Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere else, do not feel the kind of loyalty to that might make you subscribe to something.
Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it.
Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, people will beg to donate/subscribe.
I agree with your general point: people generally donate/buy/subscribe much more if there's a benefit tied to it.
On the other hand, I'd like to point out that Twitch is still losing money so I wouldn't really call their business model "very viable". I'd say it's viable for the content creators, because there's very little risk in trying out Twitch streaming, sure the chances of making it big are insanely small but the worst case scenario is losing time and a relatively small amount of money on a PC setup + microphone and camera.
Patreon is a different beast but there's a caveat here as well. I don't have numbers so this is just my PoV but I'd guess that the vast majority of creators that use Patreon aren't hosting, sharing or creating mainly on Patreon. They're called YouTubers, streamers, bloggers for a reason. Sure they may share BtS or some other kind of additional content but it's not their main platform. So while the Patreon business model works it's not really comparable to Twitch or any other platform where you actually start and continue to create content and also get paid by.
- Twitch is losing money because the costs of running the platform are higher then the revenue
- Twitch is losing money because they're aggressively investing in growth
if you want to know about the viability of the concept, I'm not sure which one it is, video streaming and small payment processing could both be quite costly
Twitch did successfully push a subscription model for creators that allowed a lot of small creators to make an income. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitch subscriptions are $5-25/month (viewer's choice) and give access to emote, subscription badges in the chat and, perhaps most importantly, give you an ad free experience with that creator.
One cannot understate how important Amazon Prime (as Twitch Prime) is to the Twitch subscription ecosystem. IIRC roughly half of all Twitch subscriptions are Twitch Prime.
Twitch is aupser aggressive with ads. Youtube has skippable pre-roll ads. Twitch does not and might have 4+ pre-roll ads plus in-stream ads every 30-60 minutes. The ad density Twitch aims for is 4+ minutes per hour. But Twitch doesn't like the subscription model anymore. They've cut the revenue split. Previously many creators got a 70/30% split, now almost everyone gets a 50/50% split.
The big problem is that ad revenue scales in a way that subscriptions don't. Ad CPMs can go up, you can increase ad desnity easily (to a point) and ad revenue scales with view count in a way that subscriptions don't (eg a creator with 100K concurrent viewers won't have 100 times the subscriptions of someone with 1000 CVC).
You're seeing the same trend with streaming services. Netflix killed their basic tier and wants you to watch ads because it's more profitable than the subscription. Prime Video has thinly veiled a price hike by adding an extra ad-free monthly fee.
My point is that subscriptions, or any form of voluntary payment, is icnredibly hard to make work and even the most successful examples, like Twtich, require great effort and a supporting ecosystem like Amazon Prime.
I donate monthly to five Patreons. One of them is LineageOS ( https://www.patreon.com/LineageOS ). Two of them are community spaces. Two are podcasts, only one of which I listen to. I really only get Patreon benefits from one of the five (I get each podcast). Some tech-related, some not.
I subscribe to one Twitch feed. Actually the main Twitch feed I watch is one I do not subscribe to. I also sometimes watch other Twitch feeds, like John Romero's, or notch, or another random programmer who livestream codes. Again, some tech-related, some not.
Generally I subscribe on Patreon and Twitch more to be supportive than to get something, although I do appreciate I get podcasts from one of the podcasts I subscribe to.
To quote something I literally read 5 minutes ago in "Perhaps the Stars":
"everyone has relationships with people far away, who inspire, entertain, role models, and also the people we work so hard for: fans, viewers, the next generation, kids somewhere, posterity. I think those asymmetrical relationships are part of what it means to be human, part of the teamwork. Humanity is teamwork. And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real"
I don't know the book beyond the quick google I just did, but I disagree with:
>And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real.
I think that people developing these so-called parasocial relationships is probably not harmful until it becomes a substitute for them developing "real" ones. But I see that growing rapidly, and I think it's a problem in the future.
Just because you can magically send some digits to someone thousands miles away you never saw IRL doesn’t mean your brain is designed for it nor is able to handle it without disruptions to its operation. Whether you believe in creation or evolution. Nobody lived like this.
>And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real.
Not in a author/reader sense, no. But in a social media age where influencers use specific language to appear friendly and familiar? At the very least it's blurring the lines.
> Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator
> Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator
This is ultimately a polite way of saying that the "author" (which can be a content creator, a OSS maintainer) needs to establish a parasocial relationship, use a self-aggrandizing approach, and create drama to entertain its users.
This does work for content creators on Youtube, Patreon or Onlyfans, but ultimately detracts from the mission of delivering quality content that is useful or positively entertaining for the consumers of said content. The fans created in this way can go on to defend your failings or can be taken advantage of in a weakness, as can be seen in the case of the LTT sexual harassment allegation case and the health situation of Physics Girl.
However, I see no way for this to work in an open-source project, because users of an open source project mostly care about the functionality provided. Creating a parasocial relationship is mostly not viable in this space due to limited interaction, as you pointed out.
I've seen a few instances of OSS project maintainers using a chest-thumping, holier-than-thou approach to create drama, and said projects have either mostly become irrelevant over time or the open source project has continued to get attention only because the character of the maintainer has been buried and not well known to most.
