Ask YC: Your thoughts on this micropayments idea?

[aaronblohowiak]

For site owner: sign up for micro payments service like an ad network, but the pay goes the other way -- you get paid $X CPM, and in exchange, you may not show other ads on the page.

For browser: You have an account with the ad/micropayment network and instead of seeing ads, your money goes to the content creator of the site.

The ad networks already have deals with content sites, and people generally want to support the content they like. You could have "premium" content that is behind a simple click-through gateway that authorizes a higher payment (but with some cap so the fraud liability is small.)

Better improvement would be to allow interop between potential micro payment networks, and handle it all transparently for the user.

Benefit to the user: history of all the ad-free content they have seen, supporting their content providers. Benefit to the content owner: higher CPMs.

[jmount]

I think it was Hank Williams (blog: "Why Does Everything Suck") that pointed out that advertisers can not afford to buy ads on sites using this kind of model. The customers that micro-pay out of seeing the ads are exactly the small minority that the advertisers were hoping to hit in their blanket campaign. So the remaining traffic is worthless to advertisers- so better just to run it as a pure subscription site (which also has not worked well).

[AlexeyMK]

Its a great idea, but I'm not sure its feasible.

To subscribe, browsers have to go out of their way (interrupt their normal browsing experience) and join in. There's a better user experience by simple installing AdBlockPlus. And if you ARE willing to go out of your way, just use TipJoy or a similar service to donate to the site - PayPal would be better, actually, given the number of people who already have PayPal accounts.

The parallel is with music, I'd think: You're looking to launch a subscription service when most people will just download the content for free or buy what they want to support off of iTunes. Only, your case is even worse: Napster/Rhapsody are doing moderately well with subscription models, and to get the rights to those subscription models, they have deals in place with the 4 major labels. The blogging (even the A-list blogging) community is much less consolidated - you'd have to strike an incredible amount of agreements to make your service universal.

But you're thinking in the right direction.

[AlexeyMK → AlexeyMK]

Actually, how about this:

Integrate with AdBlockPlus. If you pay, there are no ads ANYWHERE. Then, collect donations for EVERYONE. As a blogger, I don't need to have signed up to you, the money is being collected just the same.

Then, begin contacting bloggers and letting them know that they have X in an account with you, and they'd probably want to collect it. That would work. That would work and it would be best done by the AdBlockPlus people.

Edit: AdBlockPlus is (from what I gather on their website) OpenSource and currently lacking a business model. You could probably start working from there on, like AdBlockPlus, Good Samaritan Edition or something

[99Frogs]

Idea would probably need to be sold to paypal, or even a credit card company, maybe integrated by google, firefox, or IE to gain mainstream use.

Incentives like "tip over $20/month and enjoy an add-free web experience" for a browser add-on.

People are too lazy to add money to an account in order to tip.

[siong1987]

If I were you, I will never work on ideas that involves transactions of money. It really involves too much security problems. But, I am not discouraging you. Your idea is cool. And, I could see the future of it if everyone is using it. And, I really believe that many people prefer ad-free internet. But, I am not sure that whether people will pay for an ad-free internet or not.

[RobGR]

Maybe you could market it in a way targeted to anti-consumerists ?

You would probably want a directory or search engine which covered the people who had signed up. You could promote it as an "ad-free search engine" to bring traffic to your customers.

[vaksel]

the problem with micropayments is that you need to invest a ton of money into making your average person use it casually.