I'm going to have to start quoting this; it's a much more succinct argument than I've heard before, and it captures the essence far better than I would be able to do even with many more words.
The problem is, payment is hard.
For authors:
- Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive
- Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible, which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information or their real name
- PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime)
- Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of micro invoices at tax time
- You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse.
For users:
- Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash
- Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA
- Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters?
- Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$
The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon, whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity but also your personal account - for life.
In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month. That's it.
Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly. I can have Stripe and/or Patreon integrated with a site in a few hours of work. PayPal isn't hard to integrate either, they just suck. (I have no experience with Ko-Fi).
> Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive
So don't do micropayments. Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive, and it makes you more dependent on loyal fans rather than generous drive-bys. It's harder to get loyal fans--you have to produce quality content--but when you get them it's a more stable source of income. And from the perspective of content consumers, that's exactly what I want: higher quality content. Larger payments also means your account doesn't get used as often by hackers testing out credit card numbers they bought off the darkweb.
> - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime)
Yeah, that's a real problem, and one of the reasons we need legally-mandated payment-neutrality if we're going to give so much power to credit card companies.
You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception: cryptocurrency is a viable workaround for content creators that need a workaround (which isn't most content creators). But to be clear, I'm not talking about crypto-bro flavor of the week: USDC is pretty ideal for this, or the two popular zk-Snark/ring signature privacy coins[1] if privacy is desirable. Variable value is a problem, not a feature, so I don't see a reason to accept that unless you have a need for privacy: paying with Bitcoin is dumb.
> - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters?
> - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$
Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing.
[1] I'm not naming these coins by name because that tends to get flagged.
It's hard to pull it off without relying on the oligopoly entities. Like, I can publish my SEPA banking information on my blog, but that would just invite scammers. And it's not real-time which means I have to manually process payments.
And that's just dealing with the payment itself and not solving the problem of accounting and taxes. It's a difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand him twelve advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing him a wad of receipts by individual people.
> Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive
They are, but good luck getting people used to free content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or blogs), you got to fulfill a very specific niche if you want to lure in some whales.
> You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception
Cryptocurrencies bring in their own host of problems:
- people will automatically discard your opinion simply because you offer crypto - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as well as the environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2 footprint, ...) have burnt so many people that offering crypto acceptance these days outside of anonymity context (e.g. VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as paying for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to not show any more if an account is legacy-verified or Twitter Blue subscriber).
- can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the cops knocking on my door)
- your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your coins
> Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing.
As a user, all I have at a moment is to look how the content currently is. I have no recourse when the author decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably hacked.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-blocks-the...
Right--as I said, that's a problem, and I'd actually say it's hard enough to be effectively impossible.
Then again, I'm not sure how this is an objection to donation-based monetization of content creation as opposed to ads, given the average content creator isn't running their own ad network.
> It's a difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand him twelve advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing him a wad of receipts by individual people.
I'm not sure I understand this. It's not a wad of receipts, it's a single spreadsheet of receipts with a total at the bottom if you've set it up at all reasonably. I'm not convinced this is a real problem.
> They are, but good luck getting people used to free content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or blogs), you got to fulfill a very specific niche if you want to lure in some whales.
I'm not sure where you're getting your data here. I had a Substack and was able to get a number of $100/year or $10/month subscribers within only a few posts, by providing well-thought-out educational content for an audience with disposable income. A commitment to posting weekly ended up being stressful so I ditched the Substack, refunded where it made sense, and am slowly working toward publishing it as a book. This is probably a less-profitable route, but it's more conducive to my mental health.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not that hard.
> people will automatically discard your opinion simply because you offer crypto
The sorts of content which I would recommend using crypto for as a workaround for centralized payment processors tends to not be reputation based. If you're writing a blog about permaculture, sure, people might discard your opinion because you accept crypto, but you also probably aren't likely to have your blog payments canceled. If you're writing a smut blog that might have credit card processing revoked nobody was reading it because they cared about your opinion.
> - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as well as the environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2 footprint, ...) have burnt so many people that offering crypto acceptance these days outside of anonymity context (e.g. VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as paying for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to not show any more if an account is legacy-verified or Twitter Blue subscriber).
If you respond to what is actually in my post, you'll note that privacy is exactly the context I was suggesting cryptocurrency for.
> - can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the cops knocking on my door)
There's nothing stopping you from doing KYC in addition to accepting USDC if accepting cryptocurrency is merely a workaround for having your payment processor canceled. Accepting anonymous payments is obviously off the table where KYC is required.
