Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.
What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.
It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?
That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.
Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.
> I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background
So there are several problems with this:
1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason. For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative;
2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you. That's a far more significant cost for the majority of Internet users who are in the developing world. Cost aside, there may be issues with even having the payment infrastructure to actually pay for that (eg due to sanctions or US foreign policy).
I agree with the post's author: there are significant benefits to an ad-supported model and high on that list is low friction (paying for any service is a huge point of friction) and that those in the developing world get highly-equivalent services to the developed world.
There are definitely problems with advertising. The over-collection of data is of course one. But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
>You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.
fyi... That was my fault because I later edited it without realizing others had quickly quoted it. I made a typo "$10/year" which was clearly a mistake because no mainstream service for videos/music/books charges 84 cents a month.
> 1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.
Parent's comment originally read $10/year.
> For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative
I don't see how the first part of your statement at all supports the second. Google's revenue now, with many different services in wildly varying stages of profitability, has very little connection to the hypothetical subscription price that would be applied to a service that is now ad-funded - you seem to be engaging in wild speculation.
> 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you.
First, YouTube is a luxury service. Second, I specifically addressed the problem of "it's too expensive" later on in my comment, with "That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem." - which still holds. Third, market segmentation is a thing. Fourth, those in the developing world will pay with their personal information - which can be far more devastating if e.g. they're a dissident living in an oppressive regime. Fifth, I never said the ad model should be removed.
You seem to be making the assumption that I am suggesting that the ad-funded model be replaced with the subscription/microtransaction models - I do not, and my comment was carefully worded to not make that claim. I specifically believe that models where payment is made in money should always be available, with ads as an option - not that the former should be completely removed.
> paying for any service is a huge point of friction
False. I can relatively easily design a microtransaction service that has very little friction for payment. Meanwhile, there already exist many extremely low-friction payment services. If you have a credit card in the US with the new contactless payment technology, it's extremely easy to pay for things - you just swipe your card. If you have a Google Play account, it's similarly easy to purchase a new app. If you have a subscription service with auto-renew, paying for another month/year is literally frictionless - there's absolutely no interaction necessary.
> But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
See previous statement about your mistaken assumption that I said that advertising should be eliminated. Attacking a strawman does nobody any good.
Those who need the $10/year can decide to instead give up their personal data using the ad-funded model, which I explicitly did not say should be abolished, because I don't believe that. I was making an argument against the idea that microtransactions are themselves somehow infeasible/bad - nothing more.
You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason.
And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with.
The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available?
Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
If we are using micropayments to let users directly pay a site for views of that site's articles or for skipping ads on those articles, then the jurisdiction that the user is in is likely to consider that a sale in their jurisdiction and want the site to collect VAT or sales tax. If people from 50 different countries purchase articles, you might end up having to deal with taxes in 50 different countries! (Even countries that have thresholds of the form "no tax unless total sales in the country are above $X" might require you to register there and fill out a form each quarter saying you didn't meet the threshold).
The site doesn't have that problem if instead they sell ads and get their money from the advertisers or from the ad network. That money is taxed, but it is taxed as income in the location of the site, not as a sale where the users are. Having people visit your site from 50 different countries doesn't increase the complexity of your tax situation.
Assuming we can't get widespread adoption of more micropayment friendly rules for online purchased of content access and/or ad skipping, there is a way to use micropayments for that while avoiding the tax jurisdiction explosion.
That is the imposition of a middleman service. It sounds like Blendle might be such a middleman.
You buy articles from the middleman, making your micropayment to the middleman. The middleman license the content for resale from the publishers and pays a royalty based on volume.
If you arrange this right when the user buys an article the middleman is the seller for VAT or sales tax purposes and so it is the middleman that has to deal with all the different jurisdictions. The publishers only have to deal with their own jurisdiction and perhaps the jurisdiction of the middleman.
But then you have the issue of who will be the middleman? I don't think we want it to end up like streaming movies, where we've got Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and Hulu and Prime and Google and HBO Max and a whole bunch of others and you need to use more than one of them to see all the content you want.
We probably need at most 3 or 4 big middlemen that are easy enough for publishers to use that most sites that want to offer a pay per article option are signed up with all of those middlemen.
My guess is that it might end up being the same companies that provide "sign on with" services that end up providing micropayment middlemen services and/or companies that already provide big online stores that sell internationally.
That would be Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.
What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.
It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?
That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.
Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.