I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for?
For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. If this is a song or a book then you probably want to at least have functionality like reviews, ratings and recommendations.
Whatever it is that you're selling probably forms part of some sort of established relationship -- I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter.
It also seems abuse prone. If we're supposed to share these paid links, that creates an incentive for scammers and trolls to create their own links and get people's money while delivering nothing. That means customers will lose confidence in the system, vendors will get screwed, and the company will be hit with chargebacks. This seems like a dangerous business model.
For the vendor side, this seems to be a redirector, so once the first person pays, they can share the URL they got redirected to. This doesn't seem like a good business plan.
EDIT: I just got one to load. This is all I get:
"This link costs $15.00 to access. You are trying to accessed a link through PaidLink.to, which requires payment to proceed. Fill out your payment details below."
What the heck am I even paying $15 for? I haven't a clue. Not only there's no preview, there's not even a description!
From dale_glass' comment below: This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible.
This explanation strikes me as being closest. There is a well known problem, which is that using the non-crypto payment systems for things is difficult, by disintermediating the payment provider from the product the paidlink guys can say they have clean hands.
VISA: "What are you selling?"
PL: "Links"
VISA: "Links to what? Prohibited items?"
PL: "Oh no, our TOS doesn't allow that, we tell our customers not do do that."
VISA: "Can you verify that they don't?"
PL: "Uh, well as far as our platform is concerned their just links, you know like groceries are just groceries, we don't get into the nitty gritty of what exactly they are."
The weird thing is, even if the PL guys are 100% aligned with not letting their customers use this for "bad things" their customers are going to try to find ways around any systems they put in place to check or regulate.
Watching the shenanigans people pulled to get around our efforts to prevent the misuse of Blekko (a search engine) was really educational in that regard.
Hmm, that wasn't what I was trying to communicate. The original question was "what problem is this solving?"
The ability to create a link that you click on, and it only gives you access to the results after you pay some money, has been implemented by many frameworks and commerce "stacks". Given that if you implement something that way with an off the shelf front end, you probably already have the capability to gateway the link with a payment ask. So that sets up the situation that we have a thing that just does one part of this kind of the thing, the pay when you click. Sort of "instant paywall for URIs" kind of thing. I think the question "Why would I use that?" or "What problem is this trying to solve?" implies that there is something about the well known solutions that prevents you from using them.
My guess was that you wouldn't use one of the existing solutions if you wanted to obfuscate the connection between the payment and the product. And it is just a guess, I have no investment in it being "the actual reason" or being right about my guess, just speculating here.
From your comment it suggests that you know of "desirable purposes" for just such a service. (which sounds like a problem solution right?) I would love to hear them. I am sure I'll learn something new and that will be awesome.
Bar with a cover charge puts a QR code on the front door. QR code leads you to a paid link, you pay for access, it shows a thumbs up, you show the bouncer, they let you in.
Let's the venue track how many people showed up, doesn't require a whole account situation, and also reduces the need for people to deal with card processing or cash at the door. Also let's you come and go without a wristband or stamp or something else to verify you already paid. Trivial to change the URL each day so you can't use a previous day. Or let it ride for weekend access, etc
> My guess was that you wouldn't use one of the existing solutions if you wanted to obfuscate the connection between the payment and the product. And it is just a guess, I have no investment in it being "the actual reason" or being right about my guess, just speculating here.
I think you're on to something here. Much like cryptocurrencies, I'm thinking that the most important uses here are at best questionably legitimate. Very few honest and above-board businesses have an interest in obfuscating what's being sold like this, but quite a few less legitimate ones do. Hit a URL to send money? Sounds great for money laundering, fraud, or extortion when you can move money around using convenient services and the veneer of legitimacy.
This is most likely targeted at the onlyfans kinda "internet sex worker" who sell zip archives or lewd images and videos.
This lets "content creator" circumvent the platform fees that come with selling over platforms like onlyfans.
So on one hand, I think this is still too little. Even when buying porn one would want to know exactly what it is they're paying for, and it would make more sense to do the payment at some place with a gallery, previews, etc.
But on the other hand, this might be a plausible deniability sort of thing. This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible.
It may not work forever but since next to nothing is being provided, this site is extremely cheap to setup and run, which means it won't take long to pay off.
Why should the payment piece show a preview or gallery or anything? When I buy something using paypal, that info isn't on PayPal - it's on the vendor site.
