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?
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.