
Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology - justswim
https://www.kapwing.com/blog/skipping-our-paywall-with-an-apology
======
pjc50
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

\- pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the
thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

\- so do you give refunds a la steam?

\- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

\- pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a
micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser
to view their ad?

\- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has
good and bad ideas)

\- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install
modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

\- pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same
payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it
to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

\- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams.

~~~
vlehto
I think the only real problem there is the "how do you know who you're
paying?" part. Everything else would be solved or effectively ignored with the
following:

I send you 10$ somehow, you send me email with ten hashes. Each hash worth a
dollar.

I pay to alex by cut and paste on a webpage (here's the catch, maybe It's a
scam!)

Alex has registered as content producer to your service. Alex immediately
sends the hash with his on handle crypted into one neat package, to your
servers. As soon as it lands, you add the dollar to his account. The
particular hash is now rendered useless for the rest of history.

You send "valid transaction" message to Alex. Alex then lets me to comment his
excellent blog post.

What am I missing? If it was that easy, it would have been done.

~~~
pjc50
> If it was that easy, it would have been done.

Part 2: business model problems!

\- getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX
for pure digital goods

\- nobody wants to build a _federated_ system; everyone wants to build a
Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

\- winner-take-all effects are strong

\- Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

\- Free substitute goods are just a click away

\- Consumers will pirate _anything_ no matter how cheap the original is

\- No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to
drive all marginal prices to zero

\- existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

\- friction: it would be _great_ if you didn't have to repeatedly approve
things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But
blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it
and then feel conned

\- first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably
blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for
fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

\- Internet has actually killed previously working micropayment systems such
as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?);
surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

\- accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do
you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an
Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

Previously on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630862)
Slashdot (2003): [https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/07/22/138257/whatever-
hap...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/07/22/138257/whatever-happened-to-
micropayments) HBR: [https://hbr.org/2010/02/why-i-hate-
micropayments.html](https://hbr.org/2010/02/why-i-hate-micropayments.html)

~~~
vlehto
"Play store et al already exist, why not use that?"

Play store does not have the content I want. And it seems overly difficult to
post the content I want to make. And if I want to pay for engagement with the
content, that's not an option.

Patreon is lot closer to what suits my needs. But even that is too inflexible
on _how_ to use payments and to _what_ you should pay. So far everybody seems
to be making their micro-transaction payment models "flexible" by making the
amount paid flexible. But that's exactly the one thing I want to be fixed. I'd
like to host my entirely own webpage and patreon just to handle the money from
exactly the kind of transaction I want.

"Pirate" is not the thing I would concentrate on. People want to see the stuff
before they pay for it. But if I could somehow engage with Slavoj Zizek about
the superb youtube video he made, I'd actually pay for it. Or if I could
promote that video to people in my home city I'd pay for that also. If some of
that money went to Zizek I'd be even more willing to pay, because that would
support him to continue. People underestimate the need for other people to be
social about the content they consume.

People on reddit are using the reddit gold as super upvote. But that only
works in Reddit.

~~~
pjc50
I never thought of Zizek as the vanguard of the micropayments revolution ...

I agree about the "funding more content" angle; I hope twitter eventually
realises this, but they really have a bad idea about how their own platform
works and seem to be allergic to taking money from users for features.

~~~
vlehto
Off-topic, but the particular video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk)

------
shash7
Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this:

Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's
your change and open up my wallet.

Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people
don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you.

Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

~~~
Aloha
Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to
be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.

I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a
subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I
can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with
5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a payment button on a landing page on
a website, the rest is mostly automatic, require more than just a click thru
for anything larger than say, 25 cents. You could even set it up so it doesn't
prompt you to pay until you're more than half way thru too.

Yes, It'd take some doing to build infrastructure and get content providers
online, but it would eliminate a lot of the mechanics of paying for news,
information, online media and other like content (as well as many of the
privacy and practical concerns of ad based content payment).

The big thing is to make it content agnostic, it can't be part of apple,
google, facebook, whatever, it needs to be something that functions just as a
payment/escrow service, not part of some other media empire - part of the
utility of such a service is universality. I'd also steer clear of person to
person payments, large transactions, pretty much just be a one-trick-pony (at
least until you have wide penetration), and only go after small payments - all
of those other markets are well served by a multitude of providers, and would
serve as a distraction from the primary product.

~~~
dalfonso
Saw [https://blendle.com/](https://blendle.com/) posted on HN a while back.
Works exactly like that.

~~~
photonios
Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I
don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article.

They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with
all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything.

I highly recommend you give this a shot.

Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading
the word.

~~~
sverige
Does it work as I suspect: you pay, and yet you still get ads too?