If customer has an established relationship with a seller already, seller can put this link on a website where products are presented. It's not polished, but it's fine.
I imagine the description / preview would be displayed with the link on the seller's site. No need for this service to open itself to the liability / vulnerability of displaying whatever the seller wants (illegal content / XSS / etc)
The gallery problem is easy to solve, the models put these Stripe links on their instagram or snapchat, and then fill up their pages with saucy photos to serve as the gallery.
1. You can still have reviews,
decription of content, etc etc. But it doesn't have to ce coupled to payment processing and distribution of the content.
This significantly lowers the bar for what is required to have a "webshop" like page.
For example: a Reddit post can have a product description, with payment links directly in the description, and reviews in the comments. How convenient is that?
2.
> What the heck am I paying for?
I assume you accessed their example link. In practice you would have clicked the link from a page describing what you are paying for.
I'm not affiliated with the product. Just found this a really cool and innovative idea.
But before you click the link, the page would explain what you're paying for, right?
Sure, at the exact moment you're entering your card details, it doesn't say what the product is.
However, it seems this could be changed quite trivially.
Just add an optional `description` field to the form used to generate the url, and let the description be displayed on the payment page.
You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. This is a minimal, clean service, does exactly what it says on the tin. IDK if it gets any uptake, and the UI doesn't quite look trustworthy enough for my taste, but the idea itself is pretty much perfect.
> You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases.
And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful.
On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset.
Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.
The artist can just have a webpage/blog/... where they would include such "paid links". That is, the audience still knows who they are and still builds some trust etc. But now they don't have to deal with setting up payment systems and account handling and billing and all that stuff. The value proposition of the OP service is to take care of all that and the artist can focus on their art instead. A per-click webshop, basically.
The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL. There's no verification of control like how say LetsEncrypt works. As a user I'm taken to a link with no verification of what I might be paying for. There's no preview of the content or even a declaration of who might own rights to the linked content. So I get a link that says I need to pay $10, what the fuck am I paying for?
Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.
> The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL.
Sure, but that was a problem that already existed. People already sell other people's artworks / pictures / etc.. Having to copy a file rather than a link is not a significant barrier.
> Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.
Presumably you're getting the link from somewhere reputable - the creator's own site, or their patreon/twitter/etc.. Sure, a scammer can create a fake profile to impersonate them - but again, that's something that already happens.
Since it's something that already happens and it's a known issue, it's pretty ridiculous a brand new project doesn't have some mechanism in place to prevent it. Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.
It's not helped that there's no preview of the content or creator's site branding to give some indication of an intentional connection between the creator and paid link.
> Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.
How does anything like that help though? The scammer can download the file and host it themselves and you're right back where you started, and that's always going to be the case.
You don't seem to have addressed your parent's point. A creator can post a paidlink link on their own site. You already know they're not a scammer because you're part of their happy fanbase. So you trust the links they post will do what they say.
Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.
It would be a plus if paidlink.to actually made a call to the link before accepting payment, and put up a warning / stopped the transaction if it didn't get a 200, "We're sorry but thingyouwanted.com/enticing.html isn't currrently available, please try again later."
It is "perfect" in the H L Mencken sense: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
One of the reasons that Bitcoin never took off for their stated purpose, payment, is that they had a similarly too-simple model of irreversible one-shot transfers. Anybody who has worked on an actual payment system can tell you that commerce is more complex than that.
I don't think that was the main issue. Bitcoin's main use as an actual currency was for things like drugs, where the legal system wouldn't be on your side anyway. So lack of chargebacks wasn't an issue anyway.
The bigger issues with BTC is the onboarding problem, limited capacity and rapidly fluctuating exchange rate.
I don't think I said it was the main issue. I agree that it had other problems too, including the ones you name.
But I think you're missing my point. The anonymous, one-shot nature of things made it most appealing to only one set of merchants and one set of customers: people doing crime, and who were therefore most tolerant of the risks.
The onboarding problem is also partly a consequence of this. Because a bitcoin transaction is irreversible, and exchange can't just take a credit card payment and give you bitcoin.
Bitcoin actually DID take off for payments. The issue is it became too popular and the people in charge of it didn't want to extend the block size limit.
I would use Bitcoin to play poker online because the alternative was using Western Union - which is much more of a hassle.
Because of this issue, online poker sites now use Litecoin, BSV, BCH, etc.
