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Comment by malchow | Hacker News Reader

A company I founded, Publir, is working on a new model here -- well behaved ads for anonymous users, microsubscriptions via Stripe to eliminate ads client-side for devoted readers.

Turns out that eliminating ads in the client upon payment is actually quite difficult to do with good hygeine; ad networks are very sensitive to "fraud." Now that we have a good solution, we're pretty excited about it.

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For a while now I've been thinking about something like this: once a month I put some amount of money in my "browser account". Maybe it's $25, or $10, maybe sometimes it's nothing at all. This money gets automatically distributed to the sites I visit, potentially subject to a white/black list that I control. Payments automated, cryptographically secure. I never see an ad or run ad-related JS. And the sites that I support get my patronage as directly as possible. Edit: oh, and somehow my privacy is magically preserved. Small detail. :-)

Maybe that's too close to the "public radio" model, and would never work at scale, but I'd pay for it.

I think you just described the basic concept of Brave, Brendan Eich's browser project.

https://www.brave.com/about.html

You just described this: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

The only thing I fear with this (Brave) is that it is gameable. Whenever you create a pot of money, it will be gamed. Someone will come up with the Brave equivalent of a "One weird trick slideshow!" to extract maximum dollars.

Subscriptions, however, are consumer-empowering. And everyone gets how they work. (Netflix, Prime, etc.)

It's just like cable used to be! Before they started serving ads anyway...

Most cable networks always showed ads, other than the premium channels (hbo, sho, etc)... They used to show fewer ads though... and the shows are now, mostly slotted to 44 minutes of show (give or take), closer to 36 for reality TV. So the rest gets filled with ads.. because money.

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