I'd MUCH rather just have a system where I can just choose to either get ads, or to debit the amount the advertisers spent to show me an add to get an ad-free experience on a per-article or per-video basis where the provider (or host) isn't trying to bend me over compared to the deal they offer advertisers.
The problem is that would "disincentivize engagement" and no one would ever offer such a thing. Well, ok then, screw you, I'll use adblock and you get no benefit.
It's actually a slightly different problem.
Advertisers want the people who are willing to pay for stuff.
If the advertiser pays $0.03 to show you the ad and you could get out of watching it by paying the same amount, the only people watching the ad would be the most aggressive of cheapskates who never buy anything. Nobody wants to advertise to them, so there would be no point in even trying to sell advertising. But that's not even the problem.
The problem is in order to collect $0.03 you would need a functioning micropayments system that both doesn't charge prohibitively high transaction costs and doesn't invade everybody's privacy by de facto giving the bank your browsing history.
- The amount of hoops we jump through to get around the problem that credit card numbers are fundamentally insecure is absurd. Transactions can be arbitrarily canceled up to a month after they happen, and platforms like Paypal will then happily charge you an extra fee for the privilege of reversing the payment.
- Bitcoin was also obviously a dumpster fire in this regard. It's not clear Bitcoin was ever going to be anything but a dumpster fire; the transaction fees were always going to make it terrible for micropayments, and they were baked into the design pretty early.
- GNU Tailor has been occasionally making the rounds for years, but I don't see any kind of timeline for getting real banks to adopt it.
It's a difficult problem.
But I suspect a truly decent micropayments system that didn't suffer from all of the privacy/gatekeeping/transaction-fee problems of credit cards and Paypal would fundamentally change the web.
And a functioning microdecision system that didn't wear you down from making decisions about whether everything you try and do is really worth spending or not spending $0.03, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.
Been around for a decade, run by the old Piratebay guys.
Choice one, you have a dispute resolution system which costs money which requires high transaction costs, and can't have $0.03 transactions. Choice two, you don't, the user gets mad, disputes the charge with the credit card company and then the browser extension goes out of business due to chargebacks.
What you need is something that works like cash. Money is exchanged for goods and services, the end. If somebody steals from you or rips you off, your recourse is by recovering it from the person who ripped you off, not the bank. If that makes people stop doing business with shady people using this payment method, fine. Still works for the local newspaper.
Then you get the fraud the other way. People get content and then ask for a refund.
> If people abuse the system, ban them
So now you're back to needing an expensive dispute resolution process.
> If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.
Which punishes the sites who are the most common victims of buyer fraud.
There are three options. Option one, dispute resolution process, high transaction costs. Option two, caveat emptor, no refunds. Option three, caveat venditor, totally unconditional refunds.
And option three doesn't really work either, because if readers are anonymous they could all ask for a refund with no consequences, but if they're not it's a privacy problem. So what you really need for small transactions is option two. Which isn't really a problem for small transactions, because they're small -- if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.
They won't need you to do business with them again. 10k viewers being ripped off is $300, and let the site fail, onto the next domain to do it over again.
Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.
I envision this as more of a European style tipping than American: I read an article, watch a video, cline a GitHub repo, etc. I find that the content is well made and I’d like to support the creator. I press the “tip” button in my browser and top them some small amount (<$1 in most cases).
This way there’s no need to deal with refunds, bad actors, etc.
We already have this problem with clickbait. They get the $0.03 from filling their site with spamvertisements and then waste your time getting you to click on it. Whether the $0.03 is from you or advertisers is irrelevant.
Though you could add a "screw those guys" button where you don't get your money back but they don't get it either. That might even allow there to be no transaction costs, by using that money to fund the system.
Do you not value your time? If you watch content on there on a fairly regular basis it'll easily save you 1 hr+ of your time/sanity over the course of the month.
Also some of the money goes to help support the creators of content you consume (apparently even demonetized channels).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
Edit: Chrome Version: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
It's less enjoyable when the content comes to a total halt mid-segment to plug this week's sponsor even though I completely understand these people are just trying to eek out some coin for the content they spent time making for me to watch.
This for sure. Though I still prefer that to the abrupt, suddenly I'm now watching an ad that's 3 times as loud as what I was watching before, it's somehow suspiciously 'relevant' to what google thinks it knows about me, and can appear without warning once, twice, maybe even 3 times in a 10-15 minute video depending on, well I'm honestly not sure what after trying to figure it out for a while now, and may or may not be skippable, depending on again, I'm not too sure what.
Yup. I'm one of the rubes who ponied up for youtube premium out of my 'fun money' funds account to get away from this. It's kind of weird, some of us asked for this "I'll happily pay to get rid of the ads", Google called that bet and dammit I folded haha.
As it is, it youtube-dl everything to my Pi and play it through Kodi on my TV, so the regular ads never reach me anyway.
Creators need to be paid for their creations too.
It is my understanding (misconception?) that cryptocurrencies don’t scale well. How would a cryptocurrency handle billions of micro transactions? How would such a system scale to the amount of content consumed?
Would there be many individual coins that are exchanged for a common one(s)? NYTCoin for BTC? Is there some method for handling transactions without the overhead?
Bitcoin's lightning network is an example of this, and is currently up and running. Fees are incredibly low, currently averaging .0098 cents: https://1ml.com/statistics
You also help support channels and content creators (apparently even if they're demonetized if you have premium).
None of the channels I care for gate their content like that. If I want to support a content creator, I can do that by letting patreon or a merchandise tshirt company take a cut, rather than giving that cut to google.