See: bovada.lv and other poker sites who still offer their services to US players
It actually did not. I agree that it's useful for certain niche quasi-legal cases, but it poses absolutely no competition to both traditional payment media like credit cards and debit cards or modern options like Venmo and MPesa. It was accepted for a brief period by something like 1% of top internet retailers but it's down to at best a handful.
That's because the network maxed out and they decided to fuck everyone by keeping the block size limit. These things don't happen in a vacuum, Bitcoin lost momentum in a critical period
The block size limit was possibly one factor, but I think there were bigger ones. For example, that it's inconvenient, deflationary, slow, harder to use, riskier, and has a double currency risk amplified by Bitcoin's high price volatility.
It has a positive annual money supply increase, so in a way it's inflationary. If you look at the prices IN Bitcoin of common goods they have also increased by like 2x recently, so it has had inflation recently.
I don't think you can claim it as deflationary overall, but yeah, volatile for sure, riskier as well. But it's not like that's the only currency you take a risk with. When I had a plane ticket refunded to me that was settled in Euros I ate a $50 difference due to conversion fees (which were not refunded to me by Paypal). So currency conversion is a risk anyway.
Slow is also relative, a wire would take several days to come in. If I write you a check it takes a few months to clear, even though the bank will lend you that money before it clears.
And I would claim using those methods of payment is more inconvenient. Credit cards are not exactly equivalents because those funds are lent to you by a bank and you pay them back later.
The equivalent for Bitcoin would be Lightning Network, but it's not really usable right now, if it will ever be. Your channel might be closed after 45 days of not using it and other surprises you will experience if you actually use it.
For smaller payments it's actually better to accept 0 conf BCH payments. It has a feature called double spend proofs where after 3 seconds (the time it takes to enter the mempool of all of the nodes) it can detect whether this transaction is being double-spent
You can still double-spend it, but you need a pool with a decent chunk of mining power of the whole network to help you. So for a $1,000,000 payment it would be worth hacking the network (since you are a big pool operator you need it to be worth your while), but not for a $3 coffee
This is pretty much what solution in search of a problem is. "Here, we made this thing that solves this problem someone could theoretically have." crickets
I still think there's value in a solution already existing if someone were to have that problem. As long as the site isn't hemmoraging money and/or needs users to survive, I don't see any reason the site couldn't just sit until someone needs it and/or grow slowly.
Also: as a user, I have no idea whom I am paying – is it the content creator, a scammer, an obscure man in the middle? What kind of transaction is this even? Is there any kind of resolution in case of conflict? It's just an actual payment block box with the promise of some content behind that link, which cannot be verified, and no trust at all.
(Edit) In terms of transparency, there isn't really much to find out about of who is behind this service. From the terms of service (hosted by another domain) we learn:
Neptune Technologies, United States (no further address details)
But there's an email address, and this is the site behind that domain: http://www.neptune.is (???)
> I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter.
The other issues with this site aside, affiliate programs don't require the user purchase the item that brought them to the site. There's a book I found myself recommending quite often, so I created an affiliate account at a retailer and started using that link when I recommended it online. I make about $100 each quarter off of site referrals, but almost no one buys the book -- instead they follow the link, click on something in a related items carousel and buy one of those items. Sometimes the time between click and purchase is pretty long (weeks or even months), but as long as the affiliate cook persists I get a percentage of the purchase price.
Hm, the way I use the browser most likely break affiliate programs. I have ClearURLs which remove affiliate links, and no cookies are stored unless I use a persistent container, so the site can't realistically remember if I ever clicked on one of those links (unless they use some fingerprinting thing, but that's unlikely to persist over weeks/months).
> For most things being sold you'll want an account attached.
Who is the subject? Because in my mind, for most things sold, as the buyer, you actually just want the product/service.
> I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5
Even if you never shopped in a retail store or dined in a restaurant and paid with your credit card (which seems somewhat unlikely) you are familiar with the concept of paying for something "random" as a one of. What's the conceptual hurdle?
I can imagine this is useful if you want to sell digital goods, say an ebook or, cough, pictures, but don't want to or can't set up a shop, or use a payment processor. It looks like a simple and convenient solution, they handle all the payments and send you a check in the end.
But oh boy this seems to be an invitation to money laundering. 3 2 1 and people are going to put up links, and buy them themselves with stolen credit cards.
> I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for?
It's quite possible this isn't determined yet. It might exactly be a solution searching for a problem, intentionally so.
