Show HN: Atri: an experiment in web economics

https://www.atri.me/

by mankins • 10 years ago

65 30 10 years ago

Cool Idea.

Vraxx3• 10 years ago

To me this seems like it would suffer from a chicken and egg sort of issue. To expand, this is useful to me as a consumer if I could install it and browse the web ad and guilt free, as well as having access to pay-walled content with my Atri subscription essentially paying for it. As a content provider, I'm only going to want to provide this avenue of "subscription" if it nets more money than my current method of monetization of my content. By the looks of it, this is trying to recruit users first, but what value is a user being provided for the $30 over 3 months other than being included in an artificially limited experiment?

edit: To be clear, I like the idea, and I think something needs to be tried in order for something to work. These are just my initial skeptical criticisms.

codycowan6• 10 years ago

You're absolutely right that there is a chicken and egg problem. As it stands right now, publishers are desperately holding on to every last advertising and subscription dollar they can find, and aren't looking for new things. We've realized the only way to show publisher new revenue sources are possible (and we've spoken with almost all of them) is to actually give them a check. To start, the value to Atri users is limited - but we think there are enough people out there willing to give this a shot that we can get the ball rolling.

mankins4• 10 years ago

Also I'd say that it's an experiment, and we hope to show that if this was deployed it could work at scale and bring in the revenue the web needs to support itself and grow.

Vraxx3• 10 years ago

Yeah, that was pretty much what I gathered. Out of curiosity have you tried working with content producers to form some limited partnerships that you might be able to offer users? I was thinking something along the lines of a limited (to prevent abuse) subscription to a variety of news sites that are normally pay-walled. In addition, you might be able to bundle the extension with a partnered ad-blocker that could estimate revenue lost (on average) by the loss of impressions that could be used to compare to the amount of revenue that the site could stand to gain from the portion of the subscription fee. Some hard data could go a long way towards convincing content producers of the value of supporting a service like this.

notduncansmith• 10 years ago

I'd imagine their plan is to get enough people to pay (even if the value's not there now, it's sort of like a Kickstarter) so they can demonstrate demand to publishers. Once they get XX,XXX people using the extension, they can make a convincing offer for integration with them (and of course, each site that integrates will boost the atri userbase as well).

Vraxx3• 10 years ago

Yeah.. That's what I was speculating from reading the page. IMO (but by no means am I an expert) I think it would be easier to convince a limited amount of content producers to offer up some value that would attract users than it would be to convince users to pay for something that they have no immediate use for. I guess my opinion is based on the assumption that minimally lost revenue for the content producers would be easier to absorb than for the average user to absorb a $10 service which is competing with other monthly services like Netflix, music subscriptions, and other individual website subscriptions. I mostly posit this because just recently on HN there was a service displayed to analyze your bank data to point out monthly subscriptions, so I assume it's a pain point consumers are already concerned with.

MisterBastahrd• 10 years ago

For something like Atri to be worth ANYTHING, it needs to be profit-competitive with ad networks. It won't be. It will never be. Because guys who make things like this think that they deserve to soak up a percentage of the 100% of what the publisher was already getting.

matt4077• 10 years ago

Very close to flattr, which unfortunately never really took off.

codycowan6• 10 years ago

In a way, yes. But what we found when building adieu.io was that people who were willing to support content creators want to have it done automatically, and Flattr required a considerable amount of work on the part of the donor. Atri does all the work for you, figuring out what content earned your attention, and then assigning funds appropriately.

Kinnard4• 10 years ago

I wonder how BitWall and ChangeTip are doing?

bgnm2000• 10 years ago

The problem here (as I see it), is consumers don't care about this problem - and thats who you need to buy in. If ad-block already works for them, why download + pay for something else (that doesn't block ads anyway)?

codycowan6• 10 years ago

You're absolutely right that consumers as a whole don't care about this problem. The Atri experiment isn't intended for all consumers - we're looking for people who really care about the problem.

It won't be long before there's a paywall and subscription for every site you want to read, because publishers on the whole aren't trying to innovate, they're just holding on to what they know.

Consumers aren't paying attention (as they shouldn't - this is insider baseball), but some of us don't like what we see happening, and those are the kind of people we're looking for with Atri

kincardine• 10 years ago

You're pitching it to potential customers entirely the wrong way.

Most consumers of web content (>99%) don't care about this in any way. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I'm only mildly interested in exploring alternatives to the ad-supported web. I almost never see ads anyway.

You should be selling this as something that will give access to paywall content. That's it. Because that's the only possible thing that there is even a sliver of a market for. Recruit content providers (the bigger, the better), figure out how much they are currently making off paywall revenue, possibly sell at a loss to build a user base (and demonstrate traction to more content providers and possible investors).

Once you have a user base and demonstrated traction, allow future content providers (of any size and viewership) to join your "platform" and earn payouts based on viewership. Obviously, still target large, valuable content providers directly.

As the number of content providers grows, your value proposition grows.

As it is, you're charging $10/month for a service that offers less value than what most people get for free through AdBlock.

The real economics experiment is if people will pay more money for less value. The utility of "fixing the web" doesn't even come close to spanning the value deficit.

Kinnard4• 10 years ago

I'd put "HOW DOES THE "EXPERIMENT" WORK?" higher up. I shouldn't have to scroll down to find out what atri is. I think an evocative explanatory one-liner should be above the fold.

Kinnard4• 10 years ago

You should accept bitcoin, that would at least get you a lot of attention and play in a niche community.

mankins4• 10 years ago

We take bitcoin for payout.

panic• 10 years ago

There's a lot more info on this page for some reason: http://www.fairtread.com/company/about/faq

grizzles• 10 years ago

Paymail.net is a competitor in this space. Our app doesn't need a chrome extension. We're all for shaking up the economics of the web. You can see a demo of the app here: signal.city/sigcity.mp4

One of the things I think publishers probably want with stuff like this is an open standard for letting people hop over paywalls.

We'd be happy to cooperate with Atri or Blendle or anyone else on this. I think if companies give up on the fantasy of owning the entire distribution channel there is still a ton of other ways to build products that add massive value in this market.

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

Sometimes I visit a website I don't want to give money to. I think it is doing a disservice to the world.

mankins4• 10 years ago

Atri allows you to "block" by domain name or @screen ... ultimately you're in control.

That said, we think it usually works itself out automatically, based on attention.

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

Let the paywalls come!

herbst• 10 years ago

As site owner, how do you plan to contact me and alocate to me some funds?

codycowan6• 10 years ago

Atri contacts you the same way it identifies you - via twitter. When possible, we'll email or reach out directly, but we use twitter to verify identities and know who to send the money to, so we use it to communicate as well. Once we get in contact, we can send money via ACH, paypal, bitcoin, etc

vincent_s2• 10 years ago

Flattr has been trying this since 2010. It got a lot of attention back then and is still used today.

https://flattr.com/

vincent_s2• 10 years ago

mankins4• 10 years ago

Also we've been working (stopping and starting) on this problem since 2009. Here's the Hacker News post for the original implementation, In-a-Moon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586798

There was a lot of learning that went on during that time. The biggest difference in implementation though was that In-a-Moon required sites to install JavaScript snippets, and we tracked at the site level. For Atri, we're bypassing sites and going straight to individuals by looking for Twitter handles.

Kinnard4• 10 years ago

You should partner/merge with pocket: https://getpocket.com

Show HN: Atri: an experiment in web economics

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