~~~
hafunnyusername
No ads in my experience. You should check out the beta and see what you think,
I still think it's running. You receive a few dollars in credit to try out the
platform. Personally, I really love it.

------
cpncrunch
Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't
pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme.

IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund
it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on
the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove
the branded gifs...that's how you will grow your business, and it's not worth
removing it because someone is just too cheap to pay.

Anyway, it's your business and not mine, so do what you feel is best.

~~~
nlawalker
_> > don't think it's worth paying $1_

Key word there is _paying_. A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good
way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone
number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for
your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take
any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the
functionality doesn't work as described.

Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

~~~
ambrosite
This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen
research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and
giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since
it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately
this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like
Amazon, because if you already have an account with them, the cognitive cost
of signing up has already been paid.

~~~
mysterypie
> cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc.

That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less
hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely
online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something
goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription
I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on my
statement.

As an aside:

It's curious to see that this made it to the HN front page and already has
more than 25 comments, yet _nobody_ has commented on the original article's
own page which does allow commenting. Well, there is one comment that says,
"Great analysis", but that was me just to check if commenting actually works.
I suppose that ties in with the same idea -- it's not worth the "cognitive
cost" to make a comment no one will read.

~~~
ambrosite
> it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment

Their comment form requires login or signup. I'm already signed up and logged
in here. That's reason enough for me to post here and not there. I would never
create an account just to leave a comment unless it was someplace where I
intended to visit and comment often.

~~~
sitkack
So if true federated non-statist, non-corp entity login actually worked we
would probably comment freely and purchase stuff in 0.10-0.50 increments?
Mozilla should be a payments platform.

~~~
pjc50
The browser vendors are the only actors who _might_ be able to make this work.

~~~
majewsky
Seeing how Google makes basically all its money from internet ads, I don't
think they have any interest to enable other monetization schemes. (Unless, of
course, something makes them believe that ads are going to become unattractive
and they need to pivot.)

------
noncoml
Here is my honest brutal “apology”: I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of cents
to use your service. If you want to monetize it find a way to allow nano-
payments. You are not adding as much value as you think.

~~~
duiker101
One dollar is something you could afford. And if you can't/don't think it's of
enough value then the watermark version is good too for sure.

And if you are a content creator that needs lots of them then the 10$\month
will be fine. Let users pay with their wallet. Not everyone would know how to
do this in some graphics software so there is a value.

~~~
newen
It doesn't matter if I can afford it... I can afford to spend $500 too.
Doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on just anything.

Making a meme on a website is barely worth the time I spend doing it. The $10
seems reasonable if I make a ton of memes and it's a good website though. The
$1 is just ridiculous and they should just take that option out purely because
it changes the dynamics as to how you view the website. Charging $1 for a meme
is so ridiculous that I think people will look at the $1 and run, while
viewing it as a monthly $10 service will be more palatable.

~~~
whostolemyhat
It's $1 for removing the watermark from the video. The free version still has
the watermark.

------
mango1900
This might get downvoted, but let me play devils advocate... the $1 is too
cheap. You don’t value my time if you’re making me whip out my credit card and
go through the painful process of checking out for transacting only a dollar
from me. You’re also extremely downplaying the value of your product. if it
was only worth a dollar, you would likely not be building a startup around it
:)

Most people don’t know how much something is worth. Try not to lower price,
rather, increase value.

Under the sad faces, I’d change the messaging. Its generally understood (even
by the layperson) that the true cost of technology is very low. What this
really costs, and this is true, is the time-value of your development team
(and associated market salary). “It takes real people to build and maintain
this” might be more effective messaging.

All that said, this does seem like an interesting way to gather user feedback.
Good luck!

~~~
bartread
I'm inclined to agree with this. Like you say, increase the price and offer
more value: there's a $10 subscription, but how about a $10 one-off, which
allows me to create as many videos as I like for the next two weeks, or next
month? I'm sure there are probably other - perhaps more interesting/creative -
ways you could offer more value if you spent some time thinking about it.

Also, offering payment options that don't require me to fill in a form with my
credit card details for yet another frigging website. I hate to recommend them
in some ways - because they've caused me aggro so many times with transactions
larger than a few hundred quid - but PayPal might be a good option here.

------
coryl
A clever way to get feedback actually, by incentivizing them for it! I'm
actually having this issue right now, we have easy to access feedback forms,
but users just don't bother to complain or comment.

------
jwilk
Here's a copy that can be read without JS enabled:

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91a...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91acfddf3)

~~~
Ndymium
For those using something like uMatrix, it seems the site's JavaScript crashes
if you don't load Stripe's JavaScript too. Enabling that makes the site
render.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I found it really difficult to take this article seriously.