Sometimes i feel like people make too much of the "parasocial" buzzword, as if its new.
Entertainers have been doing the pass the hat thing for hundreds of years. It is not a new phenomenom.
Historically, it has generally worked for entertainers, and i guess religion. I don't think there are historical paralells to open source really. Maybe it just doesn't work for that sort of thing.
What percent of people do you think form parasocial bonds with social media personalities? Its probably less than 1% of the population (albeit not neccesarily the rich 1%)
You don't need Drama, but you should indeed communicate and deliver something worth the peoples' money. I mean, there are many big and small creators who just steadily and silently deliver their work and have usually no drama at all.
Drama is just popular because it's cheap, fast, and any idiot can create it. So people who have nothing else of worth, tend to live from this.
Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS).
It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour.
Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $100 to make in China, $50 to ship to the US and $150 in store costs (eg utilities, staffing, rent, amortized capex, etc). You might say I've made $200 profit.
But let's say my corporate structure is to have 2 subsidiaries: PB Manufacturing and PB Retail. The first makes the table. The second manages the stores and sells the table.
If PBM charges PBR $150 for the table then PBM makes $50 in profit and PBR makes $150. If PBM charges $300 for the table then PBM makes $200 in profit and PBR breaks even.
This is what I mean when I say Twitch's profitability is a chosen narrative.
There are many reasons to do this. Tax is a big one. Maybe you pay less tax in China so you prefer to take profit there. Maybe you want to argue stores aren't profitable to resist demands for higher wages or higher rents.
The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it technically has to be "at arm's length" and other requirements).
> Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money.
This is totally untrue but keeps getting repeated. Yes, within Amazon, the non-AWS business units pay AWS to use AWS. But they pay cost plus a small percent, not retail rates.
The cost to non-AWS businesses is the same as if they had to do it all on their own (actually a little less since they get to leverage AWS's economies of scale).
The profitability of the other business units is actually improved this way. They would be paying more if they were independent and doing it on their own. This is why Amazon is so allergic to spinning out AWS as its own business.
AWS knows how much it costs to deliver their own service. How do you think they determine their own profits and prices? They use those same calculations to bill internal customers.
Obviously AWS knows how much it costs to run all of AWS. But that doesn't translate to accurately knowing the marginal costs of a gigabyte of outbound traffic. They probably do know, but it isn't necessary at all to determine their profit, or to set their prices. "Just" set prices to what the market is willing to pay, and determine profit as total income minus total expenses over the whole operation.
Can you expand on this? You're saying Twitch is only unprofitable in an accounting sense but would be a viable business if on its own? Saying their AWS costs are $0 seems like it would be even more "fake"
A video streaming platform isn't a natural fit for a hosting service famous for charging outrageous rates for outgoing traffic. If they were neither owned by Amazon nor had a special deal with AWS (like Netflix presumably has) they wouldn't be using AWS for anything touching actual videos.
The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it technically has to be "at arm's length" and other requirements)
You have it backwards: transfer pricing is legal, profit shifting is not.
Transfer pricing is the legal term used to refer to the establishment of prices between related entities pursuant to regulations. The transfer pricing regulations were created to cut down on profit shifting.
How does a government meaningfully and objectively determine what is transfer pricing vs profit shifting in practice? Are they even capable of distinguishing the difference in a case like Twitch:Amazon?
Furthermore... isn't this the crux of Hollywood accounting..?
Twitch runs its own data centers and does not use AWS for the video streaming platform. There are probably some incidental expenses which are actually Amazon profits, but they’re much smaller than you’re making them out to be.
"Use the same live streaming technology and global infrastructure that powers Twitch."
Did IVS grow out of Twitch? Sure. That core is now a piece of AWS infra though, even though the team was initially built at Twitch.
(Obviously these things are weird to talk about in a vacuum, because all the pieces are 100% owned by the same parent. The splits we see can be changed with the wave of a CFOs pen, usually when they want to change how we view some overarching piece of the business.)
Not sure what they use for video streaming, and it might even depend on where you're watching from, but VODs are definitely on plain old S3 + Cloudfront.
Yes and no. They jump around the profit-point. They made some profit in 2019 or so, but the pandemia peaked them, not just in views and income, but also costs. The thing is, Twitch's business-model is very frail. A streamer with too many viewers can cost them more money than it brings them money. Similar, are there millions of small streamers who barely make them a dollar. And then are there also too many side-costs, like South-Korea's network-fee recently, or the too many law cases where come cranky person sues them for some nonsical reason.
And we don't know for real how much Amazon is charging them. Rumors are going, Amazon is charging them a hefty amount for servers, while other says AWS is irrelevant for their Service, so nobody knows for real, officially.
But the recent move to a different handling of video-streams is supposed to change this, as it reduce the costs on Twitch's side, and lets the Streamers pay for it themself. By which I mean AV1(?), where the streamer is encoding all streams in all resolutions, and only sends it to Twitch which then acts as a relay. Claim is, Video-Encoding was the biggest cost for them, after employees, which seems kinda strange.. But maybe it will change their game in the next years, we will see.