> - your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your coins
There's very little reason to actually ever hold coins for a significant amount of time, so losses if they occur should be minimal.
"Infrastructure" in this case can be generating a memo ID to associate transactions with KYC before they are able to view the payment address, which can be the address of a paper wallet. This doesn't require a sophisticated knowledge of crypto.
> As a user, all I have at a moment is to look how the content currently is. I have no recourse when the author decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably hacked.
Sure. When you buy a book, you're worried that the author might write a bad book in the future? If so, I don't suspect your concern is shared by most content consumers.
I'm not sure the risks of running code that can auto-update itself are really relevant to content. So far I haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to go into my brain and auto-update my memory of blog posts I've read, and I'm quite happy to pay for things if I've already learned from them.
A lot of these objections are a bit odd. What's your reason for preferring ad-supported content?
I don't like ad-supported content and hate tracking with a passion. However, it's reasonable to say that, at least at the moment, advertising is
- easier (and not just technically, but also from the bureaucratic side!) to implement than donations or "real" payments, and note that some countries like Germany make a legal distinction between these when it comes to taxes, and mis-classifying income as donations comes with severe penalties
- guaranteed, predictable income for authors
- zero effort for the reader
- zero direct, financial risks for the reader
The result of this is the current, mostly ad supported crap infrastructure we currently have on the Internet.
Personally, I'd advocate for drastic banking regulation and tax code changes to make paying for online content easier so that regular people can take advantage too, without going through middlemen extracting rent everywhere:
- for clearly non-commercial content which most personal blogs/vlogs/podcasts fall into, completely exempt donations from tax and other bureaucratic (AML, KYC, invoices) requirements
- create a globally usable (!) financial network with no censorship other than what's illegal in the recipient's country, low caps on transfer fees (0.1%), real-time transfers and "deposit only" accounts, so that transferring money across countries actually gets realistic, and I can offer my bank account number without having to fear someone draining my account. SEPA gets pretty close to that, but it's not joined with the US, Australia or Asia so at the moment there is no alternative for cross-continental donations other than to rely on PayPal and friends.
I'll also add, about this supposed benefit of ads:
> - zero direct, financial risks for the reader
"Direct" is doing a lot of work here. Ads absolutely are a financial risk to readers. "You can just not buy the product" puts a lot more faith in human agency than is warranted. Everyone buys goods and services they don't need, or which are worse than less-advertised alternatives, because of advertising. People are manipulable and that includes you (and me). No one is immune. Even if you never see an ad, your friends pass bad information from ads to you. Even if you aren't easily fooled by lies, advertisers have a great deal of control over what truth gets placed in front of you. You are being manipulated into spending money by ads--it's practically unavoidable in today's society--and if you aren't taking steps to protect yourself, you are being manipulated even more.
Arguably financial harm isn't even the most fundamental harm done by ads--I'd argue that the psychological harm done by ads is actually worse.
- Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe Link will remember your CC details - so no need to fill them in again and again. This is as smooth as can be.
- Micropayments are expensive. Forget about it. Creators need to come together under common umbrellas to get paid. That's what traditional publications were in the end. If people could put their egos aside a little, they could start making some good bundles.
- You are dead wrong on accounting. Nobody has to make formal invoices for all their subscribers.
- It's easy to accept SEPA payments and many other payment forms without credit cards through Stripe. Those germans who don't have credit cards have debit cards and they work the same.
Yes, yet another middle man, doing exactly the same as PayPal - and at least Google is known for banning people for having too many refunds or tripping some anti-fraud ML model. Not something I'd trust either as an user or as an author.
> Creators need to come together under common umbrellas to get paid. That's what traditional publications were in the end. If people could put their egos aside a little, they could start making some good bundles.
Again, middle men. Middle men that are going to censor you for whatever reason - no matter your political direction, by the way.
> You are dead wrong on accounting. Nobody has to make formal invoices for all their subscribers.
I'm German and I'd prefer to not have my donations re-classified as taxable commercial income. Our government's interpretation on what defines "gewerblich" can be pretty insane - you have to provide a full imprint with name and address on your stupid cat photo blog if you're reaching more people than your family. There have been a number of people in my Twitter feed who got into serious trouble for anything from running donation pools for their pets, beer money-style donations, and most recently Onlyfxns.
Our government is braindead when it comes to realities of digital life, and so are many others. Too many people just rely on never appearing on the government's radar.
