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
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
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.
You've definitely got a solid plan there, and its basically what Patreon is doing. But our belief is that if you're a content creator, you shouldn't have to do work on top of your creating to earn a living, hence the direct to consumer route
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.
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.
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.
Also I'd say that it's an experiment, and we hope to show that if this was deployed it could work at scale and bring in the revenue the web needs to support itself and grow.
I don't think security is as much the barrier here as access - localized servers provide 24/7 access by local employees, and until every part of the stream (employees, clients, HQ, mobile, and cloud) have near 100% internet uptime, access is going to prevent this. But it does seems likely that 100% internet uptime is possible, so I'd say eventually this is how most companies will operate.
Why is it an issue that LastPass was sold to LogMeIn? Does that company have a bad reputation, or...? This is a serious question. I am not familiar with LogMeIn.
I'll repost what I commented on the LastPass sale. LMI basically just skirts by, doing just enough not to drive their users away -
"A lot of folks only have experience with Logmein from the horrible way they handled transitioning users from the free to paid service.
My company has used Logmein Central for remote access to hundreds of PCs for years. The core software is great, reliable, and has been ever since we started using it.
The problem is that Logmein the company knows they're on top of the heap when it comes to remote management. They have no reason to innovate or improve where they can.
They added 2FA but otherwise we haven't seen a single new feature that we've taken advantage of in a very long time. Any features they do add hint at them wanting to be a RMM service but you'd have to be an idiot to trust them with more responsibility of your networks. Also a lot of those features require Logmein Pro which adds an insane amount of cost depending on how many systems you're managing.
Meanwhile there are bugs that have been around literally since we started using the software. For instance copy/paste while in a session will randomly break. The Logmein client software is very buggy on OSX, crashes often, search will randomly break.
Their support is basically non-existent, although I haven't tried in a while if you opened a ticket it would take days if not longer for a response and they'd usually just direct you to some unrelated KB or tell you post on the forums.
We use Lastpass as well so this should be interesting. I've yet to see a merger that actually improved things from our end as a MSP. Cisco bought Meraki, Dell bought SonicWALL, at this point I assume any time we see a merger that its time to find a new vendor."
LogMeIn has a history of buying useful products and then raising prices on them without much warning. I was a faithful customer of Hamachi until LogMeIn purchased them, upped the price, and then tried to lock me in to a subscription.
If anyone doesn't know enough to put comments like this in context,
Hamachi was a free VPN service most commonly used by gamers. LogMeIn bought Hamachi, and turned it into a paid service, earning the eternal hate of the gaming community.
None of these aspersions are worth considering if you're thinking about enterprise software.
Out of curiosity--have they been successful with this strategy?
I'm guessing there's some short term revenue gains, and maybe some initial fallout. But the question still stands of whether this works long term. A lot of companies underprice their offering, so this could very well work and an acquisition seems like an ideal time to raise prices while promising more down the line.
Yes, agile is basically waterfall when the people "practicing" it are using it in name only. No one promised Agile would be Engineer Driven Development - it should be team driven development. Anyone (business, product, marketing, engineer, or otherwise) should be advocating for them to lead the process, because thats how Waterfall starts, with one person in charge of decision making.
Agile works when the user is the decision maker, and everyone on the team is advocating for the user (although if its only product that is advocating for the user, that works too). Its a group effort, not something that should just magically work because "we're using agile now".
Are there any other modern companies with a fanbase that is so important to its image/marketing that an article like this would be written? Can't imagine one for Microsoft, Facebook, google, etc...
It's one of the many reasons I own AAPL shares. They have such a great following with many people who would never even consider moving away from Apple products and shun other brands. I don't see this changing for a long while.
Probably could happen with Gibson and Fender, maybe some smaller brands too. Depending on high profile a person might be, they could likely get commemorative treatment. As for being a 'fan' there are plenty of collectors that would make the news should their gear collection remain intact after they pass away.
By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song).
But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.