Yeah, I've wondered if Amazon is using Twitch's AWS fees as paper losses to lower taxes. I.e., Twitch is actually making profits but Amazon wants the AWS fees on its books so that Twitch isn't recording profits (and therefore taxes) and Amazon profits off the AWS fees.
Owning does not mean receiving benefits. Twitch is still a Company of their own, not a department of Amazon. It's well known that Twitch gets no big benefits from Amazon and is used as a Cash-Cow.
It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality.
Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-centric and web-centric.
I think its also just really hard for people to quantify on a small scale. Its much easier to reason about whether or not you get, on average, $25 a month worth of value from a subscription to the New York Times than it is to try and guess whether someone's review of a vacuum you're considering is worth $2 to you or $0.37 or anything in between.
Or if the stakes are even lower and you're not avoiding a lemon of a vacuum, you're getting marginal improvement to an experience - what is it worth to read someone saying "don't go to Jim's Ale House when on vacation there, its fine but Jacks' is nearby and better"? Clearly that information has some value, but... how much? Whats the cost of a tip that helps turn a serviceable meal on a vacation into a better one?
A good with a massive supply and a relatively small demand is therefore worth little. It's a great thing that we've succeeded in producing an enormous amount of information, and art/entertainment...but it's all well past post-scarcity.
What does it mean for content to be truly worth paying for? That someone pays, voluntarily, after already having consumed the content? How could we distinguish selfishness from content not worth paying for?
Even acknowledging the state of crypto today the dev and payment experience of Metamask as a browser extension beats any conventional payment system I've encountered. What's needed is Metamask but not necessarily crypto.
>It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for.
Go spend some time on /r/Youtube. If there is any content worth paying for on this internet, it's the virtually limitless reservoir of incredible content across youtube, and for a relatively low fee you can make ads disappear. But the anti-Google sentiment is so strong that the selfish freeloaders will do anything in their power to both not pay and not accept ads.
Youtube Premium subscriber here. It's my favorite "streaming" service that I pay for. I'd cancel Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, etc.. long before I ever canceled YT Premium.
With that being said, I don't think your comment is fair. The anti-Google sentiment is justified. They violate your privacy. Not wanting to support them by signing up for their paid service isn't being a "selfish freeloader".
I use Invidious and take any money I’d have put into Google and put it into supporting my favorite creators, my preferred instance, and FreeTube.
I’m more than happy to “freeload” off of a multi-billion dollar ad company and support creators in a more meaningful way. And I fully support anyone who wishes to avoid the evil that is ads, even if they don’t support their creators directly otherwise. There is nothing selfish about wanting to conserve time, it’s the only currency that actually matters.
IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percentage-based donations, instead of fixed values IIRC. People are selfish, but also willing to share, if you give them enough reason.
But thinking about, maybe the lack of a social component and some virtual rewards would have been beneficial. But I guess, after the first fail, nobody cared anymore for it, and they somehow failed to find their market.
Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to donate.
It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations come from 5% of users.
Trust me, everyone says they prefer paying/donating over ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if given the option.
I believe that in the last couple of years the line between donation and begging has been blurred.
You have things on the extreme side like people begging on tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people donating to the craziest streamers doing the most outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super donations on Youtube on live podcasts.
When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun. Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit card details to a random site, but the masses will trust buying credits/donations/subscriptions through tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.
Personally, I think ads can be quite predatory, which is why I dislike them (if ads themselves had better ethics and curation, I might think otherwise -- I have less issues with sponsorships elected by creators). That most people choose not to pay is a problem I think, but I think even ideally not everyone would pay (and that's fine): they may not have the means (although I guess they could just pay a smaller amount instead), or have too many other subscriptions (that they find need more money). I personally donate to a lot of services knowing that many won't pay (and many aren't able to), and I'm happy to contribute (although I think it would be better for everyone if they considered donating more!)
I think the one trick is using subscriptions that people opt into one time and just forget about. Using the dodgy psychology tricks of gym memberships to actually help people.
Also Patreon. The real failure was adopting a panhandling model of giving "each time" you consume content. Not only is this high friction, but people don't like doing it.
They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2 a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could have reliable income.
Flattr had subscriptions: if you clicked the Flattr button once, they get part of that month's donation; if you clicked it twice they got added to your recurring list, to get a donation every month.
Lol, that model had certainly not "proven to work" when Flattr launched in 2010. Sure you can point to Patreon (launched in 2013), OnlyFans (launched in 2016), etc., but that would just be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
PS: I find Flattrs model much simpler: paying a fixed amount, and choosing how many/few people I want to give it to.
I don't understand your comment at all. Subscription models have been successful for decades for the major online newspapers. Flattr could have adapted after Patreon, Substack, etc. proved it successful, they chose not to.
Also it's fine that you like Flattr's model more, but no one else did. They don't exist anymore.
Even something like Patreon is a hard sell. I donated for a couple of years to an author I liked because he had a proven track record of delivery, so helping him concentrate on writing rather than a day job let him create more works. But him aside, I mostly see Patreon used to fund authors that are stringing along patrons with promises of "You'll be a few chapters ahead of free readers" vs "This can make the difference that will let me finish." To that end, at least for me, I just go between a few so there's usually something new to read, and if not, oh well.