> It's easy to accept SEPA payments and many other payment forms without credit cards through Stripe. Those germans who don't have credit cards have debit cards and they work the same.
As said in the first point, you're again at the mercy of a middle man that's hard to hold accountable. My local bank I can at least file a complaint at the banking regulator, good luck with any of the US institutions.
You don't have to use a US card processor, there are European options. The fact is that these processors have millions of companies using them, handling probably billions of transaction every year. They are much more reliable than European banks, who will close the bank accounts of sites and journalists writing things the banks don't agree with.
As for donations, fair enough. Why not get your donations to an account outside of Germany to escape that headache?
> Again, middle men. Middle men that are going to censor you for whatever reason - no matter your political direction, by the way.
I'm aware of the censorship concern. Still it's worth a shot to try to bundle your content with like minded, you don't necessarily need middle men for this.
All in all, something will have to change with the way online content is consumed and produced - at least if we want to take full advantage of the blessings of the information age instead of rotting at the mercy of a media oligopoly.
You're still at the mercy of what the US networks deem acceptable. Even if you are German residing in Germany, have a German bank, your customer is German residing in Germany and has a German bank... say, you're a sex worker which is completely legal in Germany. And yet, you'll get booted off of anything where the US card networks are involved.
> As for donations, fair enough. Why not get your donations to an account outside of Germany to escape that headache?
Still tax evasion. Yes, I could create something like a Maltese shell company, but that is even more of an effort to set up and maintain.
As for Visa/Mastercard - yes you are at their mercy. They are not perfect, but what are your options right now, realistically? Except for manual verification of payments?
I get 1 donation per 14,000 visitors. Even among the people who email me with complex questions, and get detailed answers that no one else offers, only a few donate. The link is not hidden or anything; people just expect content to be free.
Just consider how much content you voluntarily consume, and how much of it you paid for.
The thing you seem to not understand is that ads and donations are not compatible business models. If you are making money off ads, that is why you are not making money off donations.
The content you make to sell ads is attractive up front, with clickbaity headlines and overwrought thumbnails. If the platform you're on rewards watch/read time, you then just have to provoke some sort of addictive emotion like outrage or fear to keep people there for a bit. On platforms that don't reward watch/read time, you don't even have to do that.
The content you make to attract donations is useful, educational, or otherwise beneficial to your audience. This is incompatible with pinning people down with brain chemicals so you can ram ads down their throat.
If you interrupt your content with a NordVPN or Athletic Greens commercial, people are less likely to donate. Why would I donate to someone who is trying to manipulate me? You're not doing me a service, you're doing advertisers a service.
Every example you have given of people not donating, is easily explained by the fact that the content is ad supported.
> I get 1 donation per 14,000 visitors. Even among the people who email me with complex questions, and get detailed answers that no one else offers, only a few donate. The link is not hidden or anything; people just expect content to be free.
Alternative hypothesis: people just expect that you're already getting paid by advertisers, which by your own admission is true.
You've set up this exchange where you use your audience to sell ads. You chose to make that relationship with your audience.
It should not be surprising to you that the audience uses you as they see fit. Those are the terms you signed up for.
If I'm being honest, most "content" I've come across on the web doesn't deserve to be funded and its creators are better served creating something else if they're looking to be compensated.
people will create because they want to create
What great content I have come across is usually created within a similar ethos to FOSS. People know they've learned a great deal from others in the past and want to pay it forward, or they want to share something with the world to see how others might iterate upon it.
if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now
I've also seen great content from people connected to a patreon, so there is definitely room for compensation, if the content is good enough.
Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.
> Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do.
ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations.
But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.
> I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted.
> Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.
That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.
In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience. You bring up Propublica and Mother Jones as if these rare successes mattered to people with humble readerships. It goes to show that you don’t have a tenuous grasp a reality I’m familiar with. You express desires, I express facts.
In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.
What have you done, exactly?
If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into soliciting donations, it's quite predictable that that wouldn't work.
If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into finding out the needs of your audience and producing content that meets those needs, it would be very surprising to me that this didn't get any response.
It's certainly important to make it easy for people to donate, but it's arguably more important to produce something people want to donate for. And, I don't want to underplay the fact that producing quality content is hard. But it's not impossible.
> In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience.
Not the case--don't make assumptions about people you don't know. Perhaps you should read some of my comments where I gave numbers on what kinds of subscription numbers I was able to get when I was running a substack.
> In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.
