Google have been very concerned about lack of diversity on their profitable business portfolio and this was a seemingly promising idea at the moment, so they actually tried that idea and miserably failed. People don't want to pay a single cent to publishers unless there's a significant value delivered (like music, movie subscriptions) while the majority is okay with using their privacy as currency. If you have a viable proposal on a "micropayment" business, go try and become the next tech giant.
Collectively it's untenable for a single for-profit entity to hold highly personal information on billions of people from all over the world and have a direct, immediate communication channel open to them. These companies have immense power and they need to be brought under control.
>For instance, a site like Oxford Reference can charge between 25 to 99 cents for access to a single page of content
I want something entirely different. I want to pay what google makes on me watching ads (or 2x that, I don't care), and distribute that to people creating content I watch without me interfering on that process. Essentially, what happens when I listen to music on Spotify.
To make it a mandatory system is a whole other issue.
It's true that people will probably still only pay for things that provide them significant value, but a) low-value content is one of the biggest problems on the internet, so putting those companies out of business is a great result as far as I am concerned, and b) search is obviously high value content, so Google has nothing to worry about.
That's probably because they actually have tried it: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
It may seem frustrating for some of us living in nice places, having our own money and access to easily accessible electronic payment systems but for a lot of the world (geographical, age and economic status) that's not available. So while I support being able to have the option to pay to not see ads I also support being able to just see pages (with ads) without having to configure billing, etc. Otherwise a lot of the high value Internet would be only accessible to the group of people I mentioned above and that would be sad (and going against why Internet has penetrated so much of the world).
PS: If you think it's hard to stay anonymous in an Internet of ads, I cannot see how you'd be anonymous in one where you have to configure billing which is traceable (by design) to your physical person.
Now, you have to imagine the CPM is directly related to the value of the goods being sold. That scales per country. It's probably not the perfect proxy, but in the same sense that your viewers from other countries pay out different CPMs, they can probably afford different amounts per video.
It isn't about anonymity. It's about abuse of data. I'm not mad that I can't make anonymous phone calls, I'm mad that my phone provider sells my real time location data. I am happy to pay a company that preserves privacy and trust them with my information. This is a bit aside though, because I more or less trust Google with my information, I just don't like ads. It's not about anonymity.
Sometimes we pay a lot more: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-stats
> The true value of the video is likely much lower.
The true value of the video varies a lot. Some are demonstrably very highly valued: https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators
A premium account is $10/mo.. or $30/quarter. Pandora is part of sirius now.. but spotify has revenue of about 5.50/user/quarter.
Either Pandora is 6x more effective at monetization than Spotify (very unlikely), or that engineer was wrong.
It's sort of related.
Except that the vast majority of the advertising on the internet supports mainly low-quality junk ... The more ads, the scummier and more worthless the site gets, usually.
There are exceptions, few and far between, like news websites I guess. But most of the ads on the Internet are used to support content that you never asked for, never wanted, never would visit, and still get shoved in your face occasionally.
Afaik nobody really tried true micropayments yet. Micro actually means 10^-6, so as TACIXAT mentioned below/above it comes down to 0.025-0.4 cent per one piece of something. Meanwhile what we have seen from the industry is $.99 macro payments. Did Google Contributor really charge people ~0.025-0.4 cent per impression?
People want to be able to opt out of Google entirely, and that product didn’t do it.
I don't care about seeing ads, but I am willing to pay money (and I do, when such an option exists) in exchange for stopping the spying that ads bring.
It's possible to enable advertising while maintaining privacy and security. What was missing was legal and regulatory forces to push advertisers and adtech into it. Now it's here.
Nothing is free. You either pay with cash that you earn, or you pay with your attention with ads. Option 2 is faster, easier, more passive, more affordable and more equal. That's why billions of people prefer to monetize attention on-demand for their content instead of paying cash upfront.
Whether people would pay enough to get anywhere near the costs however, is probably unlikely given how little they pay for far cheaper content on the internet today. Wikipedia is not comparable since the vast majority is unpaid volunteer work and user-provided content.
