Pages are not created equal and averaging numbers here seems to be of little use. In practice the popularity is likely closer to some exponential-like distribution. Similar to music streaming services. Lots of people wouldn't get anything but they probably don't expect anything either.

I was using averages because this model is supposed to help the "average creator", those left behind in the current Google-economy model.

"Whales" and "superwhales" (which is what as you correctly conclude this model would probably converge to too) already exist in Google-economy world so not really interesting to observe. They would just make the average creator make even less.

This person for example (from their article)

"Say, you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Imagine getting paid to share creative recipes, take photos and instruct website visitors on how they too can make amazing pancakes."

Would make $3/month (+- order of magnitude) if Yep was ever to achieve DDG level of success.

You put "average creator" in quotes but from my reading of their site Yep has not claimed they will help the "average creator", just "creators".

If Yep shares a higher percentage of revenue with creators than Google, surely that is helping creators even if it doesn't mean you're achieving some sort of imaginary "no man left behind" standard for the average creator.

If so, this quickly leads to the end-game of a dedicated industry that juices the ~~Ahrefs~~ Yep algo with bot armies and shady SEO tactics to push sites up the curve to capture this non-linear payout.

> The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something?

The profit is too low. And they're not saying they're going to provide a living wage, just an extra revenue stream. Just because that revenue stream isn't enough by itself to live on doesn't take away that it's a revenue stream and people who are indie hacking need to generate multiple revenue streams to provide security for themselves.

Why would it be a search engine's role to provide the entirety of every creators' livable wage? That would obviously be impossible for many reasons, and I don't see Yep making any claims about being a primary (or even significant) revenue source. Instead, they're proposing that the value of search comes from the end content, not the results page. The creator revenue stemming from that is inherently the appropriate amount.

Inciting the notion that they're individually responsible for the whole of content creators' income only encourages more ads or even nefarious behavior -- which is completely antithetical to your own company's philosophy, so it's not clear why you're so publicly holding a competitor to a different standard.

It seems we read the same article and understood it differently. The announcement post said :

"Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return."

To me this sounds like the idea of this model is to allow an average person doing casual blogging to make significant income? Given this premise, can we make it work?

To be clear I absolutely love the idea, I think it sounds fair and in the spirit of the web that I would like to see. The web needs innovative ideas like this, unfortunately I do not see this concrete one being viable.

So every time someone clicks to that blog about container gardens, the writer/owner of the blog gets $ 0.25?

Who pays? With money coming from where?

And how bad will SEO efforts become to get their hands on that kind of money, which is 10 times (not 1,000 times, my mistake) more than that same blog would make with advertising, if we considered a CPM rate of $ 25 ?

For the record, freediver deceptively misquoted the blog post, and Ahrefs never claimed that those would be the revenue amounts -- they weren't even talking about their own company.

Removing the context[1] from that quote feels disingenuous, at best, and purporting that they even made any claims about their product is approaching libel. The 2019 personal blog post you're referring to is a general (albeit flawed) analysis of how a Google profit share might work for the top content creators based on guesstimated information from YouTube revenues. They were very clear about all of this and plainly stated multiple times that they have no idea if their analyses are accurate, and that it's all effectively an experiment.

Here is the actual portion from that post:

"YouTube’s revenue [...] can approximate that top-earners receive $0.0015 for every one view. Considering how much more ad revenue Google SEPR[sic] clicks generate in comparison to YouTube views, a Google profit-share model could generate significantly higher returns for top content creators. Based on a quick analysis, serving one search could pay an average rate from $0.05 to $0.25 in the US. Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return."

Given the context, you're putting many words in their mouth. It wasn't a product announcement, the product itself didn't even exist yet, they didn't actually claim a $0.25/query profit or even make any claims at all, they never made any mention whatsoever about being a substantial revenue source for "average" creators (who don't make substantial revenue to begin with), and they weren't even talking about their own product.

So, again, you're holding them to an impossible standard of revenue to meet your arbitrary and unreasonable qualifications of being "impactful." It comes across as ethical posturing, and shaming someone for napkin math about a different company's offering in an old "I have an idea" post just doesn't seem appropriate from a competitor in the space. I can only presume that you wouldn't be a fan of people nitpicking quotes from your old posts, so I'm not sure why you're doing it to someone else.

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...

Edit: In fact, the other person who replied to your comment just proved that what you're doing is completely irresponsible and libelous. You're sowing the idea that those two sentences were in reference to the company's actual offering, which is completely false, but you're actively convincing people otherwise.

