Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
by fiddlerwoaroof on Saturday April 10, 2021 @09:42PM
(#26766873)
I don’t know that’s the whole question, though: I know that I, personally, would be unwilling to pay a subscription fee for every site I’ve gotten information from. I wonder how many people would choose advertising if the choice is posed as ads or content subscriptions/micropayments.
This assumes that most of the content would require much funding to operate.
Could we make it cheap enough to host a personal blog and/or wiki on a smartphone for, say, $10 a year?
The economics would be very different as sites scale up their traffic (compare with, for example, The New York Times).
I think the (relatively) small number of high-traffic sites would be able to find revenue streams to support their hosting - perhaps those would be where subscriptions would be effective.
Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
by fiddlerwoaroof on Sunday April 11, 2021 @02:09PM
(#26772220)
It’s not just that, removing ads as a funding source make the barrier to entry higher for someone who wants to launch a competitor to the platforms: medium, substack, NYT, etc.
This may of may not be good, but I’m a bit concerned that destroying the adtech industry may have ripple effects that end up being worse than some middle way like FLoC
It's fair to believe that ads are 'ok' - it's also possible that people in general don't want them. Hosting low-traffic websites on a smartphone with cellular data is just-about-feasible now.
Rather than inventing very technically clever ways to continue on our existing path, as Apple and Google are doing, I think it'd be pleasant to simply move beyond the advertising model of content on the internet.
If asked, I don't believe people would want to be tracked or have ads mixed into their content.