I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it.
It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.
Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.
Problems compounding this effect?
1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"
2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.
3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.
I tend to agree with this. But most importantly, many sites go at this the wrong way by putting content behind a paywall. Substack and Bandcamp are good examples of ways to pay and get paid for content. If you want to people to pay for content online, incentivize.
It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.
Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.
Problems compounding this effect?
1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"
2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.
3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.