The creator can implement the idea and launch it as a proof-of-concept, and see if anyone comes up with any good use cases for it. Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it's worth a shot at hitting it big in some unforeseen niche.
I think a lot of folks are mistaking this service for the front-end store.
If I create a perfectly reputable storefront with a "We use thirdparty paidlink.to for simple one-time purchases", it's quite easy to understand how you get customers to use this. It's no different than "We use stripe, I promise this popup window that asks for credit information is legit".
The difference is that, when I am shopping on InterestingContentForSaleSite.com, now I have TWO sketchy companeis to worry about, InterestingContentForSaleSite.com and paidlinkto.com
2 vendors is infinitely worse than 1, because they can blame each other for whatever goes wrong, creating an unbreakable circle of blame. If I try to chargeback paidlink.to, they can say "the link works, not our fault that the user and InterestingContentForSaleSite.com disagree on the value of the link".
At least PayPal has some reputation for consumer protection.
As an example, I buy sheet music PDFs from online stores. The stores often show the first part of a PDF and then you pay and get access to download the PDF.
It would be easy to imagine then replacing their system with this.
As a customer, I see no real difference. If I paid the store and didn't get the sheet music, of probably be stuck in credit card chargeback hell anyway.
As the store, there are probably some downsides. E.g. their own system can probably give me a unique link. That link may expire after I use it. With this system, there's nothing preventing me from tweeting the link if I wanted to.
I can see how it would be more mentally upsetting to have to pay the pirates bandwidth charge with your servers even if it's realistically the same thing
But also it's just another hurdle, and increases the acknowledgement that the person doing this is really pirating.
If I've paid for a piece of sheet music and my discord group says "hey, can we get a link to it?" I might not even think twice about just posting the link to the url. But if I actually have to upload it to some file sharing website and then post the link to that url, I've really made it clear to myself that I'm sharing something that shouldn't be shared.
Obviously they're the same thing, but I feel like adding barriers to sharing probably does reduce them somewhat.
Yes. But most people don’t like stealing. You can reshare anything you purchased online already today, this service doesn’t change anything in this respect.
Isn’t that true with most digital goods? If it’s a pdf someone can upload it elsewhere, same with images or songs. Piracy is only mitigated by convenience.
i assume you can make the final link single access or limited time access (expires 3 hours after first request, which presumably comes from you paying the link)
Cool idea, but it'd be great to add an explanation for choosing this over Stripe payment links (https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links). For Stripe, you can configure a redirect on success linking to your paid content so it should work for most use cases paidlink covers, no?
One is that I don't see PayPal support. Typing credit card info into any site not owned by a billion dollar company is a bit scary.
Secondly, and this is just a personal thing, I'm not sure it would support any of my ideas that might be a use case.
Do you have any plans to add the ability to handle membership or paid unique codes? As a lone dev, I would prefer to never touch anyone's financial info.
It would be cool if there was a service that would handle accounts and user data 100% so an app never had to touch it whatsoever.
It could provide Oauth2 SSO or something, but only if the user paid.
Or it could just act as a paid proxy that adds a secret API key plus the user's per-site anonymized ID and membership level.
It could even have an API fot the app to store files on the proxy, which the user would have full access to in their account portal.
That way an app developer never stores any user data at all, you could make a paid app just by making an open access unpaid app and hiding it behind the proxy.
Because they probably have bad interwebs security?
PayPal loses credit card information to hackers and there’s congressional investigations, dodgy website selling “links” gets hacked and it’s all about “buyer beware”.
So how can I trust that after paying for the link, I will get the content that was advertised? What happens if it just redirects me to google.com after that? How do I get my money back?
How do you ensure the paid links are safe to visit, and it won't redirect me to a malicious website?
If you trust the seller giving you the link, why would you doubt you'll get the content after paying?
Any link you click on a page could lead to a malicious site. But again, if you trust the seller, why would you think they would link you to a malicious site?
The problem here is that credit card companies do not like chargebacks in the least. A few too many and you'll see penalties; more than that and you lose your merchant account. Since there's no vetting here, this will be a magnet for both the clueless and scammers, meaning that I think it's not long for this world.
That's a fair point. I'll be curious how they handle that. Maybe you could get away with booting any user from the platform whose links generate too many chargebacks? But yeah, if paidlink.to is ineffective at preventing chargebacks, they'll get booted from stripe or whoever.