If I were to publish in that space, I'd stream chapters slowly but regularly for free and the top donation tier would yield the completed work, but priced at the median payment I'd expect to get stringing people along for a few months. That's probably not a good business model, but I think it would prove less frustrating.
I had multiple discussions with German news projects around micropayments, and they list other, much simpler reasons why they don’t accept it:
- depending on the payment method, the transaction cost is too high and eats up almost the full payment
- the administrative overhead to maintain micro transactions is huge
- it creates the incentive to create articles that sell well, e.g. clickbait, which contradicts the values of these projects
- you need to plan ahead and for that you need to have a somewhat predictable flow of income, which is not a given with micropayments.
> if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish.
Hear hear, this is exactly why bittorrent trackers is just a fad that will disappear as quickly as it appeared. What, are people supposed to just share data freely without getting paid for it? Good luck I tell them, it's impossible because every single person is just too selfish.
This argument does not take bandwidth into account. If the goal is to download a lot of different files, you will be effectively limiting your download with keeping (especially very popular) torrents seeded. I stand corrected if somebody could please disprove me.
As the other commenter said, upload and download speeds are separate. And if you mean data caps, most internet connections have "unlimited" bandwidth unless you're torrenting off your phone.
Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You decided up front how much you could afford to spend supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early user.
However, they had the problem that most of the people who you might want to support, were not on Flattr. And Flattr made a poor move early on: in a bid to avoid getting spammed by low effort/beggars, they demanded that you give and take: If you wanted to be able to receive, you had to use the service yourself.
This was eminently fair. It was also a disaster, because it exposed a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but which is a crush to most "creatives"' ego: The vast majority of us are net consumers! We watch way more than we create ourselves. Most minor bloggers/youtubers/podcasters wouldn't want to admit that, they'd just see "I pay more than I get out of this? This sucks!"
Later they backed down from this demand, and then they got the problem with low effort/begging. All along they had the problem that some influential people really wanted to see them fail, due to their association with The Pirate Bay.
Yes, I want to be nickeled and dimed for content. There's no way I'm going to sign up for any more subscriptions. But I would be happy to pay a few cents for individual articles or videos or podcasts if it was a single click process.
Since we have to assume that they assessed it, I suspect that they concluded the math would not work out.
A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is important, even though it might not click)
It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it’s all in Dutch now, and doesn’t work on a pay-per-article model anymore, it’s unclear to me what their model is now, since I don’t speak Dutch. In any case, what you’re asking for exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that’s why you can’t do it - it was tried, and people didn’t use it.
This is one of those things where I wonder if it was too early for its success? I don't know the answer but it feels like it could have been. I have never seen it used on US based media unfortunately.
It was. You could read newspapers like NYT and Washington Post, New Yorker (maybe not those exactly, it’s been a while), but there was a large number of US publications. I guess it could have been too early, but I just feel like the demand wasn’t really there. People didn’t link to Blendle articles, they linked to NYT articles, and I didn’t really think about Blendle, and instead just found the archive.to link or whatever. But I dunno. I too would love a model like this to take off, but it just didn’t.
Are you able to purchase anything for 10 cents today? The price of a short self-published ebook on Amazon is 30x that, $2.99, and plenty of people buy those.
I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like what Substack has, which is semi-longform stuff that doesn't need to be padded with "blog" style posts.
Hope the price was not hanging you up. I don’t know what the price is and it’s certainly variable depending on the content length and publication. Maybe for a long Journal/NYT expose it’s a $1…
> still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this.
To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flattr or something along those lines.
The $0.50 weekly price for NYT is a teaser rate. The full price for digital only was recently raised to $195/year. I imagine they make too much money from people who subscribe at the teaser rate and forget to cancel (like all newspapers/magazines) to make it worth exploring other business models.
We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work.
I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of.
Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
> We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work.
Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term.
If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.
Since most news publications are failing businesses I would not immediately assume they have considered all avenues of monetization.
I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using on a NYT level publication.
Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to consume it.
Thanks for the downvote but I said most not all. If you look at the news/magazine industry though it has not made a good transition to the internet age. Lots of closures and consolidations with some of the major outlets acquired as almost toys for the rich.
I come across paywalled articles at least a couple of times a week. I’d gladly pay $0.50 for most of them to access the single article.
It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
>so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal!
The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.
Don’t get hung up on the price I listed, it’s just an example which is dependent on publication and article length/content.
Your argument is pretty weak too. Of course I could subscribe but obviously I don’t for any number of reasons. I am saying I wish I could pay on a per article price. Sorry for wanting to pay for the content I consume.
Sure, but we all have subscription fatigue. Say I subscribe to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But sometimes I like to read articles in the Washington Post or the New Yorker. How many subscriptions are enough? It's just like streaming fragmentation with Netflix, Apple+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, ad infinitum.
That "works", somewhat, if you want to get all your news from one place. That's the traditional newspaper model: most people don't get a dozen papers delivered.
But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world.
Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.
Content just isn’t worth a lot because nobody really needs any particular piece of information all that much; and if they do really need a piece of information, chances are it is available in many places.