- convenience: do not underestimate it, lots of supporting evidence that people want maximum convenience. Notice how a small UI change as "one click purchase" increased Amazon sales significantly or why they even make/sell those buttons to put around the house to press and refill periodic stuff
- access: like I was saying in another reply, it's simply the case that in a lot of situations, users (because of age, location and economic status) simply have no good means to pay electronically
- affordability: 10 cent/view pay seem like nothing to us but in many places that can add up to a few USD per month that may be the cost of food of a family for a week. So now you'd have to do geographical location based pricing, dealing with all the crap that comes with it (people using proxies to avoid it, etc)
Affordability is the largest factor by far though because most people just cant pay for everything they consume for free today. When you look at video content especially, it can easily add up to several dollars per day in spend.
Just run something like a Radius server, which any website could query, and which could log usage.
> access: ...
Provide a wide variety of payment options. As many VPN services and VPS hosts do.
> - affordability: ...
I don't know specifics, but I can't imagine how users in places so poor generate the same ad income as users in wealthier places. So just adjust cost/view to generate the same income that the current system does.
Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.
With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense.
If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value.
Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.
Sure, but newspapers, magazines, cable TV and premium channels have never really lived off of customer payments, they were always ad-based businesses first (there are exceptions, such as small newspapers and HBO).
Spotify is barely thriving and took 13 years to make its first profit. It's precariously balanced with constant problems in artist payouts and catalogs. Netflix managed to grow by getting into the content production business but is seeing challenges there as costs rise.
And both Netflix and Spotify distribute content that can be consumed multiple times. How many times are you going to read the same article? If the answer was as simple as an HN comment, the industry would've figured it out by now.
Most “content” isn’t worth paying for. Google’s phrasing about publishers not being able to pay to generate content made me think, “Yay, no content mills!”
Separately, people with something to say like to reach audiences. In the distant past, it was called “pamphleteering”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer
There was a web before banner ads. The content came from somewhere...
That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. Also you don't have the same needs and wants as the billions of other people who spend time online to make a judgement that most content isn't worth paying for.
This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.”
Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for.
> That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same.
On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example.
In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites.
Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find.
Self-published home pages like this are still cool:
This one uses a kind of ethical advertising:
https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.” People with things to say will say them.
While it’s still being experimented with, it seems that quality content is worth paying for, even worth patronage:
https://patrons.theguardian.com/
This goes into more detail about content mill versus patronage model for higher value content:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4...
// Irony of HuffPo well noted.
- Option 1 is to work, turn effort into cash, then spend that cash on the internet.
- Option 2 is to just go to the internet and view ads which turn your attention into cash behind the scenes in real-time.
You're still paying but advertising is a much more seamless, passive, and equally available system, and can quickly scale on-demand. So to rephrase the argument, people want the content, and they pay for it, but they mostly don't choose option 1.
Yes there's a tiny bit that's provided for free by creators who pay for it themselves, but it's so miniscule that it doesn't matter.
How much for Arxiv with ”open access to 1,580,815 e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics”?
For huge amounts of valuable content — ideas and knowledge some people want to share and some people want to absorb — self-publishing, patronage, and private or public funding work, at scale. The “amateur web” is still here, it only seems “miniscule” thanks to being buried under the content mills trying to generate placeholder pages for ads.
The web wasn’t born as either subscriptions (pay with cash) or ads (pay with attention), it was a knowledge linking and sharing platform.
Huge amounts of content continue to be produced other ways. There are more options (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma).
> ”Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 374 million unique visitors monthly as of September 2015. There are about 72,000 active contributors working on more than 48,000,000 articles in 302 languages. As of today, there are 5,913,176 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles.” — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
That’s not so minuscule it doesn’t matter.
There's content and distribution. Sometimes content is freely generated by users (wikipedia, stackoverflow, quora, HN, social media) but distribution costs money. These costs (content + distribution) are paid for by cash (including patronage/donations) or ads. That's it. There's no magical 3rd option.
