Hard News by Russell Brown

Questions of transparency, paygrades, profits and superprofits are still open. And I know these, especially the later, may not apply to Public Address. In a more perfect world it would be nice to see them handled in a public funding model.

Made a one-off contribution, and was surprised that my credit card number was stored. There is no option to clear the credit card number. Nor is there any "contact us" information or "home" button on the accounts page.

Made a one-off contribution, and was surprised that my credit card number was stored. There is no option to clear the credit card number. Nor is there any “contact us” information or “home” button on the accounts page.

Noted.

Questions of transparency, paygrades, profits and superprofits are still open. And I know these, especially the later, may not apply to Public Address.

As I said, I'll publish the monthly income. Questions about profits would be a wonderful problem to have, but if we got to $2000 income a month I'd be delighted. The trickier problem for me is how to share revenue within Public Address. Given the likely cost of a site revamp (even at the very kind rates the wonderful people at CactusLab charge me), I can't commit to paying per post. But I think having a budget to provide a modest return for special projects is do-able.

In a more perfect world it would be nice to see them handled in a public funding model.

Yeah, but we can't sit around waiting for that. NZ On Air's budget has been frozen for nine years, remember. And news media commissioning budgets seem to be slashed every few months. If this can provide some income for me to do real journalism on the site, that'd be great.

Any chance of a weekly contribution? (I get paid weekly so would find that easier but suspect there could be additional overhead costs to set up all options.)

OK I have found where to log in on the PressPatron website, but where/how the heck do I create a subscriber account?

Minor issue: only the Info For portion of the Info For Readers link in the footer is linked.

... I suppose I should really use their contact form to tell them that directly.

Er, why would a private blogger feel obliged to produce reports to the public on their profits, or even their revenue, full stop.

Or are you referring to "back end" features that will make the product more useful from an accounting perspective, particularly for websites with multiple authors and/or which is owned by a business?

Signed up for a monthly. The biggest issue that has prevented me in the past is not knowing what is appropriate. I get that you want to leave that to individuals, but that in itself can become a mental block.

In this new world, I really don’t know how to $value$ my consumption of websites like Public Address (when everything just seems to be free). This is the first time I’ve pulled the trigger to contribute to one so that is at least some indication of the appreciation I have for your efforts!

Also, when it asked me to enter a password to create an account, it just hung from that point and never actually confirmed that an account has been created. That was on an iPad.

Cheers

Delighted to be able to chip in a wee regular amount last week. Did notice a couple of minor UX issues that seem simple to address as the service evolves.

I like the idea of Russell and others having some funding available if a post/series requires travel, phone calls, buying an interviewee a coffee, that sort of thing. Even if it's voluntary it shouldn't *cost* major contributors to enrich our knowledge.

Quick question Russell - I presume you are turning off our Paypal payments?

when it asked me to enter a password to create an account, it just hung from that point and never actually confirmed that an account has been created. That was on an iPad.

Hey Sam, we recently fixed a bug that was preventing some users from creating an account if they were using the Safari browser or iOS. These changes will be going live sometime on Friday.

In the meantime, you can use the following link to activate your account:
http://dashboard.presspatron.com/users/password/new?activate=true

This link is also accessible within your email receipt. (The URL is contained within the sentence “If you haven’t activated your account yet, you can do so here.”).

I look forward to any other thoughts or feedback you might have! We can be contacted here: www.presspatron.com/contact

Made a one-off contribution, and was surprised that my credit card number was stored. There is no option to clear the credit card number. Nor is there any “contact us” information or “home” button on the accounts page.

Hey Brent & Russell, we’re working on features to make our platform more transparent while providing greater autonomy to supporters. Specifically, we’re exploring the best way to add a ‘remove default credit card’ feature. In the meantime, we can remove default cards manually upon request via https://www.presspatron.com/contact

Please note that we never store or collect any credit card information ourselves. All of this is taken care of by our online payment processor (stripe.com), who also provides credit card processing for companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Xero, Kickstarter, Shopify and others. They are a global leader in this space.

All credit card data is encrypted at all stages of processing, and Stripe maintains strict administrative, technical, and physical procedures to protect your data. More info about their security policies can be viewed here https://stripe.com/docs/security/stripe

We’ll also be working on features to make the homepage and ‘contact us’ functionality more prominent and accessible from within the Supporter Dashboard accounts page. In the meantime, these features are available at https://www.presspatron.com

Sorry for any inconvenience during the early stages of our launch. We really appreciate the feedback, and feel pretty excited about all of the support that people are showing Russell and Public Address!

