All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them.
I think it's still a worthwhile discussion. Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences. And since in both cases (ads, micropayments) the side collecting the money is the one pushing them. So discounting micropayments solely on this basis isn't really a good way to discriminate.
Yes, it does seem that way because nobody actually says, "Please please give ads because I love them!"
Instead, the correct way to frame what users really want is to separate "stated preferences" from revealed preferences.[1]
The stated preference, of course, is for users to complain about ads and loathe them. Another source of stated preferences is marketing surveys and questionnaires.
But the revealed preference is different because it's the observation of what really people do instead of what they say they'll do. Most would rather watch youtube for free rather than pay $9.99 for YoutubeRed. Same for Spotify free tier with ads rather than $120 a year Spotify Premium. Most would rather read the 5 free articles with ads from New York Times rather than pay a subscription.
Another interesting example was Amazon's Kindle e-reader. They had a version with ads (what they call "with Special Offers") for $114 ... and one without ads for $139. More buyers chose the device with ads.[2]
Did Kindle users want ads?!? Of course not. But they valued the $25 savings more than the the ad-free experience. Basically, they "do want ads" -- in a roundabout way.
The micropayments enthusiasm doesn't really change the consumers' priority of "free with ads" over "pay for zero ads". People really really like the economics of "free". Unless micropayments is $0.00 -- which would be an oxymoron -- it will always have that economic handicap to widespread adoption.
>Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences.
One unintended consequence is that authors and creators end up with less revenue if they restrict their output to only subscribers making micropayments.
[1] https://www.beyondcostplus.com/blog/stated-vs-revealed-prefe...
Most people don't actively want ads. Ads are just too big of a revenue stream for most for-profit companies to ignore. A benefit of the original TV cable subscription was not having ads (which drove initial adoption!), but then networks saw they could charge people for cable AND show them ads with little recourse for the customer, so they did.
Also the Spotify and Youtube examples you presented are strictly subscription vs. no subscription. There can be no consumer enthusiasm for an option on the web that doesn't exist! Micropayments would add a different option with different trade-offs.
These are older examples, but they still exist. When you buy a newspaper for example, your options are not only free vs. monthly/yearly subscription, as is currently the case in your examples. They can pay a small amount for a single issue. When you buy a phone card, you can pay a small(?) amount for single calls vs. having a dedicated phone line subscription.
More recently, when you have a Starbucks card, you can use it for small purchases instead of "subscribing" to Starbucks. It's easy to use and works with the apps and online ordering. It also avoids the massive fees that payment processors collect which usually make <$1 contributions next to worthless.
Currently the most similar system to a "micropayment support infrastructure" I can think of is Patreon, which some people do actually use to work on projects full time.
I can't rationalize those choices, even, it's just what I've done, empirically.
A significant number of people do subscribe to spotify, and some is buy the ad-free kindles.
sigh, phone keyboards and a lack of proof-reading.
It's not ads I hate. It's #1 tracking and #2 obtrusive ada. Videos, animations, pop ups, etc... Unobtrusive ads are fine. Stack Overflow, Google Search, JSFiddle come to mind as ads I like. They are often relevant and they are unobtrustive
But the sad reality is that it will not happen. Not because people like me would not follow through on their pledge, but because advertising is completely entrenched at this point and it most likely would not generate the same amount of revenues.
Keep in mind that newspapers (the old kind) used to charge both sides: a subscription for the users to pay and advertising on the other side. So if some organization would start to charge using a micro-payment system sooner or later ads would be back (or they would not even leave) simply because a large enough audience is worth marketing to, and an audience that is paying for content is worth more, not less.
So I'm afraid that advertising is here to stay.
The problem that I have isn't so much with advertising, it is with all the tracking. I'm fine with ads, and I'm fine with occasionally seeing stuff that I might be interested in. But all the tracking to boost the value of the individual profiles is what irks me. So an opt-out using a micropayment system to have zero tracking would maybe be closer to practical than a complete opt-out of advertising.
At Brave, we integrate the blockchain for low-friction, private contributions to content creators based on user attention distribution. We do so in such a way that we efface the micro-payment/blockchain integration. The end user has no idea _how_ the solution is implemented, they just know that their favorite websites are getting support (some for the first time ever).
Effacing this technology is the right way. Figuring out how to make it work without burdening the end-user is the clear path of least resistance.
I guess most people would be willing to pay that amount in exchange for privacy.
In other words: If you are willing to give me $50 for ad-free internet, that's going to cost you $100. And so on...
In the world we have, even with money to spare people will stop visiting a site in preference to enabling ads. Especially as ads get ever more intrusive and destructive of the experience while use of ad blocking continues to rise. It's not solely to get content for free, it's mostly because the ads got so damn irritating and so high a percentage of screen space and page weight. To that they ad a triple shot of tracking so they can trace you all over the web.
Too many intrusive adverts is why many get rid of cable and terrestrial TV, or only listen to BBC radio.
So do content creators prefer some money from those people, or none at all?
Now, if the content is worth it, that's different story. There have always been subscription based websites (e.g. forums with pay-to-upgrade schemes).
Why webmasters and advertisers haven't yet perfected and adopted server-side ad injections is beyond me.
Because then the advertisers have to trust the webmasters to actually show the ads and not inflate the numbers, etc
This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them.