Rather , because it's still too difficult to put money in a computer. Arcade machines in the 70s had the perfect impulse-purchase-compatible usage model
When clicking "Private advertising" on the Brave website you get:
> Powerful Ad Formats (...)
> Diversify from Big Tech channels, and get the first-mover advantage of advertising in the fastest-growing search engine since Bing. Search ads are privacy-preserving, text-based ads that appear at the top of a user’s search engine results page (SERP).
That was Google Contributor. It would pay min required to win the bid. Wasn't too successful. People very soon realized that you get the same for free with ad blockers.
Ads also physically influence the world. More humans become aware of something other humans want them to be aware of, more people end up buying some things (thereby incentivizing more of them to be created) or spending their lives on the most addictive mobile gambling thing or whatever. Whereas a system that just lets people say "this thing entertained me enough for 0.00023% of my economic output for the year doesn't do anything else, and deciding typing in how much something is worth to you is work. Not a lot of work, but it's still work that might even be worth more than your micro donation, depending on how you value your time and the neurons you dedicate to thinking about it. So obviously the system that actually does something is more viable.
I just something I can subscribe to and money goes to sites I visit in a reliable way. And the sites should stop showing me ads, but I'll even take that as optional right now.
Ideally something like youtube premium, but not youtube.
Google ran some services that at a very surface level had the same idea, but actually worked in a messy and bad way, and then they gave up on it. Which is a real shame because they have the ad presence to actually make it work.
Every other attempt I've seen has way too close to 0% of the sites I visit able to receive money.
Sadly disagree, I've put some BTC on my Podcasting 2.0 player (Podverse) and stream it to every creator that wants them (via the Bitcoin Lightning network).
Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet.
ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.
No, for so many reasons. No, tracking is bad. No, a central organization will not do an equitable job of distributing fees even if it has invasive tracking information. No, a mandatory fee is unacceptable. No, not all sites visited deserve an equal share based solely on visits and bandwidth. No, there is no reasonable automated metric that would allow such division, as any possible metric can be gamed.
The moment something like this were put in place, sites would immediately start gaming the resulting perverse incentives. Sites get more share based on bandwidth? Useless background downloads. Sites get more share based on number of visits? Lots of background loads, content in multiple iframes, split across many pages, etc. Any metric you can think of can and will be gamed, other than "user says they want this site to get a share". (That can be gamed too, but only insofar as sites already compete for user attention.)
Here's how to remove unwanted ads from the Internet: get everyone to install an adblocker, put advertising out of business, observe better revenue models emerge out of necessity without having to fight to compete with "free with ads".
If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way.
Your ISP probably already does that - at least re sites visited and data used.
They might try, but I tunnel all my traffic out anyway. In your proposal, my tunneling behavior would be morally equivalent to piracy. I don't think it's the world I want to live in.
Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.
>but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish.
That's an odd definition of "selfish". Why is there an obligation to hand someone money? If you are running a business, be up front and charge money for it.
At least in theory, the flattr model was "pay a fixed amount you can afford, it automatically gets divided among the sites you flattr".
That's a model that helps avoid subscription fatigue. Put $10 or $20 or $100 into a pool, and at the end of the month you know you'll spend exactly that much, no matter how many sites you flattr.
its not fair to call people shelfish when the only subscription option given to them is 10000x the value of an ad shown to them. Flattr was a good idea and if it was integrated to youtube I would have easily pay more than the ads would have.
I'm not sure how to talk about this without using the word selfish. It's not an insult. Most people are mostly selfish. There's no way of talking about the world without taking that into account.
This is wrong. Laws around money transmission, as well as egregious rentseeking from payment processing networks, not “people [being] fundamentally too selfish” are why this doesn’t work.
The tech and will is there. It’s just illegal to build it.
I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them
It's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides basically nothing to crypto.
I think you're not wrong. There is the BTC Lightning network which burns A LOT less energy and the low transfer costs make it feasible to stream fractions of cents. Ie. when listening to a podcast via Podcasting 2.0 app (like Podverse). Btw, I upvoted you, all the frothing was fading out your reply.
BTC Lightning is one of those babies people want to wash away with the bathwater. Or perhaps it's the only one I know so far. I do agree 99.99% of "crypto" is shitcoin scams.
It's less about transfer fees. I'm not saying you should make microtransactions to visit webpages.
I'm more imagining a mining-pool made up of webpage visitors. The website allocates you certain blocks of hashes to be calculated and you calculate those. Once they're calculated and the webpage verifies it by randomly double checking a few, then the webpage is served.
A websearch tell me a webpage visit nets the owners about ~2 cents in ad revenue. So you just need to mine some equivalent amount. It'd be sort of like a mining-pool where the overwhelming majority of users don't successfully mine a block - but when someone does the website owner gets the coin.
You could get more sophisticated on top of that and have some central mining-pool coordinator and session cookies etc so that your mining credit transfers across webpages and you can "premine" certain amounts
So the currency becomes more granular at "how many hashes have you calculated" and not how many coins do you have
I could be wrong though ~ It's possible 2 cents of hashes takes hours to crunch on a phone
We shouldn't have to make the world infinitely worse place and waste billions in energy just to squeeze out a cent in 'magic internet money' to give to another person.
it's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a smaller price to pay
that was literally what the parent comment said: "This is why ads are the only viable business model". No alternative to ads has been really made viable. Fattr shutting down makes the point
I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model.
