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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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
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".
>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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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 a more accurate question is "Does the content make me want to support the creator?"
This is why tipping thrives in settings like Twitch, which is heavily geared around engendering parasocial relationships.
That's two ways of saying the same thing.
But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.
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.
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.
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.
They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2 a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could have reliable income.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could definitely see this working at scale.
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.
I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit, and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit most.
eventually they just deleted my account due to ”inactivity” in maybe 2017 or so.
this made me stop recommending them
they just kept my money
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.
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".
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.
How did flattr differ from these services?
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.
I would love to have seen that model succeed.
The tech and will is there. It’s just illegal to build it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Factoring in inflation, that $2/mo now was about $1.12 back in 2000 when McCloud proposed the idea.)
1: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/index.html
Pessimism of whether the content would be worth real money, mostly.
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.
Does the subscription model not do exactly this?
The former can be assumed to be a lot more sustainable than the second.
But it does exclude a portion of the potential customer base. Whether or not that matters to a business is a different issue, of course.
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.
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https://ko-fi.com/
https://github.com/sponsors
https://www.patreon.com/
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/
Any others, let me know
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.
- 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde
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 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?
Independent information that serves people, is funded by the people
I wonder if having the government hand out tokens that you can spend on whatever media you want would be better.