>Kapwing is an online video and GIF meme generator

It adds bars of text to the top and/or bottom of a gif. This product is worth
$0. Probably less.

~~~
tyingq
_" Around 8% of users who could have used the apology flow converted into
paying customers"_

One man's trash...

~~~
skinnymuch
I'd like proof or actual numbers before just believing this. What if 8% of
users is a few people?

------
xelxebar
This URL only loads a blank white page for me. It's probably because I keep JS
disabled, but I really wish sites would degrade more sensibly.

If you absolutely require JS for the content, I understand, but please display
some minimal page that explains things. Even if it was just ugly plain text,
I'd be much more willing to enable JS for you :)

------
PeOe
Shouldn't you focus on those guys who will have a commercial benefit out of
such a service? If they have a benefit, they will pay - because they earn
somehow money out of it.

Asking private persons will lead into goodwill purchases - which I'm not
thinking that this is scaleable...

~~~
wastedhours
I can see this working well for content curation of articles for businesses.
Reading individually might be free, but then if you want a daily dose of
industry related news hand picked and cross linked, then you pay a
subscription.

------
dredmorbius
Treat information as the public good it is.

Pay those who create it.

Allow free access to public information.

The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to
roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the
US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.) Total
media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the
order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).

Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/)

------
raresp
You should force non-paying customers to refer a friend or to share the page
with a SEO optimized title on their facebook/twitter profile. But you
shouldn't remove the skip payment option until you have a big user base.

~~~
RepressedEmu
Adding a sharing feature to get past the payment is an interesting thought.
Instead of subjecting your users to ads you make them advertise to others on
your behalf. Its definitely a good move for them if they are a young company.

------
nikki-9696
They skipped paying because they didn't want a small text link that advertises
for the service they just used for free? I don't buy any of their excuses.
It's not like they couldn't use the service at ALL.

------
underwoodley
From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free
service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or
providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you
didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time
which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.

~~~
jchw
This, to me, seems like a strange way of thinking. They're not 'wasting
people's time,' they're making a request of them in exchange for a service.

Instead of turning them away entirely as a full paywall may have, they got
some information or at least amusement out of them, and the user still gets
their service.

Users benefit either way; the question is whether they have to pay in exchange
for it or answer a question in exchange for it. The latter may seem wasteful
to you, but clearly it didn't to the owners of that website.

------
ungzd
Imagine the same implemented in mainstream news media, links to which is
always on top here on HN. "I'm too poor to pay non-cancellable monthly
subscription to The CNN Times and extremely want to read this exciting article
'10 Reasons Why Zuckertrump Is A Horseman Of Apocalypse'".

------
omk
> Around 8% of users who could have used the apology flow converted into
> paying customers.

Given enough time, game theory is bound to kick in and gaming the system
becomes a norm reducing the conversion rate. That is what you get with
rational decision makers combined with enough automation.

------
peterburkimsher
I like this idea of avoiding a paywall with a reason.

I read many articles from The Guardian, who use a banner ad to promote their
premium subscriptions. Due to my unstable life, I can't commit to regular
payments from one bank account in one country for more than a couple of months
at the longest.

The Guardian and many other news sites have entire sections dedicated to
Bitcoin. But they don't accept it as a payment method.

I emailed their customer feedback, and was pleasantly surprised at the
encouraging reply. Their management will be discussing whether to accept
Bitcoin as a payment method.

If the news websites start accepting Bitcoin, they'll be more likely to post
less sensational articles about it, and the value proposition to the end user
becomes more clear (remove ads). The fact that Bitcoin payments aren't
traceable encourages factual articles instead of promoting articles that
indulge the political opinions of the people funding the news agency.

------
1_player
I've had this idea, and this is a good time as any to put it in the wild,
since I don't have time to build it:

My problem with paywalls/sponsoring/micropayments is that I'm completely fine
to pay an entity, say $5 a month. What I am not OK with is supporting all the
people I'd like to support, which at $5 a month might total a hundred bucks or
more.

I have the budget for it, but $5 increments can really get expensive after a
while. And if you don't want to support an entity anymore, you'd have to
remove their subscription on Paypal or Patreon or on their website or on
whatever platform they've decided to use.

My "disruptive" idea is composed of two pieces:

1) A budget. I have $50/month I want to give away. No more than that because X
reasons. I want this money to be equally divided. Tomorrow I have a better
job, so I can budget $200/month, and everybody wins.

2) A browser extension. I click it when I'm visiting a website part of the
network and lo, I've subscribed to the entity and at the end of the month part
of my budget goes to them. Whenever I visit their site/content the extension
reminds me I'm a subscriber, so I get the warm fuzzy feeling I'm supporting
them. When I want to unsubscribe I toggle my subscription with a click.

EDIT: also, the entity DOES NOT know if a visitor on their website is a
subscriber or not. I want to keep the Internet free for everybody, and not
split it between paying users and leechers.

That's it.

Seems to me it's _relatively_ easy to build, and it's miles ahead of all the
current micropayment platforms, that are clunky as hell.

Flattr Plus seems to have gone towards the same direction, with a big
difference: whenever you visit an entity registered with Flattr Plus they'll
automatically send some of your money to them to support them. I DO NOT WANT
that. I might visit a site, decide it's awful, and don't want to support them.
I need to be able to choose.

I'd really like to discuss more on this idea, it might be totally bunk but I
still think this is potentially disruptive.

My email is in my profile.

