Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies.
Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold.
A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.
For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead.
Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".
Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that?
Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it.
Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.
You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content.
One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off.
In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only.
True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.
That's because magazines are heavily advertiser-supported, the very thing you're trying to not have online.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get.
And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.
That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media).
Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.
Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:
"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."
Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.
[1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...
No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself.
Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this:
That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US.
But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.
But(from an article in business insider): "It may well be that Blendle has been so successful in the Netherlands because the publications that have signed up have been Dutch language, rather than English, in which articles are often replicated hundreds of times over. But Klöpping[the founder] believes the Netherlands is no different than any other country"
I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
On top of that, if you want to replicate content in hebrew, you're probably an Israeli, you have more lucrative jobs. But many poor people in the third world do know english pretty well, and the english market is bigger, so there are enough people willing to do that job,
So the situation is very different. But sure it would be interesting to see how the u.s. expansion goes.
EDIT: one thing though - i see their most popular piece is an in depth analysis of how will middle east will look in 2035. Seems like something that might not fit ad-based content(it's too long, making it both hard to copy well, and not fit for ads, and also credibility of the author matters). Now i really want to see what kind of content this produces in english.
Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.
Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?
Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc.
Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.
But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
Just that? "People", "Cosmo", "Men's Health", all the most succesful print titles are hardly better than BS clickbait...
Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button.
That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?
It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution
What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.
(And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)