- rgavuliak parentI do usually have a beer at the airport, but having more means you have more usage out of the plane bathroom which I can do without.
- I don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal.
The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
- > Publishers have just decided to put all their eggs in one basket
Isn't that just the ecosystem provided by the Big Tech ad platforms? Publishers at some point very much wanted to sell ads directly as the CPMs were 10x of what they are now. Then FB and Google took over as the middlemen, pushed CPMs down, added sophisticated targeting and set the precedence for how things are implemented.
Sure the tech giants could team up with the publishers to take back control but they'd need to share more of their revenue in exchange which I am doubtful they'd go for. Not just because it means losing control but also it creates the hassle of having to deal with a fractured landscape of publishers of very varying technical acumen.
- My point was that your preferences don't make for a good business model when it comes to micropayments.
What I am telling you that based on online readership patterns, people that read 25 and more articles per month don't make up for enough of a base to be worth monetizing at 2.3 cents per article. These are hard facts.
In this case the market evolution is the proof that micropayments are not feasible. Not one company succeeded running them, but you have plenty of news companies using subscriptions that scaled the approach and made significant revenues. These are lessons learned across hundreds of news sites. With all due respect, your opinion is just that - anecdotal.
- Let's look at the economics, back when I was working in the paywall industry you had roughly 10% of users reading more than 5 articles on an average medium.
Let's say that you could get 2 % of these people to pay you $10 per month. With a readership of 1M that would mean you'd get (1000000 * 0.1 * 0.02) * 10 * 12 = $240k per year.
Now let's move that over to blendle, let's say that the average reader reads 1.2 articles per month (since most people only look at 1 article). Let's be super generous here - with a much larger conversion rate - 10 % of everyone buying 1 article per month month on average comes up to a comparable amount 100000 * 12 * 0.23 = $276k per month. And we're being generous here, remember - blendle abandoned this model so it almost certainly isn't equal to the metered model I used in my estimation above even if more users are willing to pay.
Now if you bring down the payment to whatever you're proposing you get to $27.6k or even 2.76k per YEAR. The napkin math is clear that this isn't feasible.
Interestingly enough you'd pay less as a "heavy reader" if you read 10 articles per month (which is a super small % of users on an average medium) with blendle (10 * 0.23 = $2.3) than with a subscription costing $10. But making the users count articles likely isn't great psychology as compared to buy and read everything you want. Which likely is perceived as a higher value offer.
- > And nearly the entirety of retail sales
Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.
> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
- You are wrong. There have been multiple attempts at micro-transactions - and they all failed. One of the biggest was Blendle - https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
- Maybe it's the fact that we've seen VCs and a16 specifically push for highly overhyped things that didn't really come true like WeWork, Crypto?
If we go beyond a16, the last decade has shown us VCs pushing for insane valuations for companies that went under after hiring sprees. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg sing similar odes to Metaverse.
At some point you stop believing the next big thing from a certain crowd.
This doesn't mean I am not exploring how to use AI and even have something I am working on in terms of an idea, it's just that caution is advised.