The amount of content that's both created and distributed for free is miniscule and you haven't quoted a single example yet. Billions of consumers are not going to be satisfied with a bunch of people hosting their own blogs from their home.
You weren’t talking about paying cash for publishing/distribution, because both your two options, paid subscription and free ad-supported, you were talking how the consumer pays and also cost money to publish, cancelling that dimension out.
In the pay-to-publish model, someone is deciding it’s worth their own pocket money (or patronage or sponsorship by powers that be) to publish. That makes it free to consume.
We were talking about the perspective of the content consumer, and for them, the pay-to-publish model is free. They are neither paying for the content, nor are they paying with their attention. Some entirely different actor not discussed in your models, is covering it.
That content, content creators support publishing, tends to be different in nature — someone is willing to spend “their own” money to share the ideas in it freely.
Pamphleteers paid the printing presses by cash too, that’s how they didn’t have to sell ads and how they didn’t have to charge a ha’penny a sheet.
> “Content both created and distributed for free is miniscule and you haven’t quoted a single example yet”
You’re both non-responsive to examples with factual data to back them up, and moving the goalposts. To be clear, I’m agreeing there is too much no-value content getting churned out as filler to advertise against. So much volume, so much noise, the valuable content is buried.
Perhaps we agree there’s too much ad-hosting filler content, and not enough inherent value content.
To keep saying “minuscule” perhaps you use a very different internet. Where are the ads on this site? Are you paying for it? No, someone has an interest in this site and its content being available to a special interest audience. It costs almost nothing to host contentful content of mostly plain text conveying information rather than eye candy to drive clicks. With light design but info rich text content, it’s easy for the ROI to work. Companies know this and publish for free without ads.
If you add “corporate” publishing into the mix, all the company product sites and blogs, combining company sites, academic sites, non-profit/public-good sites, government sites, WordPress home pages of everyone homesteading on the web, etc., it’s not minuscule.
But here’s some hard data from 2018:
“Ad-supported media’s share of consumer time will drop to 42.5 percent by 2021. This past year [2017], the number fell to 44.4 percent, its lowest point ever, per the research.” — https://www.pqmedia.com/product/global-consumer-media-usage-...
Ad-supported is less than half of media time and trending down.
In the beginning, profiting off web content was illegal. Is it impossible to imagine course-correcting this race to the bottom?
- - - - - -
PS. I can’t help but notice the incredibly high not at all minuscule percentage of content linked to from HN that is neither subscription based nor ad-supported, but paid for by its author, some even calling out that they’re free, such as this one from the thread on standing out as a speaker:
What does this cost?
Make your checks payable to a shell corporation I have in the Caymans. Just kidding; it's all free. I hope you enjoy it. Also, if I ever see one of your talks, it better be damn good.
I'll add to this site over time. You might be interested in watching the newest posts page.
Once again, content published to us for free is ironically the very content worth paying for.
I'm not sure what you're even arguing now. You seem to be saying that some sites exist where the creator pays both costs instead of the consumer but I don't see what point that makes. Like I said, that particular scenario is an absolutely tiny portion of the content available.
Is your argument that only content that's completely paid for by the creator is good? That makes no sense.
If you come to my site, and I take money from an advertiser to show you an ad, I simply add that money into the income for my business on my Federal and state tax filings.
If you come to my site, and pay me to view my content, then in addition to dealing with that money as income, I also have to worry about whether I owe sales tax to your state or VAT to your country.
Worse, in many states that tax rate depends on your address, so I'll need to get that from you.
To make micropayments work for web content, someone is going to have to offer a service that integrates the micropayment system with a sales tax/VAT collecting and reporting system. You probably have to set it up so it is actually that service that is selling the content to the end users, so that the sites themselves do not have to deal with the states at all. That may require the service to act as some sort of portal that the users go through to reach the sites.
If it becomes harder and harder to push invasive ad me then more money will end up in dumb ads instead.