What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big one.
>What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity.
as an advocate for microtransactions: yes, i see this. but i think you've got it backwards. nobody is "turning creative work into a commodity". it already is, and creators and marketplaces are both happy to treat it like one when they're selling their work. Creatives don't like micropayments because they don't like to so explicitly acknowledge that their work output is a commodity.
Pff, I love Patreon and I feel like that is basically "micropayments that actually work". If you look at Scott McCloud's original proposal for micropayments ([1], parts 5/6), the only thing that's really not viable is the idea that every reader paying 25¢/mo would work - in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something, especially when you factor in that you are not going to get every reader to pay. Luckily it turns out that you can also get some readers to pay $5/$10/$50/mo, or even more.
(Factoring in inflation, that $2/mo now was about $1.12 back in 2000 when McCloud proposed the idea.)
> in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something
another person who doesn't know about PayPal's micropayment account fees. They save us (ardour.org) about 23c per US$1 transaction, and we get the majority of our income from US$1 transactions. Instead of the usual 3.5% + 49c fixed fee on the order of 30c, PayPal' structure for this is more like 9c fixed + 4.99%.
If I was a believer in some deity that paid attention to such things, I would pray daily that PayPal does not decide to end these at some point.
Good news is that they now offer something called Dynamic Pricing, where instead of maintaining two accounts and choosing which one to use based on the transaction value, they will now do this automatically for you. Subject to approval, they say.
9c fixed + 4.99% is ~10.2 cents fee for the proposed 25 cents/mo micropayment in the post you're replying to. How is that good? It's better, sure, but that's still handing over 41% of your income to PayPal.
The number cited in the parent comment was US$2/month. We have roughly 3k subscriptions at US$1/month, and although we'd love to collect more of the revenue, I don't find myself thinking that PP's micropayment structure is untenable for this.
Yes, for 25c payments, especially one-off's, the systems are not there at this time.
The EU is working on "digital euro", which is meant to be free of transaction fees. I would rather see a 0.1% transaction fee to cover the costs, but at least it should make micropayments viable.
Ads (along with nazis and pedophiles) are the root of almost all issues on the internet and it looks like a very bleak future if we can't build an alternative form of compensation into our protocols. I don't understand why we can't at least outbid the advertisers for our own attention.... what a waste of time and money and attention and culture all around.
Well, it's impossible to say without the opportunity to experiment. It's certainly difficult to believe nobody would take advantage of this if they could.
> I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments.
How do you know that? I 'd use micropayments any day, but they are practically a nightmare to implement so we have to use third parties or subscriptions in order to justify the transaction costs.
It's not either-or, subscriptions have always existed, but the current (lack of) payment tech makes them more useful.
>What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big one.
I think one distinction is that subscriptions often denote "I like your work, keep doing that", whereas one-off payments denote "I liked this one thing, I'll pay you for it"
The former can be assumed to be a lot more sustainable than the second.
This is an interesting take. Traditionally, I can't think of any instances in which high-end creative work was paid for by a subscription. Hollywood blockbusters were paid for by ticket sales. Great albums by album purchases. Frescos and painings either by selling the paintings or being commissioned on a project-by-project basis. Novels by selling the novels. Creative work has more or less always been gig work.
Microtransactions are a natural extension of this funding mechanism into smaller-scale creative output such as blog posts and ten-minute videos that don't cost anywhere near as much to produce as films and novels.
Was Flattr big in the US? It was a "future big thing" in my part of Europe for a while, driven by discussions in Blogs and experiments with using it for bigger projects, iirc. It seemed like it never achieved much success of leaving that bubble though. After a while I never noticed it again. I thought about it recently when noticing that a gaming journalist used Steady for his incomes, and Patreon would be the other service to mention.
Looking at the timeline though, it confuses me that this was only 14 years ago. But no, that lines up with how old my own blog is. Feels far away! The web was a different place back then, and Flattr a part of that past, with a slightly different version of the future than the future we got.
It was never big. I saw a handful of open source projects and the like use it a very long time ago. But it was never a considerable source of income for them.
- flattr support discovery: Instead of having a "Flattr" button on the webpage I visit I need to navigate to flattr website and search there... but I'm not going to do that. Maybe adblocker removed that button?
- ownership confirmations - I wanted to donate to person $PERSON and found them on flattr. But I had no idea whether this flattr account actually belongs to $PERSON. I reached to $PERSON about that and never heard back so I stopped donating.
Which speaking of, ran/runs a bunch of other useful services. IPredator (sadly no longer with us) was an alright VPN service and Njalla is (still with us) a really great domain name registrar for people who care about their privacy.
Seems RIAA and MPA are still trying to go after Njalla as far as I can tell, so you get some hints that it's actually working as advertised :)
I currently "subscribe" to the Financial Times because I use Revolut Metal. I understand it has higher quality content than elsewhere, and enjoy reading articles from there now and again, but I never would've paid for it.
