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.
- Twitch is losing money because the costs of running the platform are higher then the revenue
- Twitch is losing money because they're aggressively investing in growth
if you want to know about the viability of the concept, I'm not sure which one it is, video streaming and small payment processing could both be quite costly
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.
It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour.
Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $100 to make in China, $50 to ship to the US and $150 in store costs (eg utilities, staffing, rent, amortized capex, etc). You might say I've made $200 profit.
But let's say my corporate structure is to have 2 subsidiaries: PB Manufacturing and PB Retail. The first makes the table. The second manages the stores and sells the table.
If PBM charges PBR $150 for the table then PBM makes $50 in profit and PBR makes $150. If PBM charges $300 for the table then PBM makes $200 in profit and PBR breaks even.
This is what I mean when I say Twitch's profitability is a chosen narrative.
There are many reasons to do this. Tax is a big one. Maybe you pay less tax in China so you prefer to take profit there. Maybe you want to argue stores aren't profitable to resist demands for higher wages or higher rents.
The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it technically has to be "at arm's length" and other requirements).
"Use the same live streaming technology and global infrastructure that powers Twitch."
Did IVS grow out of Twitch? Sure. That core is now a piece of AWS infra though, even though the team was initially built at Twitch.
(Obviously these things are weird to talk about in a vacuum, because all the pieces are 100% owned by the same parent. The splits we see can be changed with the wave of a CFOs pen, usually when they want to change how we view some overarching piece of the business.)
Furthermore... isn't this the crux of Hollywood accounting..?
This is totally untrue but keeps getting repeated. Yes, within Amazon, the non-AWS business units pay AWS to use AWS. But they pay cost plus a small percent, not retail rates.
The cost to non-AWS businesses is the same as if they had to do it all on their own (actually a little less since they get to leverage AWS's economies of scale).
The profitability of the other business units is actually improved this way. They would be paying more if they were independent and doing it on their own. This is why Amazon is so allergic to spinning out AWS as its own business.
You have it backwards: transfer pricing is legal, profit shifting is not.
Transfer pricing is the legal term used to refer to the establishment of prices between related entities pursuant to regulations. The transfer pricing regulations were created to cut down on profit shifting.
And we don't know for real how much Amazon is charging them. Rumors are going, Amazon is charging them a hefty amount for servers, while other says AWS is irrelevant for their Service, so nobody knows for real, officially.
But the recent move to a different handling of video-streams is supposed to change this, as it reduce the costs on Twitch's side, and lets the Streamers pay for it themself. By which I mean AV1(?), where the streamer is encoding all streams in all resolutions, and only sends it to Twitch which then acts as a relay. Claim is, Video-Encoding was the biggest cost for them, after employees, which seems kinda strange.. But maybe it will change their game in the next years, we will see.
> 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.
You don't need Drama, but you should indeed communicate and deliver something worth the peoples' money. I mean, there are many big and small creators who just steadily and silently deliver their work and have usually no drama at all.
Drama is just popular because it's cheap, fast, and any idiot can create it. So people who have nothing else of worth, tend to live from this.
Entertainers have been doing the pass the hat thing for hundreds of years. It is not a new phenomenom.
Historically, it has generally worked for entertainers, and i guess religion. I don't think there are historical paralells to open source really. Maybe it just doesn't work for that sort of thing.
And when there's 15 people watching, that does enable real conversations.
Maybe that is not the same as pretending to be your friend but then again that mostly applies only to the more extreme end of streamers.
"everyone has relationships with people far away, who inspire, entertain, role models, and also the people we work so hard for: fans, viewers, the next generation, kids somewhere, posterity. I think those asymmetrical relationships are part of what it means to be human, part of the teamwork. Humanity is teamwork. And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real"
>And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real.
I think that people developing these so-called parasocial relationships is probably not harmful until it becomes a substitute for them developing "real" ones. But I see that growing rapidly, and I think it's a problem in the future.
Not in a author/reader sense, no. But in a social media age where influencers use specific language to appear friendly and familiar? At the very least it's blurring the lines.
