Can Microtransactions Work?

This post continues our series on how coins might unlock better ways for writers to get paid, and for readers to connect more meaningfully with the work they love.

In this post, we look at the challenge of coins at a post-level, and scratch the surface on the types of experimentation we may see moving forward.

For reference, here are the previous three posts:

Rethinking How Writers Get Paid – why open editions haven’t worked and what coins could unlock.
Why Will Readers Buy Coins? – a breakdown of motivations behind why readers support writing & creative work.
Are Coins Better at Enabling Patronage? – a valid critique on how coins, in their current form, have a hard time at supporting patronage.

Let’s dive in.

Most coin models today are centered around the smallest possible unit — usually a single post.

One of my concerns with post-level monetization is that it puts a lot of decision fatigue on the audience and patrons. Every post asks the reader to make a choice: do I support this and buy coins? How much? How should I think about price? Even after buying, there's decisions around whether to hold or sell.

This is in part why it's hard for any transactional model, especially microtransactions, to generate meaningful income for creative work over time. (Unless you crack the code on consistently going viral, but that's a whole separate issue.)

In contrast, paid subscriptions require a single purchase decision, and then inertia becomes quite powerful. The decision on whether to cancel is much less burdensome than whether to keep buying. For the writer/creator, it's nice to have a more predictable source of income, and it places some good accountability to show up and provide value over time.

The results are clear: paid subscriptions have unlocked significantly more money for creators than courses, tipping, or any type of one-off payment.

But paid subscriptions also have limitations. Paid subscriptions force writers into full-time publishing, a path that isn’t feasible or desirable for many. Further, there's pressure to use paywall or restrict access in some way, which usually limits readership/engagement and audience growth.

Perhaps most important, while potentially more lucrative, launching a paid subscription is a heavy, intimidating action, and definitely a vulnerable moment for writers. At Yem & Substack, we worked with several writers that hesitated, delayed, or gave up before turning on paid subscriptions (this is in part why we shipped Pledges).

On the reader side, subscription fatigue is real. People are more mindful now about stacking up recurring payments. They want to support writers, but not at the cost of managing another mini-portfolio of subscriptions.

Many such notes.

Further, there have been some compelling experiments around micro-transactions:

Through clever UX, Farcaster bundles the decision of a bunch of $1 tips into a single action.
Turning social gestures (that were previously not monetized) into microtransactions (e.g., @tipn turns likes on FC into a small USDC tip to the caster).

Bringing all the above together, there are compelling opportunities to improve our current models:

For full-time writers, how could you leverage coins to bring together loyal readers and writers in a much more compelling, differentiated way than paid subscriptions? (We may need post-level coins to tie into project- or writer-level coins?)
For writers publishing infrequently, how can we unlock post-level monetization without creating tons of decision fatigue? How can we finally crack the code on leveraging transactional monetization to radically increase the amount of funds flowing toward creative work? (Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from free-to-play gaming?)
For readers, how can we enable them to better connect and support creative work, writers/creators, and the community around it? How can we let them express who they are and find new friends that share their interests?

We haven’t found a reliable way for microtransactions to create meaningful income for creative work. But with new payment rails, perhaps this is a problem space we need to continue to explore, especially as we experiment more with coins.