Edit: Here's a screenshot[2] of your unedited comment, since you decided to remove false information and things that I referenced.

[2] https://i.imgur.com/hcJJNXJ.png

I was under the wrong impression that this [1] was the announcement blog post for Yep. As I read the comments here initially, many mentioned that blog post and I did not pay attention to the date on it and just took it for granted. [2]

It seems that the 'announcement' post I was referring to isn't fresh announcement for Yep but a 2019 blog post by the founder explaining the concept.

In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. There was no malice intended.

Thanks for holding me accountable.

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615194

> In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis.

Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and personal costs of ads to the end user are too high. So, I'm really not sure why you would stand behind an analysis that hundreds of millions of dollars is an "unviable" and irrelevant amount of revenue.

When Kagi is bringing in $365M/year, feel free to make all the declarations you want about $328M being "not much." Until then, you're being hypercritical for no apparent reason -- with the results being identical to malice.

You are putting words in my mouth and starting to get personal at the same time.

My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.

The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work.

If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. It is a terrible idea.

Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.

> You are putting words in my mouth

Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory.

> and starting to get personal at the same time.

Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry being directly discussed. You are not a victim in this situation.

> My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.

This is the exact claim that you just accused me of "putting in your mouth," so you're doubling down on your completely faulty analysis, while also claiming I've somehow antagonized you into doing so.

> If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact

As folks in this thread have explained to you multiple times, there is no such thing as an even distribution of traffic. In reality, the content creators who currently get very little search traffic won't be affected by this additional revenue source, but they aren't expecting to and nobody is claiming that they will. Whereas a content creator who does receive a lot of search traffic would see an increase of revenue that is significant relative to their overall income.

You are still trying to push these fundamentally absurd notions that all content creators have the same sized audiences and that the search engine should be responsible for their baseline revenue -- and if the company doesn't meet those literally impossible requirements that no other business in the world would ever be held to, then the concept is somehow inherently flawed and won't have any relevant impact.

> and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed.

You're inventing problems that don't exist. The advertising and content industries have utilized minimum payouts for decades. The claims process could be as simple as a site verification code, which has also been used for decades by thousands of companies.

> It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.

This explains everything about your commentary, and I find it to be anti-social at its very core. You appear to be plainly declaring that money can only be impactful when invested in large businesses that "scale" -- scale at what, nobody knows, but apparently scaling is inherently beneficial to society in some way -- and that supporting small businesses is a "terrible idea." That is illogical, harmful and completely unjustifiable.

When conversation between two humans derails, I always remember The Egg:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Can you please breaking the site guidelines like this? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Therefore we end up having to ban accounts that keep doing this. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

This is exactly the situation I emailed you about, dang. Given that freediver actually broke twice as many guidelines -- his most recent comment alone broke five -- and used HN as a platform to repeatedly slander a competitor, it doesn't seem appropriate to be singling me out. You are giving the instigator(s) a free pass on everything, while treating those who respond to those instigations as "destroyers" of the site. Help me understand why this is the case?

Edit: Just got your email. I will continue the conversation there.

I made my other comment about the disparaging qualities of your commentary, but I just wanted to point out that the numbers you're discussing are actually good for content creators. Incredibly good, actually.

Presuming your DDG example of 100M/day @ $0.01, that would be $328M/year paid out to creators. Bandcamp currently pays out ~$75M annually, and nobody is declaring them "unviable." So, I can't imagine why you consider this amount to be "not much," particularly when it would be additional revenue for creators which is typically 100% absorbed by the search provider.

Not all content is equal. Good content require efforts, often efforts of a team. Youtube is a good example of how revenue share will work in practice. Some creators are getting millions there, some maybe hundreds. But as a consumer you can find good content for almost any topic you can think of.

Revenue share amount from Youtube is a few times less than what Google search is making https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings...

Youtube is slowly killing itself with abusive revenue practices but ignore THAT bombshell for a moment and focus on why you are wrong. Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos.

It would be a lot more valuable if you just explain your thoughts instead of creating a guessing game

> Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos.

Data for this? Rather people love to consume videos. Instagram, Tiktok, Twitch come to mind immediately. Not just Youtube.

We live in a pyramid, so not everyone can live of art/sport. For instance there is 87 million tennis player in the world, but only 1000 or less players actually earn enough money to live comfortably. Wile most of the earnings is withing top 20. Production level are not enough to give everyone a life they would like to have.