pay shipping. )
I am far more open to giving them a dollar cash than giving them my charge card numbers.
I am not giving anyone my banking info for three lousy cents!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Are you recording the lack of a click in some way, then?
Which of these is more meaningful?
60% chose 1 cent
30% chose 2 cents
10% chose 3 cents
Or:
90% chose 0 cents
6% chose 1 cent
3% chose 2 cents
1% chose 3 cents
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.
In the end, web-sites need to make money
Yet the web survived for years when hardly anyone was making money from it. And finding useful information was much easier than it is today, where there are a hundred ad-funded web scraping sites set up soley to make money for every actual, informative web site.
Thanks for the link. Flattr looks great! I read up a bit more about it, and it was co-founded by Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay. (Just don't download the browser extension, as it sends every url you visit to flattr.)
A quick search also brought up Kachingle and Sprinklepenny as similar alternatives.