Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:<p>- 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?<p>- so do you give refunds a la steam?<p>- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying<p>- 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?<p>- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)<p>- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off<p>- 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)?<p>- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?<p>Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams.
Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.
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.<p>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.<p>Anyway, it's your business and not mine, so do what you feel is best.
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.
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 :)<p>Most people don’t know how much something is worth. Try not to lower price, rather, increase value.<p>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.<p>All that said, this does seem like an interesting way to gather user feedback. Good luck!
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.
Here's a copy that can be read without JS enabled:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91acfddf3" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91a...</a>
I found it really difficult to take this article seriously.<p>>Kapwing is an online video and GIF meme generator<p>It adds bars of text to the top and/or bottom of a gif. This product is worth $0. Probably less.
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.<p>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 :)
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.<p>Asking private persons will lead into goodwill purchases - which I'm not thinking that this is scaleable...
Treat information as the public good it is.<p>Pay those who create it.<p>Allow free access to public information.<p>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).<p>Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...</a>
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.
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.
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.
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'".
> Around 8% of users who could have used the apology flow converted into paying customers.<p>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.
I like this idea of avoiding a paywall with a reason.<p>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.<p>The Guardian and many other news sites have entire sections dedicated to Bitcoin. But they don't accept it as a payment method.<p>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.<p>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.
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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>My "disruptive" idea is composed of two pieces:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That's it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'd really like to discuss more on this idea, it might be totally bunk but I still think this is potentially disruptive.<p>My email is in my profile.
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.<p>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.<p>(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)