Higher motivation and lower commitment lead to higher signup and conversion rates.

The decision to initially engage involves lowering commitment and increasing motivation (bokardo).

People who are not sufficiently motivated will exit immediately after being asked to pay. Premature limits both reduce motivation and immensely increase commitment at the same time. If commitment rises above motivation, you get an exit.

Extremely high perceived value, plus immediacy, plus high motivation, plus low commitment yields higher conversion rates.

How can we measure this? We could measure the level of impact a page has on the avg pageviews for those who see it. We can also identify pages where commitment is high, reduce the commitment, and measure the a/b outcome. Further, we can identify pages where motivation is possibly low, and do the same.

Tactics

Optimally, in the first five minutes and perhaps even beyond, users should be clicking every 1-7 seconds or so. Establishing a click rhythm decreases commitment. It’s also easy to change text from things like “Enter your personal information and signup” to the lower commitment “Try it”.

Buying decisions could be introduced by the machine at appropriate times, if users’ motivation could be measured. In the absence of this, it makes sense to introduce decisions in places where there is the most immediate, rather than long term, value. For example, it makes more sense to introduce a buying decision where the users life, ego, or status will be immediately improved.

Immediately prior to introducing the decision, it’s worthwhile to increase motivation as much as possible.

Subscriptions

For these reasons, I think that subscription based models will have a much harder time monetizing than micro-payment models. The commitment involved in signing up for a subscription is higher than that involved in buying something once.

For subscriptions, you are making a much more long-term value proposition, in that you are telling your customer that they will continue to want to use our app for quite a while. This massively increases commitment, and skews the incentives for the designer.

Since immediate benefits, high motivation, and low commitment work best, subscription-based companies are incentivized to craft buying decisions that offer immediate, aspirin/crayon value. Unfortunately, this means that the actual usefulness of the app will be easy to ignore, given that what’s driving customer buying decisions is the perception of immediate value points. People tend to not cancel subscriptions immediately, so one the customer is acquired, they’re all too easy to forget.

Micro payments

Micro payments are probably going to take over from subscriptions.

Imagine if there were 10 restaurants, and 9 of them each offered a plan where I could eat there twice a month for $20 / month, and 1 restaurant offered a meal at $10/meal. The subscription based restaurant has to not only convince customers that it has good food, but it has to convince them to commit to them for at least two nights of the month.

The $10/meal restaurant, on the other hand, offers the same price per meal, but no lock-in. They only have to convince customers that their food is good. The buying decision is more immediate, and there is less of a commitment.

This is obvious in the real world, but not on the internet for some reason. Subscriptions are now the least creative, and the least interesting way to monetize.