Quick question Russell – I presume you are turning off our Paypal payments?

Hi John, it is my understanding that PayPal supporters will need to login into their PayPal account to cancel their contributions. Russell will be able to confirm this, though. He might have plans to manually check whether contributors are contributing via PressPatron, and then cancel PayPal the payments himself?

Apologies for the inconvenience of transitioning from the old system! Once the transition has been finalised, we're confident that PressPatron will make the process of contributing much easier than PayPal. Cheers :)

More info about their security policies can be viewed here

Thanks Alex. Maybe good to add that link from your site somewhere? And my thanks for what you and your colleagues have done so far. Important for the future of meaningful media in NZ.

I have no idea whether I have successfully subscribed to the PA updates list or not. The checkbox in my presspatron account is ticked, but when I click on the link in the "confirming your subscription" email I get the error "publicaddress.nethttp’s server DNS address could not be found."

Heh, thanks. Looks like it didn't work. I had assumed it did because I received the email. Will use the link.

Another bit of feedback re Safari on iPad. When I clicked to support, it opened up a box in the middle of the page which asked me to enter my credit card details. It didn't navigate to a new page and didn't tell me in any way that the connection was secure. I paused, almost backed out and then just took it on faith that it surely would be! I could see the background page had a padlock but nothing to confirm that the box was from the same secure domain.

Cheers

Hey everyone, thanks for your feedback! To try and streamline this process, it would be great if everyone could please use our contact form to submit their feedback via email. This will help me keep track of everything more easily, in one place. Here’s a link :)

https://www.presspatron.com/contact.html

In response to the comments since my last post:

In reply to: Sacha

Thanks Alex. Maybe good to add that link from your site somewhere? And my thanks for what you and your colleagues have done so far. Important for the future of meaningful media in NZ.

Thanks Sacha! We’ve included details about the Stripe payment gateway within our Terms, Privacy Policy, and our FAQ section. I’ll do some further thinking about ways to make this information more prominent to supporters. We’ll probably add an ‘info’ icon to the sign-up process, which provides more info about our payment system when a reader hovers their mouse over the icon.

In reply to: Trevor Nicholls

I have no idea whether I have successfully subscribed to the PA updates list or not. The checkbox in my presspatron account is ticked, but when I click on the link in the “confirming your subscription” email I get the error “publicaddress.nethttp’s server DNS address could not be found."

Hi Trevor, thanks for the feedback. Here’s an overview of what happens when you subscribe to PA updates while using PressPatron:

When you tick the option to “Subscribe to Public Address’s email newsletter”, this provides Russell with your name and email address within a CSV spreadsheet (with your contribution details removed). Russell can then use these details to add you to his newsletter database for PressPatron supporters. (Note: we're planning a more streamlined system for the future!). Russell will be the one who decides the frequency of these newsletter updates, and the content they include.

In regards to your other comment, I haven’t been able to recreate the DNS error that you experienced. Can you please use the “contact” link (above) to email me more details about this issue? If possible, it would be great to have details about your operating system and browser, as well as screenshots showing the error message.

In reply to: Sam M

Another bit of feedback re Safari on iPad. When I clicked to support, it opened up a box in the middle of the page which asked me to enter my credit card details. It didn’t navigate to a new page and didn’t tell me in any way that the connection was secure. I paused, almost backed out and then just took it on faith that it surely would be! I could see the background page had a padlock but nothing to confirm that the box was from the same secure domain.

Hi Sam, thanks for the extra feedback.

Just to confirm, both Russell’s website and the PressPatron payment system are secured by SSL security certificates which encrypt all data transmitted. On the “Make payment” page of the sign-up process, we have a message that confirms our SSL status via the following message: “Secure payment AES 256-bit SSL encryption” (which is next to a padlock symbol).

This sign-up page also contains a link to our Terms, which provide further details about our security and encryption processes. I’ll have a think about ways we could improve the visibility of our security procedures to readers. Feel free to email if you have any ideas! (Contact link is above).

Er, why would a private blogger feel obliged to produce reports to the public on their profits, or even their revenue, full stop.

I think revenue as opposed to profit is the more apt lens ... as for the reporting, there probably an optimism bias whereby readers think the site's journalistic efforts are showered in commercial returns when, I suspect, the opposite is more the case. When alerted to this readers may feel the urge for some reciprocity, and make a donation. Behavioral economics 101.

there probably an optimism bias whereby readers think the site’s journalistic efforts are showered in commercial returns when, I suspect, the opposite is more the case.

Yeah – over the years some people have always thought I've been coining it from display advertising and I have to explain that the reality is very much otherwise.