A monetization-and-payments question worth arguing: do micropayments and pay-per-view work for adult, or is subscription still king? the appeal of PPV and micropayments is that some customers will pay for a single scene or a small unlock who would never commit to a subscription, and it can capture value from casual buyers. the problems are that payment processing has fixed costs and friction that make tiny transactions inefficient, high-risk processing and chargebacks are worse per-dollar on small amounts, and subscriptions produce the predictable recurring revenue that PPV does not. so is pay-per-view actually viable for adult given the payment friction, where do micropayments make sense versus where does subscription win, and has anyone made PPV or micropayments work alongside or instead of subscription?
the payments problem with micropayments is that a lot of the per-transaction cost is fixed no matter how small the charge is. so a tiny payment loses a big chunk to fees while a monthly sub doesn’t. to make them work you either bundle them up into bigger amounts or use rails with lower fixed costs.
this is why subscription stays the core. the recurring revenue is predictable and it compounds as retention builds, where PPV is one-off and lumpy. build on the subscription base and bolt PPV on to catch the casual buyers, don’t try to swap the recurring model out for it.
and in high-risk it gets worse, because a chargeback costs you roughly the same fixed amount to deal with whether the charge was large or tiny. so a dispute on a small PPV charge is proportionally way more painful than one on a bigger subscription. between the fixed processing costs and that, small transactions get hit twice over. worth modelling before you lean on them, not advice.
There’s a crypto angle worth mentioning. The fixed card-processing costs and the chargebacks that make micropayments painful are pretty much the two things crypto and some of the alternative rails sidestep. On a payment method whose economics actually suit small amounts, micropayments start to make sense again.
micropayments and pay-per-view can work for adult but the processor and chargeback side is where they live or die, not the tech. lots of tiny transactions is lots of tiny dispute surface. not legal advice, but check what your processor thinks of the model before you build it, they often have opinions.