I think their business model is like a gym - they need people making an effort to cancel, not to renew... Crypto works for one-time payments, but it sucks for recurring transactions. Too much hassle to pay every month, people would just give up.
It's a good point but worth noting that the Mullvad VPN (which, like porn, has a strong driver for privacy) recently got rid of susbscription payments altogther.
Their reasoning was that you can't handle recurring payments without holding a lot of personal data.
Perhaps porn sites that want to offer inter-species furry porn should bite the bullet and only accept one-off payments, just so they can make effective use of crypto.
Recurring payments should be initiated on the client side (or at your bank) anyways... Not initiated by the business you are buying from... That's a good way to get screwed.
With micropayments, the business model becomes (quite literally) pay-per-view.
> it sucks for recurring transactions.
The UX is bad at the moment, but with crypto there is this idea of "streaming payments", which work very well as a substitute for subscriptions. Basically, you make only one initial transaction to set up the "subscription" with a locked deposit. On every block (or on every X seconds if you are doing off-chain), a small transfer is made. You only pay gas if you need to "top-up" the balance or when you want to close the stream.
I can sign 12 transactions with my private key now and automate sending them out every month. If I don't want to be responsible for sending the transactions, a smart contract can do it for me. This can be abstracted away from the user and made as intuitive as any other payment flow.
There might be a smart contract that acts as a hot wallet where you fund once to authorize, and every month the contract owner/operator can withdraw X amount of Ether from your quota. They pay for the gas but if L2 is used and transactions are batched, that's negligible.
If your quota has insufficient Ether or you've deauthorized the contract, your "subscription" will be cancelled automatically.
I think recurring payments are a pretty good use case for smart contracts, you load up a wallet defined in the contract with some cash, similar to a prepaid debit card, then authorize scheduled payments specifying a recipient, a frequency, and an amount.
It’s not ideal for that type of derelict subscription business model (e.g. the gym), but neither are prepaid debit cards or virtual cards with predetermined spending limits, and they probably already contend with those.
That's a good point. I think other business models are possible, though, if less lucrative. One example is one-time payments to buy videos, or to tip an artist that you for some reason feel like tipping.