Imagine this catches on. Now I'm not sure why would it, but let's suppose we have a paid link to a book, or song, or download, or something else useful. If this link is ever shared anywhere public, there's an incentive for spammers and trolls to create their own links and try to get paid for nothing.
Probable end result: platforms start banning links to paidlink.to, because a lot of people get cheated out of their money.
this isn't saying that the product is wrong, it's saying we accept you and then offering a gentle gesture toward the center of the circle to commence your nerd beatdown. this is the initiation process.
also we're nerds, we ask questions and shit. it's fine. nobody means anything by it.
> Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store.
All the same comments as here, but I suppose they ultimately pivoted away from the link format. I suppose it's the perfect MVP though!
Those were different times. There’s no more room for scrappy products like that now. You can’t just post an explainer video with an email sign up and expect to become Dropbox.
Lean startups have been rejected in favor of “Do all the big work up front and then we’ll see if we like it”. It’s MVP fatigue.
Yes. But you can absolutely want to and actually do make your own file storage and syncing service with web interface and desktop integration and whatnot. In fact, nobody can stop you!
No. Gumroad hosts and sells digital products from a store.
This site...well, I can't even tell what it does aside from creating a paywall link that requires $X to bypass. And on that payment page there's no hint as to what you're buying.
And after you've gotten a new link...then what? Someone can just post that link everywhere? Or is there some kind of API that unlocks a link? Or...?
The service has very questionable usability. Gumroad has obvious utility. That's the difference.
I like this idea but wouldn't it be really easy to bypass? Once you pay for it, I imagine you get redirected and can just share the final URL destination for free.
My guess is that this is that this is for use-cases where that's not a big concern, or at least where that concern is outweighed by the easy of use.
Some examples off the top of my head:
- I'm selling something to exactly one person - I met someone on discord and I'll sell them a writeup on how to do X in language Y for $5, or I'm selling an art commission or something. I use this service to send them a link.
- I'm selling a somewhat niche infoproduct - the "Expert's guide to using jq to parse stripe data" or something. I expect most people to find it via my blog or newsletter where I talk about jq a lot. I don't think many people will pirate it and I use this paid link to distribute it.
- I'm selling something time-bound, like "Joe's guide to the 2022 world cup tournament for programmers," and I expect that I'll make whatever money I'm going to make on this guide pretty quickly before people get around to sharing the link for free.
- I'm selling something that's paid now, but that I plan to make free next week. "Click this link to buy early access to my yadayadayada!"
If you want to actively prevent sharing of the post-paywall content, Gumroad and plenty of other options already exist for that use-case.
Yeah, this is it exactly. There are definitely valid criticisms of this kind of tool, but people need to understand that there are already a lot of small, niche creators doing this kind of thing manually, e.g. by accepting PayPal and manually emailing Google Drive links to purchasers.
These people obviously don't care much about piracy (and probably don't need to, either) and don't seem interested in setting up another service like Gumroad/Patreon/OnlyFans, so being able to trivially automate their existing manual processes sounds pretty handy.
AFAIK state-of-the-art is requesting a signed URL with a timestamp from whatever system can verify you paid, then presenting that to the file server, which validates the signature and can also elect not to serve links with a too-old timestamp (limiting the damage a leaked URL can do).
This could work for affiliate programs if somehow it is possible to attach an affiliate id into the link. I once created such a product, where affiliates share their payment links and earn on each purchase.
Let’s be real, 99% of uses of this will be porn or malware masquerading as warez. You do not want to be fetching those URLs. Removes any plausible deniability.
Yeah, the argument I guess is most people won't go that far over small payments like $2-5 kind of like how news sites have a paywall you can bypass with archive.is
Can that be done for links to youtube and other platform sites?
It seems to do that securely requires proxying the resource but that’s not a great idea for platform content (It would likely break the site: You would need to rewrite all static and dynamic links to resources in order to host the platform under a different domain. You would also be responsible for bandwidth fees for relaying the content.) and redirecting would expose the platform’s open url to the resource.
Quick and blunt piece of advice: you need to redesign your website asap imo. It reminds me exactly of what a webpage looks like once the hosting has expired on it.
Very low trust for a service like yours.
FWIW the content on it is great. Very concise and to the point. It's just the look and feel I'm referring to.