1. I donate a significant amount to content producers, and pay for a few different subscriptions, as well as being willing to pay to purchase content. My point all along has been that people are willing to pay for and donate to the production of quality content. Maybe if you cared more about what content consumers thought, you'd get more of them to donate.
2. I don't think you can reasonably disagree that quality content is content that serves the content consumer. You want to produce quality content, right? If content consumers tell you what they want, it behooves you to listen.
3. If you're a sociopathic content producer, sure, you have no reason to care about people except as potential sources of income. But as a content consumer, and more importantly, as a decent human being, you probably do care about other people as more than just sources of income. You've said you could make more money on ads if you didn't have integrity, so you clearly have other motivations besides money. You probably aren't a sociopath. So if you set aside your emotions about this disagreement I think you probably do care about people even if they don't directly contribute to your bottom line.
Perhaps an example, not sure if that one works well: I have my personal music collection. I choose music to listen to based on mood. I do not own a spotify account and I do not want to own one. I go out to my music collection and choose music for myself or I go online and search for more music of some genre or fitting my mood. I actively seek that out. On spotify people let stations play some music, based on algorithms. The content is pushed into their faces (ears). If there was not so much of music "to fill the gaps", then more people would go on an active search, instead of relying on it being pushed to them. They would maybe discover some music from some composer and seek out their website, shop, bandcamp, whatever, and buy their music there. I have done so at least and found great music this way. Basically cutting out the content pusher middleman, that has nothing to do with the actual creation of content, but merely acts as a publisher. More people being actively seeking content themselves, less people relying on publishers.
I guess it is a continuous fight of donation financed content creators against the generic artificially marketted stuff, that is financed in different ways. We can however see, that there are content creators out there, who do make due on donation basis. Personally, I hope that we will see more of that and less affiliate marketting pushed stuff.
Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.
They similarly finance many people whose content saved me time, money and stress.
They also finance lazy people, some of which steal my content. However killing their income stream kills mine, and it still leaves you with far more prevalent first-party blogspam.
In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.
Agreed!
Unsurprisingly, search engines funded by advertisers surface content which is effective at serving ads, rather than quality content. Do you see how this might be a problem?
> Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.
My guy, what do you think "selling out" means?
I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that.
Define “ad”. Is “read more in my blog” an ad? Is “see Foo’s blog at …” an ad? “Read Foo’s excellent blog”? “Read more here” in a blog entry?
If you say “when it is paid for it’s an ad”, how do you detect that? And what is “paid”? In a webring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring) people reciprocally ‘pay’ each other by providing incoming links, thus all gaining reputation. The difference with a citation ring (https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/03/23/citation-stati...) is subtle.
And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online?
> Define “ad”.
"How to define 'ad'" is a question worth asking, because it is important that we block ads without blocking valuable content. And how to block harder-to-detect forms of ads is a real, open problem.
But it's just not an argument that blocking ads is impractical. The vast majority of ads are ones that no one is confused about, and which can be detected fairly easily. Imperfect != impractical.
What you're saying is an example of a perfect solution fallacy. Obviously adblocking is never going to be perfect, but it works pretty well.
> And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online?
Not in a void, the way you're presenting it. I'm proposing blocking all ads, not just newcomers' ads. Ads provide the greatest advantage to the best-funded, and that's usually not newcomers. Advertising benefits entrenched interests, not newcomers. Uniformly blocking all ads would be a boon to newcomers, not a harm.
At a more fundamental level, ads fundamentally prevent capitalism from providing the greatest value for the least cost. Ads allow advertisers to provide lower value at greater cost by spending more money on advertising.
An absence of advertising means that people find out about products from higher-signal-to-noise ratio sources of information, such as independent review sites, word-of-mouth, and subject experts. Consumer reports is an excellent ROI: buy nice or buy twice. My friends are better at recommending books and movies to me than any advertiser. And it should be the responsibility of the FDA to disseminate information about new treatments to doctors, and the responsibility of doctors/prescribers to keep up-to-date: drug ads and prescriber kickbacks from pharmaceuticals should be unequivocally illegal.
Ad apologists will claim "but how will we fund content creation!" and the answer is, if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now. "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. They're the ones creating the filtering problem. Paid, quality content creation inherently doesn't scale because it's inherently serial: a person/team creates one piece of content at a time. You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation.
And the fact is, people will create because they want to create, even if they aren't paid to do so. Maybe they are paid, but that's secondary to the human need to create. As Quincy Jones said, "When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room."