Just because something is written in flowery language doesn't make it profound.
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.
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.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
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)
They survive on patronage outside of their subscriber base.
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.
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.
I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of.
Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
I agree that ads have historically made a lot of money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am probably in the minority but I would be interested if any of the major publications had data on this kind of strategy. I realize there have been products including Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using on a NYT level publication.
Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to consume it.
It’s very much a shell of what it once was.
Or that they prefer the world in which it doesn't take off because they expect to make more money, at least in the short term.
If they believe that they can still convince N users to buy $195/year subscriptions, versus getting 10N users to pay a net total of $10/year in per-article fees, then they're better off trying to convince the N users to subscribe. Which might* work for the biggest dozen newspapers with brand recognition, but won't work as well for the long tail of news sites.
It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
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.
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.
But many people do read articles on dozens of different sites in a month. And that's a good thing; a world in which people get their news from a variety of different sources seems like a fundamentally better world.
Newspapers and news subscriptions were financially viable in a world where most people had a subscription and that's where they got most of their news. They may not be financially viable in a world in which most people don't have or want to read only one or two sources of news. And that's fine.
Your argument is pretty weak too. Of course I could subscribe but obviously I don’t for any number of reasons. I am saying I wish I could pay on a per article price. Sorry for wanting to pay for the content I consume.
There are communities where the creators are well under way to becoming sustainable with this method. Granted, it's very early days.
Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"
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.
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.
I'm more imagining a mining-pool made up of webpage visitors. The website allocates you certain blocks of hashes to be calculated and you calculate those. Once they're calculated and the webpage verifies it by randomly double checking a few, then the webpage is served.
A websearch tell me a webpage visit nets the owners about ~2 cents in ad revenue. So you just need to mine some equivalent amount. It'd be sort of like a mining-pool where the overwhelming majority of users don't successfully mine a block - but when someone does the website owner gets the coin.
You could get more sophisticated on top of that and have some central mining-pool coordinator and session cookies etc so that your mining credit transfers across webpages and you can "premine" certain amounts
So the currency becomes more granular at "how many hashes have you calculated" and not how many coins do you have
I could be wrong though ~ It's possible 2 cents of hashes takes hours to crunch on a phone
Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.
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".
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.
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.
> Powerful Ad Formats (...)
> Diversify from Big Tech channels, and get the first-mover advantage of advertising in the fastest-growing search engine since Bing. Search ads are privacy-preserving, text-based ads that appear at the top of a user’s search engine results page (SERP).
> (...)
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.
You have things on the extreme side like people begging on tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people donating to the craziest streamers doing the most outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super donations on Youtube on live podcasts.
When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun. Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit card details to a random site, but the masses will trust buying credits/donations/subscriptions through tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.
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.
They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2 a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could have reliable income.
PS: I find Flattrs model much simpler: paying a fixed amount, and choosing how many/few people I want to give it to.
Also it's fine that you like Flattr's model more, but no one else did. They don't exist anymore.
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
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.
The tech and will is there. It’s just illegal to build it.
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.
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.
Or if the stakes are even lower and you're not avoiding a lemon of a vacuum, you're getting marginal improvement to an experience - what is it worth to read someone saying "don't go to Jim's Ale House when on vacation there, its fine but Jacks' is nearby and better"? Clearly that information has some value, but... how much? Whats the cost of a tip that helps turn a serviceable meal on a vacation into a better one?
That's two ways of saying the same thing.
But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.
Not really. Most people just don't know how to block them, and browsers won't block them by default because of they have a conflict of interest.
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.
With that being said, I don't think your comment is fair. The anti-Google sentiment is justified. They violate your privacy. Not wanting to support them by signing up for their paid service isn't being a "selfish freeloader".
I’m more than happy to “freeload” off of a multi-billion dollar ad company and support creators in a more meaningful way. And I fully support anyone who wishes to avoid the evil that is ads, even if they don’t support their creators directly otherwise. There is nothing selfish about wanting to conserve time, it’s the only currency that actually matters.
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.