The NY Times solution, for example, is to target ads based on relevance to content on the page being delivered. No tracking required, but its relevance to the page can sometimes be more effective than tracking ads.
Conversely tracking ads are not necessarily smart.
Go shopping for a fridge, then buy one. You'll have fridge ads following you around even though you're not in the market for a fridge any more.
This persistent meme commits the fallacy of believing that every person follows the precise same fact pattern as yourself: Buying a fridge on some predictable, perfectly recurring and invariant schedule.
In fact, it is probably far more likely that a person who just bought a fridge will be favorably economically incentivized by an ad for a fridge than a randomly selected person.
For one thing, we know that this is a person who will ever influence a decision to buy a fridge (because they in fact did buy a fridge). Many people will never select a fridge in their life (for reasons that include renting a home, moving into a home which already has a fridge, replacing a non-working fridge with whatever a repairperson selects and is thus not influenced by an ad, is not the person in their family who selects a fridge, etc.)
A person who just bought a fridge is more likely to return that fridge and buy another than a randomly selected person is likely to buy a fridge in the same time period.
A person who just bought a fridge is more likely to be a decision-maker in selecting another fridge in the near-term than a randomly selected person (for reasons that include: buying another fridge for their garage, buying one for their business, recommending one to their contacts).
Buying a fridge is a rare event that probably absolutely correlates positively to buying another fridge.
A more effective ad targeting model would advertise fridges to the friends of someone who recently bought a fridge though, due to a) keeping up with the Jones' effect, and b) friends are likely at similar life stages, ie. getting married, buying a home, etc.
The fridge ads are mostly interesting for someone who has searched for a fridge (either on Google or on the fridge seller's website) but hasn't bought one yet.
I mean these are massive spyware businesses and they should be called out as such.
Newspapers especially fit your model of micro-payments: each newspaper is usually a minuscule amount of money, but that is never enough to sustain it.
There is also the problem of incentives - even if your customers are paying to access the content, if you can then ALSO mix ads with the content, you are guaranteed more money, so businesses will usually be inclined to do so.
Similarly, the free web is mostly content produced by people with little interest in getting paid (see livejournal, tumblr, blogger, pre-monetized everything: youtube, tiktok) and the providers are not simply trying to cover costs, they are trying to become billion dollar platforms.
All I'm trying to say is there's a vibrant internet to be had without prioritizing profitability and allowing ourselves to be subject to surveillance.
Perhaps though there is an ad-free future at could strive towards. I doubt it will happen within the current capitalist framework.
Because it's not valid alternative. It may work some edge-cases, but there's 0 evidence that it could support economy at the same scale as ads.
> We absolutely need a new funding model for the web (to kill ads).
We need to rework how ads work, but killing ads is very naive approach. Ads are core part to how world economy operates (and always have been). Calling for killing advertising is only hurting the case - it makes it easy to dismiss, as some crazy hippie talk.
I know there are probably a lot of people who would rather be advertised to than pay any non-zero amount to view content. Those people should be able to pay with their attention.
Maybe we don't need to kill ads, but having the choice to pay with money would definitely be welcome to people like me.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to compare the way ads used to be (inert) to the tracking/privacy/malware nightmare that online advertising has become.
Just because we've always had some (comparatively mild) forms of advertisement doesn't mean we should put up with this blight.
And I'm a fan.
I mean seriously I would probably pay more.
I hope regulations from governments help bring google down in size instead of breaking it up for a monopoly. IT has been extremely lucrative.
Further, their privacy sandbox sounds like it would just monopolize the advertising space to them. If they don't allow advertisers to collect data, that takes control away from advertisers and centralizes it to their ad market platform.
The post also creates some weird false dichotomy between cookies and fingerprinting. Let's just block both, yea? That's what is best for the user, and probably best for the web in the long term.
We absolutely need a new funding model for the web (to kill ads). The biggest barrier I see are the high transaction fees of digital transactions (30 cents + 2.9%). I don't know if the solution will be Brave, Libra, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, it can't come soon enough.