DoubleRecall (YC S11) Nabs $1.6 Million For Alternative To Paywalls
62 points by transburgh 13 years ago | 21 comments- jrkelly 13 years agoForcing people to read ads -- check off another world-problem solved :p This stuff bums me out. Guessing this a solid group of engineers; could be working on something that matters instead.
- tadruj 13 years agoI'd rephrase this as: Enabling people to skip the paywall by doing a minimal thing which is a little more than a click.
Behavior design matters and is a great challenge for engineers.
- asr 13 years agoIf your phrasing were where this is going I'd have no issues with it, but I think (if this is successful) it's going to be much worse:
"The idea is to create experiences that ... are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether."
The most likely use case is to make pop-over ads 100x more annoying, not to complement a paywall. I would hope user revolts would kill this, but I'm not optimistic...
- tadruj 13 years agoNot everything is a conspiracy theory. As a start-up we wanted to solve only one problem: giving users alternative for paying for the quality content. Where this leads us we'll see. As a species we already made a mistake thousand years ago when starting to mass produce the food. But today we're here and it's not that bad.
- tadruj 13 years ago
- eli_gottlieb 13 years agoCorrection: behavior design matters and is a great challenge for our established banking system, which only wants to deal in Big Money (much like how many start-ups now only want to deal in Big Data).
- asr 13 years ago
- zaidf 13 years agocould be working on something that matters instead
Sorry, but what does this even mean? You may it seem like there is a universally accepted definition of the word "matters" to which these folks are not living up to.
- aresant 13 years agoI never get this attitude.
Without mechanisms for publishers to monetize visitors, publisher quality deteriorates or becomes untenable for independents.
In a world where nobody wants to pay for content, this is a minimally disruptive, novel way to pass revenue directly into the hands of publishers that are working hard to create content.
- Retric 13 years agoI would much rather pay a few cents than watch an Ad on Hulu. It got so bad I simply stopped watching Hulu all together. Now yet another start up has tacked the hard monetization problem by crating even more annoying advertizing. And you don't see anything wrong with this picture?
PS: Advertizing is basically a zero sum game. It's a multi billion dollar industry, but most people spend most of what they make and better advertizing does not change that fact.
- blake8086 13 years agoA lot of people "would rather pay a few cents than...", but who "would rather create an account, verify their email address, get out their credit card, enter their payment information, and confirm a $0.05 payment than..."?
Maybe the best form of protest would be to come up with a one-click way to pay a few cents for something. As far as I know, Flattr is about the only thing in that space.
- blake8086 13 years ago
- fauigerzigerk 13 years agoI agree that there is a problem to solve. But I'm not sure if this approach does anything other than shift some advertising money around. Does it really change the equation or the size of the pie? I don't think so. Whether or not it's minimally disruptive depends on how it is used - like all advertising.
It's perfectly OK for a startup to do advertising stuff, but I agree with jrkelly that this is not what the world needs engineers for. It's just a way to make some money and I wish them luck with that.
- Retric 13 years ago
- tadruj 13 years ago
- d5tryr 13 years agoInteresting the amount of value that is attributed to a user typing a slogan.
- tadruj 13 years agoInception is currently very underpriced behavior goal.
We do our best to measure it and wake-up the brands. They're quite entertained by other flashy & wavy stuff on the screen at this time.
- tadruj 13 years ago
- avree 13 years agoGoogle's currently doing a similar thing with their new Customer Insights—on sites like ZAGAT.com, instead of seeing a paywall, the user is asked to answer a survey question.
- OJKoukaz 13 years agoSolveMedia.com has been doing this for sometime now. What's different here?
- tadruj 13 years agoWith DoubleRecall you don't prove that you are a human, but you prove that you've read the message so you get something in return = quality content.
- OJKoukaz 13 years agoYes, I'm getting something in return, I get to take the desired action on the publisher's site. That's the case with any CAPTCHA. With the old CAPTCHA, I was at least helping convert printed books to digital formats. How is Double Recall different from Solve Media? It's obviously the same business model.
- tadruj 13 years agoSolveMedia is a CAPTCHA system which verifies that you're a human, DoubleRecall is not a CAPTCHA system and it only verifies you read the advertisers message. It's much easier to decypher than CAPTCHA, so more straightforward.
We did more than 100 of design iterations on millions of people to come to the current simplistic design.
- tadruj 13 years agoWith re-typing you are helping the publishers to provide you with quality content that you otherwise couldn't get.
- tadruj 13 years ago
- OJKoukaz 13 years ago
- tadruj 13 years ago
- starfox 13 years agoCongrats guys! There is easily millions of dollars worth of value in this idea, even if it's not for everyone.
- Swizec 13 years agoCongratz guys!
If you ever need someone taking up room at your place again, you know where to find me.
- CWIZO 13 years agoSwizec should mention that he was an intern at DoubleRecall last summer.
- CWIZO 13 years ago