

How Bitcoin Can Save Publishing - walid
http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-can-save-publishing/

======
TylerE
Reposting what I posted two weeks ago when this was posted the first time (and
promptly ripped to shreds and then deleted)

Where this utterly falls apart is that it doesn't consider that the major
barrier is NOT the price. It's overcoming the friction of getting the user to
pay anything, at all. If you can do that, conversion rates are similar at
$0.10 and $10.00. That is why micropayments are dumb. They're leaving money on
the table.

NB: I work in the industry and this is coming from direct professional
experience. I'm not really at liberty to go much more in depth than I did, but
I have strong real world data that says micropayments are a disaster, plain
and simple.

~~~
derekp7
So the solution is to have some sort of premium content Internet pass. It
costs $10 a month, but can be used to get free content at whatever sites are
signed up with it. Kind of like Amazon Prime, but with an arbitrary number of
vendors. Then, the $10 per user is split among all the products that the user
uses it with.

Now here's the kicker -- come up with a marketing deal with various ISPs,
where they can include this with their subscriptions. Either as a premium that
comes automatically with their higher-speed tiers, or something that can be
billed as extra for the lower speed tiers.

~~~
TylerE
Yea, pretty much, that's where I think it should go. Sort of Spotify for
written content.

Some very high profile outlets (WSJ, NY Times, New Yorker, the Economist)
might be able to make their own things work, but those are the exception, not
the rule.

~~~
joanofarf
_Sort of Spotify for written content._

Wouldn't this end up leaving even more money on the table? Spotify pays
artists based on their share of total plays.

Say two sites (X and Y) join up to offer a $10/month pass for unlimited access
to both sites, with the say pay scheme as Spotify. Site X has 3 times as many
articles/videos as Site Y. If every user reads/watches 100% of Site Y's
content, Site X may still receive an equal or larger share of the payouts even
though users consumed a much lower percentage of it.

~~~
cmsmith
If you make the assumption that each piece of 'content' takes the same amount
of effort/money to produce, that's not really a problem. Site X has presumably
spent 3 times as much on content creation, so it's fine for them to get 3
times the revenue (assuming equal quality).

The problem I see is that with spotify it's pretty easy to determine the rate
of content consumption (e.g. songs or minutes listened). News sites are pretty
adept at turning one piece of content into many (multi-page articles or
slideshows), and the system would have to protect against that.

~~~
TylerE
Another option might be to proportion revenue in accordance with membership
sources into the cartel. E.g. if site 1 delivers 10 new subscribers, and site
2 brings in 2 new subscribers, the money goes to the sites in a 5:1 ratio,
minus maybe 10% off the top for operating expenses.

------
ath0
Jon Rosenberg (of goats.com)'s experiment with this in the early 2000s -- not
bitcoin, which didn't exist yet, but micropayments in general -- was the first
one I saw with hard numbers about why this will be extremely difficult. Sadly,
he's taken his site offline, but short version: There's a huge difference in
someone's mind between "free", and "not free"; it's seen as a change in
category, not in degree. Having to commit any amount of money - even $1 -
significantly reduces your audience, but once someone's gotten over the hump
of willing to pay, you might as well ask them to make a larger purchase of a
T-Shirt or subscription.

This sort of experiment has been repeated many times. Folks like Flattr have
tried to tie this to social networks, so it's seamless; and the NYTimes model
of metered paywalls (smaller publishers can use something like
[http://www.tinypass.com/](http://www.tinypass.com/), which Andrew Sullivan's
blog uses) seems to be taking over magazine publishing. Even attempts to turn
cable subscriptions a la carte aren't doing well, as Megan McArdle explains:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-
cant...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant-we-
unbundle-cable/239849/)

I get why the Genesis Block would have enthusiasm for this idea. But one-pass
micropayments, Bitcoin or otherwise, don't seem like the future to me.

~~~
Aqueous
Ten years ago you were right, but I think you are making this out to be some
hard-wired component of human nature when it is largely cultural. Something
has changed culturally and psychologically in the time since then. The
psychological gap between paying and not paying now is narrower than it was 10
years ago. This is in large part due to developments that have taken place in
the time since, especially the iTunes model. In the 90s people people were
extremely cautious about purchasing things online. In the beginning it didn't
happen at all, but Amazon and the development of e-commerce broke that
barrier. People began to think nothing of giving out their credit card
information and home addresses to purchase things that will ultimately be
shipped to their homes. Then, paying for all-digital premium content became
the norm, especially because of iTunes. iTunes completely normalized the
concept of a small payment for quick and easy access to content. People think
nothing of purchasing an app or a song in two seconds on iTunes, because
psychologically $1.00 doesn't mean a whole lot to them and easily fits within
their recreational budget and it is exceedingly convenient.

I think the next form of content to fall into this model will be written
content. First major newspapers had to stop giving away their content for free
(they already have as you point out). People have shown that they are willing
to pay for this formerly free content. Now comes the part where they start
charging for a la carte access to articles. I've already seen this on some
magazines - GQ? Time perhaps? I forget - and I must admit I've clicked through
a few times, and I don't have a lot of disposable income. I might simply
irresponsible but on the other hand I'm probably not alone.

------
aqme28
How does this have anything to do with Bitcoin, on a fundamental level?
Companies like Tinypass ([http://www.tinypass.com/](http://www.tinypass.com/))
do a pretty good job of this already with more traditional currencies.

~~~
VMG
Bitcoin doesn't have this:
[http://www.tinypass.com/terms/](http://www.tinypass.com/terms/)

~~~
adestefan
Except that it will if anyone actually tried to do this.

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kaonashi
Bitcoin paywalls… gee how original. It's just like our old non-solutions, only
with Bitcoins, so that makes it awesome.

~~~
aminok
Lower fees, and no divulgement of personal financial details, make it awesome
for micropayments.

~~~
kaonashi
It's like Paypal without the risk management and all the convenience of forex.

~~~
aminok
It has lower fees than PayPal. For micropayments, you don't really need risk
management. In addition to offering a lower cost option for micropayments, it
enables transactions in countries not well integrated into the global economy
where PayPal can't operate (e.g. Ukraine).

You're right about the forex cost.

------
coryfklein
Although I'm not sure Bitcoin can do much to change the paywall problem, this
article does shed interesting light on the state of the publishing industry
and how the natural downward drive of quality is leaving a gap of top-quality
and accurate reporting.

I am very interested to see who will fill that gap in the next few years, and
I think it will go to whoever solves this free/non-free paywall problem.

~~~
nwzpaperman
It's more complex than free vs. non-free, but it's solvable and will be
solved.

------
donohoe
This was posted two weeks ago and was a load of BS then and still is.

Can someone with appropriate privileges just kill this one off please?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6444566)

~~~
walid
Note that you work for qz.com which kinda discredits you when asking for
another site to be deleted.

~~~
eli
Ad Hominem attacks aren't cool.

~~~
walid
True, but I wasn't trying to attack him. I was surprised that someone would
ask that a thread be deleted that vehemently so I got curious about his
background. When someone is in a competing position, s/he has to respect other
people's expectations about them.

