
Show HN: Atri: an experiment in web economics - mankins
https://www.atri.me/
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kincardine
You're pitching it to potential customers entirely the wrong way.

Most consumers of web content (>99%) don't care about this in any way. I mean,
to be perfectly honest, I'm only mildly interested in exploring alternatives
to the ad-supported web. I almost never see ads anyway.

You should be selling this as something that will give access to paywall
content. That's it. Because that's the only possible thing that there is even
a sliver of a market for. Recruit content providers (the bigger, the better),
figure out how much they are currently making off paywall revenue, possibly
sell at a loss to build a user base (and demonstrate traction to more content
providers and possible investors).

Once you have a user base and demonstrated traction, allow future content
providers (of any size and viewership) to join your "platform" and earn
payouts based on viewership. Obviously, still target large, valuable content
providers directly.

As the number of content providers grows, your value proposition grows.

As it is, you're charging $10/month for a service that offers less value than
what most people get for free through AdBlock.

The real economics experiment is if people will pay more money for less value.
The utility of "fixing the web" doesn't even come close to spanning the value
deficit.

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bgnm2000
The problem here (as I see it), is consumers don't care about this problem -
and thats who you need to buy in. If ad-block already works for them, why
download + pay for something else (that doesn't block ads anyway)?

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codycowan
You're absolutely right that consumers as a whole don't care about this
problem. The Atri experiment isn't intended for all consumers - we're looking
for people who really care about the problem.

It won't be long before there's a paywall and subscription for every site you
want to read, because publishers on the whole aren't trying to innovate,
they're just holding on to what they know.

Consumers aren't paying attention (as they shouldn't - this is insider
baseball), but some of us don't like what we see happening, and those are the
kind of people we're looking for with Atri

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Vraxx
To me this seems like it would suffer from a chicken and egg sort of issue. To
expand, this is useful to me as a consumer if I could install it and browse
the web ad and guilt free, as well as having access to pay-walled content with
my Atri subscription essentially paying for it. As a content provider, I'm
only going to want to provide this avenue of "subscription" if it nets more
money than my current method of monetization of my content. By the looks of
it, this is trying to recruit users first, but what value is a user being
provided for the $30 over 3 months other than being included in an
artificially limited experiment?

edit: To be clear, I like the idea, and I think something needs to be tried in
order for something to work. These are just my initial skeptical criticisms.

~~~
codycowan
You're absolutely right that there is a chicken and egg problem. As it stands
right now, publishers are desperately holding on to every last advertising and
subscription dollar they can find, and aren't looking for new things. We've
realized the only way to show publisher new revenue sources are possible (and
we've spoken with almost all of them) is to actually give them a check. To
start, the value to Atri users is limited - but we think there are enough
people out there willing to give this a shot that we can get the ball rolling.

~~~
Vraxx
Yeah, that was pretty much what I gathered. Out of curiosity have you tried
working with content producers to form some limited partnerships that you
might be able to offer users? I was thinking something along the lines of a
limited (to prevent abuse) subscription to a variety of news sites that are
normally pay-walled. In addition, you might be able to bundle the extension
with a partnered ad-blocker that could estimate revenue lost (on average) by
the loss of impressions that could be used to compare to the amount of revenue
that the site could stand to gain from the portion of the subscription fee.
Some hard data could go a long way towards convincing content producers of the
value of supporting a service like this.

~~~
codycowan
We've starting talking to content producers, and its an avenue we want to
pursue further, but as you pointed out the hard data we're gathering here is
going to be key to our negotiations.

As to your idea of bundling an Ad Blocker, while we support ad block as a
product, we don't want to be building two products, and there are plenty of
great ad blockers out there already. We also think that there might be some
people who, for whatever reason, don't want an ad blocker but do want to
support creators, and we didn't want to limit Atri to only adblock users.

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grizzles
Paymail.net is a competitor in this space. Our app doesn't need a chrome
extension. We're all for shaking up the economics of the web. You can see a
demo of the app here: signal.city/sigcity.mp4

One of the things I think publishers probably want with stuff like this is an
open standard for letting people hop over paywalls.

We'd be happy to cooperate with Atri or Blendle or anyone else on this. I
think if companies give up on the fantasy of owning the entire distribution
channel there is still a ton of other ways to build products that add massive
value in this market.

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panic
There's a lot more info on this page for some reason:
[http://www.fairtread.com/company/about/faq](http://www.fairtread.com/company/about/faq)

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Kinnard
I'd put "HOW DOES THE "EXPERIMENT" WORK?" higher up. I shouldn't have to
scroll down to find out what atri is. I think an evocative explanatory one-
liner should be above the fold.

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vincent_s
Flattr has been trying this since 2010. It got a lot of attention back then
and is still used today.

[https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

~~~
mankins
Also we've been working (stopping and starting) on this problem since 2009.
Here's the Hacker News post for the original implementation, In-a-Moon:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586798)

There was a lot of learning that went on during that time. The biggest
difference in implementation though was that In-a-Moon required sites to
install JavaScript snippets, and we tracked at the site level. For Atri, we're
bypassing sites and going straight to individuals by looking for Twitter
handles.

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matt4077
Very close to flattr, which unfortunately never really took off.

~~~
codycowan
In a way, yes. But what we found when building adieu.io was that people who
were willing to support content creators want to have it done automatically,
and Flattr required a considerable amount of work on the part of the donor.
Atri does all the work for you, figuring out what content earned your
attention, and then assigning funds appropriately.

~~~
Kinnard
I wonder how BitWall and ChangeTip are doing?

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Kinnard
You should partner/merge with pocket:
[https://getpocket.com](https://getpocket.com)

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fiatjaf
Sometimes I visit a website I don't want to give money to. I think it is doing
a disservice to the world.

~~~
mankins
Atri allows you to "block" by domain name or @screen ... ultimately you're in
control.

That said, we think it usually works itself out automatically, based on
attention.

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Kinnard
You should accept bitcoin, that would at least get you a lot of attention and
play in a niche community.

~~~
mankins
We take bitcoin for payout.

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herbst
As site owner, how do you plan to contact me and alocate to me some funds?

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codycowan
Atri contacts you the same way it identifies you - via twitter. When possible,
we'll email or reach out directly, but we use twitter to verify identities and
know who to send the money to, so we use it to communicate as well. Once we
get in contact, we can send money via ACH, paypal, bitcoin, etc

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fiatjaf
Let the paywalls come!

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santiago-north
Cool Idea.

