Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.

But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.

Certainly.

> and how you use it

Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.

There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.

For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.

Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.

Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.

What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.

This is flatly false. CPM models are alive and well. You don't need to look any further than AdSense for proof of that.

Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.

But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.

1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.

2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.

This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.

I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...

Recall back in the early 80s - the idea was to pay for TV so you wouldnt have ads...

We hate content creators?

Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.

So why on earth are you going to those sites?

> We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry?

That's literally what this is.

I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other.

That's literally what this is.

No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us like to use ad blocking mechanisms.

Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the talk from adblock users about how they'd just love to micropay for content directly has been replaced with all manner of excuses.

And by the way, we're paying for content. It's called books, magazines, newspapers, kindle shorts, you name it. Half of the original content out there comes from established news agencies, and most of them don't even run AdSense.

And please, spare me with this false dilemma, we're either bombarded with ads or the web will cease to exist. I've been hearing that for more than a decade. Advertising evolves. Even if 80% of users adopted ad blocking technologies advertising would find a venue to reach users. It's doing that for decades.

If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.

So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.

(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)

Is it, though? Perhaps a closer inspection of the payment model is in order. I found this:

> You’ll pay the market price for each ad space that shows a thank you message or pixel pattern. This price can vary a lot. The exact price is determined at the time of the Google ad auction.

Further details are here:

https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?vid=1-...

Essentially, you are bidding against a website's advertisers and paying the going rate for that ad slot. Not all content is equally valuable to advertisers. Consider the high cost for cancer targeted advertising compared to targeting an audience for, say, some form of generic cola beverage. The page with the cancer advertisement will receive a higher portion of your Contribute budget than the page with the cola advertisement (if it's replaced at all.. Google may decide they get more money with the cancer-related ad than with your Contribute bid).

So, it doesn't seem to distribute your money in proportion to your level of visits. If you visit a single site more frequently than others, then sure, that site may get a larger number of bites at your budget, but if the value of that space is very low then the total sum you provide to this content creator could be less than what you give to the owner of the click-bait link you followed once and forgot about.

I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.

If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.

What do you think the possible consequences of this are? Will that be a net positive or a net negative for content quality on the web?

If someone is proposing a solution for or discussing a problem that affects the entire Internet, it's important to realize that there are several parties who think differently, and in fact only a very small minority feel the same way you or me or the majority of HN does about things.

I'm not proposing a solution, hell I wouldn't even consider that I know better than Google what should be done. I'm just stating a problem. Profiling is annoying. And as a user I don't think it works that well. When I visit a site for science fiction I'd prefer watching relative ads, not an ad about a pair of shoes I searched a week ago.

We certainly are a minority but an influencing one.

As a nerdy guy, I'd much rather see video game ads than tampon ads. I get the ideological argument against targeted advertising, but the practical arguments for it are pretty compelling, too.

There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.

So because there are bad content creators, that means the good ones should not get paid?

I'm not quite following your logic.

But I'd go a step further than "BuzzFeed". Any of the "[something] via [somesite]" web sites are in the offending category. They literally make money from the content of others by (sometimes) rewording the original title and giving it a slightly more clickbait title so that their 'via' "articles" look more inviting. Often, this is a chain of evil. I do not want to support that chain, even if it is just for the one visit. I would like to support the original writer, but none of the reworders. Now, the sad part is, there is only a very small list of real content creators.

Ads is the old print way of getting paid.

Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.

Why are you so focused on ads when it 1. Doesn't make sense if users can just block it and 2. There are better options for me to pay content creators?

If you aren't interested in my 'preference' you lose out. The customer is just trying to have a normal relationship here... Abusive forced ads are not normal... IMHO.

> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.

Actually, subscriptions + trial periods was also a print way of getting paid. For much the same reasons as it doesn't work for most mass content on the web, it didn't work well as the primary source of income for mass print publications (though there were publications for which it replaced ads, for the most part, it just served to provide a paid circulation number which demonstrated to advertisers the size of the audience that was dedicated enough to a publication that they were willing to pay something for it, so it was a proxy measure for effective ad reach.)

You realize that this has been tried and widely deemed a failure, right? Paywalls are a problem because they actively drive your audience away to next-best alternatives.

So basically, you are just paying for the goods you use, you set your price and this is beneficial to companies because the marginal cost of serving a webpage is almost nothing so if you opt to pay anything it is profit.

Unfortunately, taking time to pay for something has more friction than just not paying for it as well as being cheaper.