This business model was previously tried by Kwedit. I was sort of disappointed when they abandoned it, because it deprived the world of kwedit default swaps.
You made a good point about Kwedit back in the day, which I believe applies just as well here. Namely, micropayments on the nickel-and-dime scale are seriously challenging. How does a vendor price them effectively? How do you get a consumer to wrap his/her head around them?
Everybody understands the value of a dollar; nobody understands the value of a nickel. Coins, pseudocurrencies, and loyalty points seem much better suited to overcoming that psychological barrier.
The concept is interesting. However, I don't think that the concept of "use now, pay later" is really what prevents people from doing micro transactions. The real work is to convince content providers to hide their stuff behind cheap paywalls and use their system.
Flattr never gained enough traction and I don't see how laterpay solves this problem.
> otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.
this is exactly the kind of strategy that 'poor' people take to maximise the effectiveness of 'freebies' (which includes credit). i hope they have some strategy in place to mitigate that risk...
Assume you want to read an article because it relevant for work. Assume your salary is $25 per hour. If you think for just 5 seconds whether you should pay for the article or not this will costs your employer 3.5¢. So at least in that context a price of 5¢ or 10¢ per article should absolutely be a no-brainer.
What I have no idea is if you can sustain a business at that price - content producer and payment provider. And I am also unsure how well that translates to non-working time. It is at least often argued that you should value that time just like your working time. Psychological barriers as mentioned by others are a very different matter, too.
Content producers and techies want something like this (microtransactions) to work so badly that they keep trying to make it happen, despite the fact that people quite simply don't want it. They keep thinking "maybe I just need to make it more usable" when PayPal has been quite usable for nearly two decades.
People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.
>People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.
Are you familiar with In App Purchases? The fact that so many apps are moving towards being free with paid content after purchase/install kind of goes against your statement. If anything, it would support the argument that people are willing to use a system like this if it is usable and trustworthy.
The reason people don't buy TV shows is due to bad pricing and lackluster value.
I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. Also they need to pay extra for any specials.
Hollywood and studios assume that people are willing to pay more for instant access than they pay for physical products. And there in lies the problem why very few people but TV shows a la carte.
On the people who download from p2p etc. a number of people would pay if the amount was lower, and within this group are a number of people who download from p2p now and buy the DVD when it has released.
This is also a big attraction for people waiting a year+ for a season to show up on netflix.
> I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses.
This sounds like an education problem: how do we make people understand that the cost of printing DVDs is negligible (in fact, practically nothing) in comparison to the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of trained individuals, tens of millions of dollars of specialized equipment, and the limited availability of their favorite actors?
To my knowledge the perceived expenses with DVD comes from the costs consumers think that comes from packaging, warehousing and sales.
To be honest I completely agree that this is not substantial and should not affect the costs and margins for the studios.
There is definitely an education problem, but the bigger issue is the consumption problem, that is, people who are willing and able to pay for digital downloads of TV shows are prepared to wait a few months - a year to buy a DVD or watch it on Netflix.
Sure we could try and educate these people about the minuscule difference in price. But chances are we would still fail to increase the perceived value.
And there in lies the problem and an opportunity to find a better delivery system.
As a publisher, I'd question when I'd actualy get money for the content I sold, if I have to wait for every "customer" to accumulate €5 before they forked over cash. Until LaterPay has significant market penetration, the likelyhood is that small publishers will never see any revenue.
Sounds similar to tipit.to which friends of mine did. Unfortunately, like a lot of money transferring services, they ran into a lot of fraud. Any money -> something -> money service online makes it really attractive to launder stolen credit cards.
According to this german blog post (It's an interview with a famous german blogger/tv presenter who is working for Laterpay in a consulting position) [0] you don't have to sign up to use it at the beginning. You basically just say "I want to pay for this later" and once you are hitting the 5 euro mark it'll prompt you to sign up and pay for it.
I'm having a hard time understanding what I can use this service for. Can somebody please provide one or two concrete examples of potential use cases? Thanks very much in advance!
I like that as well. Except, I'm seeing the content in German and this button reads "Jetzt registrieren OR Anmelden". Well, I guess "ODER" would have been too wide anyway.
I don't really see the connection between Bitcoin and Micro-Payment services at all. Bitcoin is hardly easy and instant unlike Flattr (Although I'd say Flattr isn't really that easy and straightforward as their intro video wants people to believe) and this service.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811