I like this idea. I have no clue whether all the concerns here about ToS/legal/chargeback issues are valid, but I've thought a service like this should exist for a while now (whenever a relative asks me how to get started with a website for a simple product they want to sell).
However, I think you need to consider the overloading of the term "link" in your product. I know it's your name, but the example shows just how confusing the overloading of the term is to your users. Here's the breakdown of what my mind does as it scans the example link page:
- Ah, I'm at a site, "Paid Link dot To"
- "This link costs $15 to access" - OK, the seller page I just left is selling me something called a "link"
- "You are trying to accessed a link" - Skip over typo...OK, what's the link I tried to access? Like, what's even the thing I was trying to do on the last page?
- "Autofill your card with Link" - Huh? The link already has my card?
- "... or create a Link account" - Is link the name of the site I'm on, the site I came from, or the thing I'm buying? Why do I need/want an account from any of them? If any of them, I'm assuming the account I should want to create is with the seller with whom I've just decided to transact business.
- "Link logo Learn More" - Is this the link I need to click on to get the thing I want? Like a "Download Now" button on a link scam website like softpedia?
- "Access Link" - does this button take me to my Link account? A new website called Link? Ah, it's the content I've been after this whole time.
Certainly none of that is insurmountable for the user, but I just wanted to put it out there to give you my impression as someone who's brand new to your site.
What's new here? People have been selling things online for 30 years and selling digital things (ebooks, zines, videos) for just as long. This is basically a lower-tech Gumroad.
It comes from the drive for "monetisation" which is the most recent form of alchemy. Where the alchemists of old tried to turn base metals into gold these monitists try to turn everything into a bunch of changed bits in a file on some bank's computer system. Future history will tell whether monetists had better luck than the alchemists of old.
Crypto/payment startups are a sort of sudoku distracting VC's and software engineers, building an abstract world of endless technical complexity that passes for fulfilling work.
What's up with the hypocrites who either have a paid job or spend other's earnings for a living but insist that other people must not charge money for what they do, whatever that is?
How does this service prevent the actual (free) URL of the content from being visible / shared after a user pays? It seems like this would be difficult for some of the use cases presented (YouTube, Wordpress, etc) without managing the backend.
And how long does the buyer have access? How do they regain access to the link later?
I can tell by the amount of negativity and willful ignorance in the comments (why would I buy something by clicking on a link?!) that this service will be a big success.
That's exactly right. This service wouldn't be appropriate if you were trying to protect access to (for example) a full web application. It could be appropriate if you were selling (for example) access to an individual Zoom call or Google Doc and didn't have concerns about the link being shared afterwards.
you could do a caching proxy then sell access to the cache data, or make the person selling the link pay more % to keep the link cached longer, maybe like an IPFS pin or something
Anyone able to comment on what fees they’re charging and onboarding process?
So far for the onboarding process I have:
- signup by giving email and password; does not appear to be an email confirmation
- Thank you for registering, [insert-signup-email]. Next, we will have you register with our payment processor, Stripe, to collect payments for your link. (Link to “Continue to Stripe”)
- No idea.
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Edit: In searching for their pricing found a competitor that’s charging 0.5-1% of the transaction:
I created a similar service to this called Monetized.Link https://www.monetized.link/ ...We describe it as if you put together a tiny url and a paywall. From what I've seen there's a fair amount of interest in easily converting a link into money. Like Gumroad we've tried to make it as easy as possible, but more to be done.
Our team's background is in content so we initially were imagining this as a paywall for one-off content. You could put these monetized links inside a newsletter or twitter stream for instance and get an easy to create payment stream from your exiting users.
Over the product's development we have found support with the web3 community doing token gating (get the premium content if you own an NFT for instance).
This is an amazing product & given that gumroad has recently increased prices, the timing could not have been better. But information architecture of the landing page needs to change. I am left with the following questions after reading the content on the website.
1. How much margin does the platform charge?
2. Why can't I see a preview to what I am paying for?
3. How is it better than Gumroad, Stripe and others? Margins, ease of use etc, whatever your arguments are, I would love a detailed explanation.
How about an e-giftcard that is just a series of numbers and I can use to purchase anything online without filling out my credit info.
e.g. I went to somewhere and bought an e-giftcard of $1000, I use $100 of it to buy a licensed software and download it, I pay another $50 for an online subscription,etc.
So I do not need disclose my location and even my name when I do not need to, this is basically a simple bitcoin-style-debit-card-for-online-purchases.
does such thing exist? any online stores accept that? if not why not.
