littlefish444

Hmm interesting.

But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?

It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it). The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.

Nice! Cool demo

Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol

Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?

I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).

Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article? My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.