I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work; the publisher integrates Google's contributor code in such a way that if you pay them, they don't show you any ads, no need to worry about the ad ecosystem.
> People want to maintain their privacy
I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US.
> It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser
Brave is really killing it with their user numbers, right?
No, I understand perfectly well how it works. If you pay Google, then Google doesn't show you ads and it gives the Content Creator a cut.
Google is part of the Ad ecosystem. Contributor not only excludes other Ad providers from participating, it also requires the Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem. And Google is still gathering metadata about you.
So who benefits? Google has compelled Content Creators to join it's Ad Network, Google has compelled you to disable your Ad Blocker under the guise of compensating Content Creators, Google gets paid whether it serves an ad or not, and Google gets to track you in ways it couldn't with your Ad Blocker up.
You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I'm sure it will work just fine with whatever Google Ships in Chrome though.
It's a different market to chase money from people that actually read their content instead of companies who want to sell their products, and outside of a few large paywalled sites like Bloomberg or WSJ, many attempts to charge for content online have failed - but the conundrum is they don't fail for lack of readers, just lack of readers willing to pay.
As far as privacy issues, compared to 2 billion active chrome installs[1], the 611 million people that use ad-blockers[2] is only 30%, assuming they're all using Chrome (which I doubt), and even then, privacy tracking blocklists aren't turned on by default, so the percentage of Internet users that know about the privacy aspect, and care deeply enough about it to do something, is surely smaller still.
Google, then, is one of few parties with enough clout to create such a system and possibly prevail. Content creators have already explored a relationship with Google, many end-users already have logins for Gmail, and many have already paid Google directly in some fashion (Google Play store on Android).
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-... [2] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
I don't think there has been any indication of this one way or another, and I'd be sort of surprised if this is the tack they're taking.
We'll see how it turns out, but it doesn't sound (to me) like they are compelling companies to show Google ads, merely providing the paywall technology.
> You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker.
I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, so I have no idea where you're getting this idea from.
It is not an either or situation. Google wants to track you and get paid for doing so. They don't care if the money comes from you or advertisers. They do however care if they can't track you.
A contribution system could be setup completely independent of the ad serving system. That however has not been the case. With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all.
"This time is different", or at least I think this time it will be different, since the whole point is to reach users who have ad blockers enabled, I guess we'll see how it goes.
> I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US.
That's like saying, "I will start believing people don't want viruses when they stop opening attachments, start carefully examining every URL before clicking on it, and verify MD5 checksums before installing any downloads.
We don't blame the spread of computer viruses on untechnical users. The creators of operating systems and browsers have the vantage point and the expertise, and are in the best position to do the right thing. But of course profits always come first. The same goes with privacy.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-t...
The study you linked to asked people "whether they would take discounts in exchange for allowing their supermarket to collect information about their grocery purchases" and found 43% of people said yes, but I believe that the conclusion you would draw if you asked people "would they pay more to stop their supermarket from collecting information about their grocery purchases", you would get different data.
In the same way that people dislike price discrimination more when it is framed as raising prices on some people rather than giving some people discounts.
And I'm sure this behavior will change further when you actually ask people for money and not just whether they would hypothetically pay money.
For regular people, if Brave somehow started eating meaningful chunks of Google's market share they'd just integrate contributor into Chrome and get roughly the same effect.
I'm of the opinion that the best we could hope for is strong silo protections and the ability to request deletion of our gathered personal information for individual companies, and even that's a stretch. Also, even if we got that, good luck enforcing it on remote entities.
*Most relevant demographics
This always saddens and upsets me that "movie studio accounting" even exists in the first place. I would be loathe to support a model that could devolve to this.
The acceptance of half-assed worse-is-better partial solutions has doomed us all to scammy, spammy "Links from Around the Web" until these issues arw resolved.
uBlock is gonna be just as easy to install as hassling with setting up a contributor account.
Check out: https://satoshipay.io/
Adaptation is the key to success. Something like that would be counterproductive.
There aren't just a handful of Ad networks, there are thousands if not millions out there. On top of that, they utilize each other to push out ads in a horrid rat king like incestuous jumble. Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require compensating all of these companies, the end result predictably would be movie studio accounting that leaves the content provider with nothing in the end.
This setup does nothing to address the privacy issues people have with companies like Google tracking their comings and goings. Google is still at the heart of this system and still knows everything about you. To get any benefit from this system actually requires you to embrace Google. People want to maintain their privacy, they don't want to login to Google to get rid of ads.
It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser that you fill occasionally and that prompts you to pay a site similar to the manner in which Location Services work simply based on a meta tag a site provider puts in their page head containing their wallet and request pay amount and schedule. It's impossible to imagine Google, Apple, Facebook, or anyone who wants in your pants to allow themselves to be cut out of a revenue stream by such a system. Companies like this are double dipping by charging everyone else to be the broker and also by being the service provider being paid.
I honestly don't know if an ad free web is allowable. It's technically possible but everyone who isn't the content creator is going to do everything they can to stop it form happening.