And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money to read a a website, then people might do that too - if they deemed the content worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Millions of people already pony up $1000 for the latest smartphone so they can read stuff online at all hours of the day. I really don't think the web creators should be this worried about whether or not people actually want their stuff. They desperately want it; in fact, most people are probably literally addicted to it.
Of course, maybe you're trying to draw the distinction between paying for a good and voluntarily making a donation. If that's the case, I'm with you - the latter idea is a loser. But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. I think a lot of people think they learned this fundamental truth that people don't want to pay for things to read on the internet, when what they really learned is that people don't want to be interrupted and asked for their credit card details. But if you can make that process seamless, people will happily fritter away thousands clicking through links.
People would maybe do it, but ads wouldn't go away because there's x times more money to be made in the ad business than people micropayments.
If something similar existed for the web it would be great
Brave has a model where creators are automatically tipped, based on usage, which makes more sense imo.
So the question is, how do you provide consumers with such an incentive without charging for the content itself (as that can be problematic for the reason you mentioned), without offering "an ad-free experience" for paid users (as Brave blocks ads by default regardless of whether users pay or not), and without requiring users to incur the mental load of trying to decide whether the paid experience is worth it over the free one?
A difficult problem to say the least.
Problem is I don't want to open an account with just every possible newspaper and magazine on the web. What is needed is some common mechanism for most if not all content providers.
Maybe $0.50 is too much. Maybe $0.25 would be more like ok.
Say that in an hour you browse two articles from the NYT, one from the WSJ, five Wikipedia pages, one click on a BuzzFeed listicle, and one blog post from Joe's blog.
Is the NYT article worth $0.50? $0.25? What about the WSJ one? And surely Wikipedia is worth as much as a NYT article. But the BuzzFeed one is definitely worth less. Maybe $0.05? It was moderately entertaining after all. And what about Joe's blog?
Having to do dozens of these micro decisions per hour is exhausting, and is the whole point behind having a system that allocates funding automatically. It's not optimal, but it avoids decision fatigue.
I don'think it would be more exhausting than being in a bar and putting coins into the jukebox.
Automatic funding sounds interesting, was it explained in the article somewhere? Or is the point that we should use 100 million to develop a working automatic funding algorithm since no such thing exists yet?
That said, Netflix is incredibly successful with something new, but that also took years. Netflix worked hard on the reputation that they had the best, most interesting new TV shows that you couldn't get anywhere else. But it takes years to overcome that inertia.
> eating and driving to work.
This confused me for a second before I realized it was intentional. Good one
The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. If people are buying Tide pods instead of generic laundry detergent, it seems to me that the advertising isn't just shifting money around, it's actually increasing spending. But it could just be bad instincts, I don't know of any actual real research on the topic.
Another way of phrasing this -- if Apple stopped advertising iPhones, some Apple users would shift over to Android, which (ignoring cost differences) theoretically would just mean they gave the same money to someone else. But would there be another contingent that stayed on iPhone and just stopped buying new hardware every year? How large would a contingent like that be?
At the very basic level of it, advertising is giving out the information that your product exists, because otherwise, nobody would even know its existence.
Your example for Apple is very good, it's very highly probable that some persons only switch to newer iPhones when they hear the news it exists and see the keynotes/articles about it, even though there is nothing wrong with their phone, and they may not be thinking about changing it.
For my wife, the pods are a lifestyle upgrade over the regular powdered pour out detergent. The convenience and effort saved justifies the more expensive packaging.
I'm a firm believer in adopting new processes or products that reduce the amount of time required to perform my daily functions. They pay off in the long run.
When smoking ads were banned, profits for cigarette companies went up, because they didn't have to spend money on marketing anymore. Addicts still kept buying them anyway. Previously, smoking ads were to get people to buy your brand rather than some competing brand.
I’m sure there are pretty of studies out there.
It kind of sounds like ads are like a pollution on the web, and we should just ban them.
What you describe is a lot like the pollution due to over packaging many products in the food industry. You can say consumers shouldn't buy it, but consumers as an aggregate can't handle that and if you want to solve the problem, it's to put less packaging on the shelves.
Similarly, if what you describe is true (and it sounds true, because how massive the internet ad industry is, indeed to me never seemed to quite add up to what people do online), then no matter what sort of monetization schemes we come up with for Internet content, most industry everywhere is still going to pollute the Internet with ads, simply because the content producers want more money, the consumer doesn't have it, but the industry marketing budgets do.
I think this is partly due to "content producers want more money", because if it's never enough you can wreck any good thing. But the other part is that "the industry" can apparently stuff the Internet full of as many ads as they want without actually being bound by how much the consumer wants to "pay" for the content via ads or (if we figure out micropayments or something) money. Because their spending budget dwarfs that of the consumer.
So, just like I always suspected, all these ads are there because the industry wants to advertise on the Internet, not because it needs to be there to pay for the content.
Content automatically becomes advertising when it exists by the virtue of a marketing budget.
Turns out this whole "your data for our content" deal, that consumers are supposedly choosing for, isn't the relevant transaction at all.
You see pretty much the same problem with outdoor advertising and store front signage. The industry has way more than enough money to spend on advertising to ruin the urban scenery with ads and giant billboards. Where I live we have regulations to keep that in check, but when I go to other countries it's really ugly. It's quite bad in the USA, but at least that country hasn't existed for very long. The saddest thing is in older countries where you see historical buildings being half-obscured or even have the billboards bolted on them. Fortunately due to tourism, there are some regulations.
Anyway, the point is that our Internet is being ruined with ads by the marketing budgets of the industry, not because the ads are necessary to support the content (they never were--there was content on the Internet before advertising, lots of it too), but simply because they have the money to put as much ads as they want onto our Internet.
It reminds me of certain cafes where they play bad commercial radio. You paid for your coffee, to sit there, but you're still subjected to over-loud ads every 15 minutes. This is not because you didn't pay enough for the coffee, it's because whoever paid for that ad has the resources to pollute the soundscape regardless of whether you pay or not.
My argument is basically that no web monetization plan that involves redirecting some of our discretionary spending towards paying websites can make up for the advertising revenue they currently get, because that ad revenue is funded by not only a portion of our discretionary spending, but a portion of ALL our spending, and the non-discretionary portion is much larger. Tide and Toyota are always going to have more money to spend on advertising than Bobby and Jill have the discretion to spend on sponsoring websites.