~~~
infinisil
You might want to check out Brave [1] which does pretty much exactly what you
described:

> Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly
> donation among the top sites you visit.

See also their blogpost about it [2] and the FAQ [3].

[1]: [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/) [2]:
[https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-
payments/](https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/) [3]:
[https://www.brave.com/faq-payments/](https://www.brave.com/faq-payments/)

------
alkonaut
If the options were "click here to pay $1" and "click here to pay $0" then I'd
happily pay for tons of services and paywalls.

If the option is "Click here to pay $0" vs. "Click here to either sign up or
do a 5 step one time checkout" then it's not clear, at least not for a
service/product I'm unsure about.

(Disclaimer: I don't have PayPal or similar - I'm not sure if there exists a
single click payment system that I'd be willing to use)

------
bearbearbear
I'm sorry I'm not apologizing for being poor.

~~~
s73ver_
Then keep the watermark. But don't feel that just because you're poor that
their costs are any different.

~~~
bearbearbear
I didn't ask them to have costs or a website.

~~~
s73ver_
And? Your point being? Should the grocery store also give you free food
because you didn't ask them to have a store?

Again, you being poor sucks. That does not change things for them, however.
They still need to make money, and if you don't have the money, then you can
go without. You will still live.

~~~
bearbearbear
> Should the grocery store also give you free food because you didn't ask them
> to have a store?

Yes, that's why I have food stamps.

~~~
mikestew
I don’t think that you understand how food stamps work.

------
shmerl
As usual, greed slows down progress.

~~~
bartread
Greed?

It's a startup posting on Hacker News about how they're trying to build a
business, which is right in the bullseye of the Hacker News schtick as far as
I can tell.

Since when has it been greedy to try and make a living, even doing something
random and frivolous? The world _needs_ random and frivolous things.

Regardless, I thought it was an interesting experiment.

~~~
shmerl
Wrong article. I was posting in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591020)
but misplaced the comment.

~~~
bartread
Haha - classic. I've done that before too.

------
jancsika
Did you get the permission of the users whose responses you posted?

~~~
chipperyman573
Legally they're fine because the responses were anonymous and none of the
users would reasonably believe that their responses would remain completly
private.

Ethically (at least in my opinion) is the same, as long as they're kept
anonymous and there's nothing personal or private in the responses they can
use them for any reason. Especially because they were given in lieu of
payment.

~~~
jwilk
Are you saying that expecting any privacy is unreasonable these days?

~~~
chipperyman573
1\. I never said that, please stop putting words in my mouth.

2\. In my opinion, posting completely anonymized responses is not a violation
of privacy

------
stevefan1999
That means you are publicly shaming your "pirating" visitors? That's morally
unacceptable!

~~~
Angostura
Except, I see no mention that anything is made public.

~~~
jwilk
Some of the "apologies" were published in this very article.

------
kilolima
Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

~~~
KyeRussell
Yeah, cool, so like most of the modern Internet then?

Accepting JavaScript's prevalence—even given its many many many many many
flaws—is something us pragmatists that actually decide to use the Internet to
do things decided to do long long ago.

~~~
s17n
Uh huh tell me more about these "things" that you "do".

If there's a web app that I want to use, I whitelist it for js.

For general browsing, I keep it off. Ironically, this works fine for the same
reason that paywalls will never succeed - there is so much content out there
that any individual piece of it has essentially no value.

~~~
Veen
> there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has
> essentially no value

Zero multiplied by anything is zero, so if all individual pieces of content
are worthless, so is content as a whole.

But of course that's not true because content isn't fungible. There's an
infinity of content, but, unless you think a cat meme listicle is equivalent
to War and Peace, it doesn't matter. The best content will always be worth
paying for to people who care about what they put into their brain.

~~~
s17n
I'm talking about browsing HN - nothing getting posted here is equivalent to
War and Peace. If a particular link doesn't work because of javascript, I can
just go on to the next one.