I wonder if 'bundling' is a way forward for content creators? Use x bank/isp/ridesharing app/delivery service, and you automatically get subscriptions to these creators.
Instead of governments spending £bil on their cultural budget, surely offering the same amount to companies in tax breaks if they support cultural projects would achieve a far greater impact?
Brief search showed £345m Uber Eats revenue in UK. If £3.45mil of that made its way to supporting 100 people who all had channels/sites inspiring families to eat healthier/more locally/promote local business,etc, surely this 'organic' approach could yield more than layers of civil service?
News should be paid for by people using it, making news dependent on government funding is bad, making news dependent on corporations is even worse, I tend to point the start of the decline of information and so democracy and plurality to the advent of blogs, free websites etc.
Independent information that serves people, is funded by the people
Always been a huge fan of this as opposed to a "Tv license" type system. Being able to choose where 1% of your tax money goes each year.
IIRC, Poland does something similar:
"Individual taxpayers of personal income tax have an opportunity to allocate 1% of their annual tax liability to specific Polish public welfare organizations. It is an easy way of supporting a charitable initiative and it does not require additional cost or a lot of effort."
I've used Flattr for a short period of time in early 2010s. I think it's unfortunate that the service picked up steam when most of the published content was moving from self-hosted to centralized social media platforms. Actually with a bit of marketing Flutter would have been better suited nowadays than at that time.
Just the other day I was trying to remember "this weird micropayment site I used to donate to What.CD" and could not describe it coherently to a friend. It's kinda cool it was around this long
Brave blocks ads on pages you browse, and then sends ad notifications to user who opt into their earning program (disabled by default). It pays them in BAT, a crypto coin they developed. If you want to, you can use these earnings to contribute to sites who have signed up to accept their crypto coin.
I used Flattr for awhile but I eventually stopped, because it had low discoverability of where the money was going and it was a recurring charge structure (as I recall), but sometimes I just wanted to spiff somebody one time. It's an interesting idea, but it never really worked out, and I also didn't heavily utilize it while I was active because few creators had a Flattr profile and the other mechanisms I was too lazy to use. A lot of folks here talk about selfishness being the killer, but the reality is that it didn't have a strong UX.
This is very unfortunate and surprising, goes to show that even after 14 years Flattr didn't find any market.
I was hoping for bitcoin and crypto to show low usage after around 15 years of no legitimate use cases other than speculation, ransomware and other scammy things, but Flattr's shutdown was a surprise.
Flattr billed itself as the RSS of donations to really get rid of those ugly PayPal buttons on blogs, websites and the indie web, but unfortunately that didn't happen.
Flattr was trying to bootstrap a sort of two-sided market from scratch. They needed to get both hosts/"content providers" and clients/"users" to sign up.
This is just a very, very hard problem, and if we're being honest about it, most of the success stories that come to mind got there through burning venture capital, which perhaps Flattr didn't have enough of?
I don't think the idea is fundamentally flawed, it's just very difficult to do this kind of thing.
Well, they also made the mistake of initially trying to force both sides of the market to be one, i.e. you had to be a contributor (pay money to others) to collect money (let others pay you money). Also collecting money on behalf of others and then distributing it after sitting on it is an easy way to run afoul of anti money laundering laws in various jurisdictions. Also they did take investments which means they had to not only build a sustainable business but actually create a considerable ROI for their investors or risk them pulling the plug and cut their losses (which is presumably what happened given the lack of detail and "our wonderful journey" speak).
So in other words they decided to play in hard mode (infinite growth) and then kneecapped themselves (to avoid "begging"). It's a miracle they survived this long. I had forgotten about them longer than I had used them.
I really liked Flattr, and used it for a while. The big problem was getting money in and out.
Their idea of accumulating microtransactions ("Flattrs") internally for a month and dividing up a fixed amount was a really nice idea: both to reduce payment processor fees, and to remove any anxiety about clicking on a Flattr button (the same amount was spent per month, regardless of how many things were clicked, so go ahead).
However, those monthly payments were also internal: transferred between from one user's "account balance" to another, and those balances had to be topped up manually via a rather laborious bank transfer (supposedly to keep fees down). I think there was an assumption that money would be moving around a lot inside the platform, e.g. blogger A gets Flattred for their post, and they Flattr developer B's application, whilst B Flattrs musician C's song, etc. I think reality had more of a creator/consumer dynamic, which made it more important to smoothly get money into the platform.
I think they would have fared better by allowing users to be automatically charged each month (like Patreon, etc. who came later). The "account balance" idea could be simplified to withdraw-only, for tracking how much was received (i.e. 0 for almost all users); and perhaps allow that balance to be deducted from the monthly charge. It seems obvious in hindsight, and perhaps they did change to such a model; alas, I think their early buzz was squandered due to this friction.
Maybe one thing that held them back was that one of the founders was also founder of The Pirate Bay. Maybe potential big clients didn't want the association.
No, that would not be appropriate, since there is no “Expect” header you could send in the request to get a successful response.
From RFC 9110, HTTP Semantics:
The 417 (Expectation Failed) status code indicates that the
expectation given in the request's Expect header field
(Section 10.1.1) could not be met by at least one of the inbound
servers.
