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.
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.