The PayDelete Plugin for WordPress has been launched on a small fleet of websites. Those websites all have one thing in common, they all have content that they are better off without if the price is right. When most people ask a website to remove a post they usually don’t care what removing content costs a website. They don’t care if the website will lose considerable advertising revenue long term due to traffic loss, they don’t care if the website has to hire employees just to respond to their complaints, and they certainly don’t care if the webmaster would rather be doing something else.
Unfortunately for webmasters it is rarely cost effective to moderate content. There are some exceptions like sites generating a lot of advertising revenue if advertisers threaten to pull their ads or subscription services afraid of losing subscribers due to a decline in content quality, but other than that moderation is rarely beneficial to the website. Usually moderation just wastes time and money making a website less valuable, but what if you can monetize moderation? That is where PayDelete comes in.
Moderation monetization is not new or uncommon, but the quick and efficient solution offered by PayDelete is. Usually moderation monetization requires people to pay hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars to get posts about themselves removed. They are quick to falsely accuse the websites involved of extortion despite the fact that the websites have every right not to remove content and nobody is ever truly forced to pay a removal fee. They may choose to do so under unpleasant circumstances, but they ultimately make a voluntary choice none the less. The prices charged by pay to remove businesses are the usual focus of their anger. It isn’t necessarily just that they had to pay a fee, but that the fee was too high. Sometimes they are higher than necessary due to the webmasters being greedy, but even when they are not greedy the fees still must be high enough to cover wages, lost revenues, and opportunity costs associated with the providing the service.
In the United States minimum wage is just over $15,000 per year. If a website can find someone willing to do moderation work for that much they are lucky, but that still requires they find enough people willing to pay for removals to cover that. That is just chunk change for tech giants like Facebook, but it can make all the difference between life and death for small websites. Often small websites cannot afford to hire a moderator and the webmaster himself must do all the moderation work. In that case he must consider how much money he might lose from other sources due to lack of content and opportunity costs associated with moderating content when he could be doing better things. That is why most sites that charge removal fees charge so much, but what if they no longer had to pay anyone to moderate content? If that were the case then the only factors to consider when setting removal prices would be the impact less content has on revenue and what consumers are willing to pay. This is where PayDelete comes in. We offer an automated solution that eliminates labor and opportunity costs.