Where did you get that information from? I've never used that functionality myself, but haven't seen info indicating it got deprecated so I assumed it's still supported?
I had an idea just like this several years ago and seriously considered doing it as a startup but somehow never heard of Flattr. I'm curious what kind of marketing to website creators did they try.
Did anyone try Google Contributor, which was a similar idea?
I've had a similar idea simmering in my head for over 10 years, I even purchased a fitting domain name for it. It's always been a "one of these days" kind of project. My idea is different enough that it might have a shot where Flattr fell flat, but it's exceptionally hard to gather users, even if you build a superb product.
Flattr style micro-payments doled out based on impressions of a page (or their evil twin, ads) seem more honest than subscribing a la patreon. (I subscribe to a lot of creators with patreon.)
I frequently hear and read people not wanting to sponsor some youtube channel or podcast they consume for hours a week because it's "not that good". If you spent the time there, they deserve your money. I really feel for creators who produce popular material, but don't get as much remuneration as content that people are prouder of liking.
For a moment I perceived that as "Flutter" and immediately thought, "Of course, Google is shutting down another project." Perhaps that's enough screen time for today.
I do indeed! I've got two NTAG216s in my left hand, one of which lights up green when you scan it, a T5577 prox card emulator in my right hand, and a P71D321 secure element in my left arm which does onboard crypto, NFC yubikey emulation, and a few other misc. applets I've loaded onto it.
My magnet implant came out around 2019, iirc. The coating ruptured, and a five year run on the old-style parylene magnets was super solid.
I don't want to throw yet more GenAI crap at this, but could RAG be a possible innovation that unlocks microtransactions?
I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction. Then also sells the Q-and-A as a subscription service to the end user. Maybe payouts are conditional on positive user feedback. The solution can also flag queries it sees that don't have great answers yet.
> I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction.
That sounds like you're describing Mechanical Turk? (And also "let's train an LLM on Reddit/StackOverflow). Problem is, the humans in Mechanical Turk loop were economically motivated to outsource to AI even before LLMs.
Micropayments struggle because they add friction to the process of consuming content. Right now, if I see a great blog post, video, whatever, I spend a bit of time taking it in and then move on. With micropayments, I now have to think about how much it is worth to me (is this blog post, comment, sketch worth $0.50? $0.10?). You just turned a brainless moment of enjoyment into a value judgement where I now have to become a critic and try to create some kind of inner framework for assigning value, etc.
Ads avoids all these by (relatively) frictionlessly converting attention into money. Subscriptions bundle the friction into a single event (the conversion) and remove it for all future interactions. Micropayments are just constant papercuts.
> With micropayments, I now have to think about how much it is worth to me (is this blog post, comment, sketch worth $0.50? $0.10?). You just turned a brainless moment of enjoyment into a value judgement where I now have to become a critic and try to create some kind of inner framework for assigning value, etc.
That was never how Flattr worked though. Flattr was just a button that could be placed on a page (next to "Facebook Like", etc.); if you click it, they'd get a portion of your monthly donation. The whole point was to (a) be as simple to use as a Facebook "like", and (b) always cost the same per month (since the monthly donation was divided up, there was no need to worry about clicking too many things; just click what you like).
> Subscriptions bundle the friction into a single event (the conversion) and remove it for all future interactions. Micropayments are just constant papercuts.
Clicking someone's Flattr button twice would "subscribe" to them (automatically put them in your donations every month). So again, Flattr was pretty much designed precisely to avoid these problems that you bring up...
That's still a lot of friction. You would be surprised at how little friction is too much when it comes to consumer apps. Today alone, I have probably consumed a dozen or more pieces of content. I don't want to apply more thought than it takes to click a link or hit the play button. With this model, I have to (1) decide my overall monthly donation (2) decide if this content is worth donating to (3) remember to click the donate button. Sure, none of these actions is particularly onerous but it adds up over my day and I don't get any (additional) benefit from doing them.
When I choose to subscribe to a creator, it is because I expect to derive sustained benefit from their work. That long(ish) term expectation of benefit is what motivates me to take the additional effort. I don't have any similar motivation for drive-by content and so I won't make the effort, however small.
> With this model, I have to (1) decide my overall monthly donation (2) decide if this content is worth donating to (3) remember to click the donate button. Sure, none of these actions is particularly onerous but it adds up over my day and I don't get any (additional) benefit from doing them.
I'm confused when you say "it adds up over my day", since (1) is a one-time action you take when signing up to Flattr (e.g. I chose to donate £10 per month). I also wouldn't distinguish between (2) and (3): clicking the button is choosing to donate.
> When I choose to subscribe to a creator, it is because I expect to derive sustained benefit from their work. That long(ish) term expectation of benefit is what motivates me to take the additional effort.
Yet you could subscribe to a creator with Flattr for less effort (literally just click any of their Flattr buttons twice within a month; no need to "choose an amount" or anything). I'm very confused about how you think Flattr worked...
"We ran out of money and our investors wanted to cut their losses and pulled the plug" isn't something you usually spell out in a post like this to avoid burning bridges or appearing "unprofessional".