Privacy.com is designed exactly for this purpose. You can create as many service/purchase specific “debit cards” as you want and set limits. At time of purchase, you can use any name and address you want.
you can buy visa/mastercard gift cards at supermarkets/ the post office in australia. I am sure that there are similar things in other parts of the world
Oh nice, I didn't know about that. How does it work? You sign into a centralized wallet provider like paypal?
For most things my gut says deeplinking to a dapp is going to kill conversion. Use cases I'm thinking are selling audio samples or a sewing pattern... stuff people use gumroad for.
I wonder how the transaction costs compare at these price points ($1-20). Hoping that's gotten better. Last time I tried sending eth it only made sense for big transactions.
I know this probably won't be used too much but I'd love the concept of pay once links that become public once anybody has paid for them. It mirrors the way I think copyright should work.
Or pay sum that become public once the sum of payments from everybody reaches given value.
Seems like an interesting approach to doing things like online paid concerts. I don't know the space well, there may already be solutions for this in the market. Still, if this is successful, I imagine Twitch/Youtube etc. could quickly add this.
You can stack the items under "Trusted to monetize access to:" in one row, instead of a column. It'll reduce page height and make the page scroll-free. While you are at it, please reduce the size of those giant icons.
Their advertising states charging for links to YouTube, and other hosting sites, which I am willing to bet is a going to violate those sites terms of service. This is in addition to it being a bad idea in general.
This is absolutely nothing new. Adfly (adf.ly) was the popular version of this 10 years ago. Often modders would put their mediafire links behind adfly to get a little revenue.
If you want this functionality on a WordPress-powered site, which is one of the use cases stated, this is the industry standard way of doing this within the WP world:
It's a system for managing access to digital files on your WordPress site. You have to have your own payment processor and enter the API keys in the settings. The add-ons are mostly API connections to other services, i.e. Dropbox, aws or additional features. $500 is if you want everything and have lots of sites. Probably only a developer would want that. $100 is the basic set up.
This is an alternative to something like woocommerce if you only have digital merchandise, and makes restricting access to files easy
Christ, this is genius. Why doesn't this already exist? I can already think of a bunch of use cases.
You should definitely work on getting an API together. I could see people building services on top of this if there was a programmatic way to create paid links.
I think there was a link-shortener back in the day (when people used link-shorteners) that did this. The exact same way. I can't remember what happened to them... if they went out of business in a month because nobody used the service, or if it took two months.
So many problems here. Once I have the link, I can just re-share it and bypass the paywall. For starters.
But also, smaller stuff... the UX on the paywall is bad. It needs a preview... UX on the whole of the site is very bad. If you're going to charge, make sure it's a good experience. Not just something that looks like someone slapped it together in a basement in an hour. Get a real designer, a logo, a brand theme... It'll add trust.
The costs seem to not be great in terms of what the content creator gets to keep.
If I understand your objection, I don't think it is a problem. Wouldn't the preview et. al. be on the web page with the sales pitch? Only after the user was satisfied with what was being offered on that page, would the user request (and then pay) for the link.
scenario: You share a link with me, earn $0.50, i notice people willing to pay for it.
I then go on to create my own link once I have access to the site. I now earn the money.
I can also share the original link once I paid.
This is also ripe for abuse because it intentionally hides the original url, so it could be taking you to a scam site after a paywall. Or worse, if you always conceal the original url, the perfect way to get people to pay and put in their google passwords into another site.
For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. If this is a song or a book then you probably want to at least have functionality like reviews, ratings and recommendations.
Whatever it is that you're selling probably forms part of some sort of established relationship -- I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter.
It also seems abuse prone. If we're supposed to share these paid links, that creates an incentive for scammers and trolls to create their own links and get people's money while delivering nothing. That means customers will lose confidence in the system, vendors will get screwed, and the company will be hit with chargebacks. This seems like a dangerous business model.
For the vendor side, this seems to be a redirector, so once the first person pays, they can share the URL they got redirected to. This doesn't seem like a good business plan.
EDIT: I just got one to load. This is all I get:
"This link costs $15.00 to access. You are trying to accessed a link through PaidLink.to, which requires payment to proceed. Fill out your payment details below."
What the heck am I even paying $15 for? I haven't a clue. Not only there's no preview, there's not even a description!
Screenshot for anyone having issues: https://imgur.com/YIsypEN