Good, hopefully we'll see some real innovation, with wide spread micropayments, rather than brainwashing which costs the viewer of the site far more than the recipient of the site gets.
The hardest part of making a sale isn't the price--it's getting the customer to say yes. With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link. This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content. No wonder it hasn't taken off.
A better solution from a market psychology standpoint would be to sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites. Monthly auto rebill. Just one purchase decision for life and with enough sites the perceived value is high. Not sure why we aren't seeing more of this -- if anyone works at a media conglomerate feel free to reply :)
Can't wait to buy my "Internet Pass"!
- Track how many sites a user visits, without knowing which sites the user visits. Call this number N.
- Charge the user for N visits.
- Distribute the money to the original websites, without anyone knowing (not even their banks?)
Sounds like a nice task for a cryptography researcher.
just spread a virus... or chrome extension which keep querying your websites
there is no way to implement this with technology in a reasonable manner unless you monitor every action every user does at any time. which would be (at least in my opinion) worse.
Yes, but by that logic a banking website could also be compromised.
And banks spend a lot of money to minimize that; less affluent business won’t be able to properly deal with that.
Any examples of that, relevant to a desktop bank website user?
Do they sell antivirus solutions, or work with browser vendors to improve security?
I suspect banks have some kind of money-back obligation when hacked, but curious how far that goes when a sizeable part of their customers is hacked.
Korean banks required an activex that scanned your computer.
These measures surely raise the bar though I don’t know how effective they actually are.
They can equally bid for the amount to charge from a customer directly. If your payment for not seeing an ad outbids ad networks, you don't see the ad.
E.g. imagine that you agree to pay up to 5¢ automatically for visiting a page is the site asks for it, up to 15¢ per session. If the required sum is above it, you get notified (pay or not). You can configure your browser according to your tastes: accept larger charges from particular sites, always decline any paid pages from some other sites, bid for removal of video ads more aggressively than for static text ads, etc.
A clearinghouse company should handle this the same way an ad network would. Viewers would put some money to their account, and that would be written off in larger transactions e.g. weekly (dollars, not cents).
I believe such solutions were tried in the past, but did not work too well. I suppose most people value their attention much lower than hard cash.
I hit "yes" or "no", and don't hear about it until I've read those 20 articles. Something built into my browser could act as the middle man, taking 10% of that fee and sending the rest to the article's creator. Firefox could put in an infrastructure to plug in easilly enough. You could even allow payment via bitcoin to get VCs happy.
I don't have the patience to be thinking about authorizing spend every time I click a link.
I know I am worth ~50$ a year to the Ad business. I'll gladly pay $60 a year for access to content. That $60 gets redistributed to content providers based on the share of my viewership they get.
Basically, cut the middle man (ad companies in this case).
If you really want to be socially inclusive, raise taxes on those that can afford to pay (wealthy pensioners are massively undertaxed in the UK for instance), and distribute it as "consumer tokens", or cash, that people can spend on consuming crap.
If you want to subsidise low income people, then be honest about it.
A friend of mine recently fell prey to a scam ad on Facebook and they got some money off her. I have yet to buy anything from an online ad in my entire life; so she is actually a much better investment than I am in terms of ad spend.
Sounds like the "marketing doesn't work on me cuz I'm so smart" fallacy, which usually means you're getting hacked by a different type of marketing.
Getting the eyes of wealthy target demographic -- and IT/CS/Dev/STEM folks qualifies -- is definitely worth $$$, the only question is if it's $500 or lower (or higher?). I used to have clients who existed to target the hyper-wealthy, and they made cash hand over fist schlepping details about those folks.
$500 bucks for semi-personalized deets about FAANG devs making $300k+ makes sense, and you can find those people on HN for sure.
Let stay conservative and say 3$ per 1000 views. I heard of plenty of people that make more and that's including what Google take out of it. There's no way you only see 20 000 pages a year. It's at least 5-6 times that amount of page.
Ads are also amazing by the fact that they still pay even though you are underage and can't get a credit card. My passion of software engineering wouldn't have been fulfilled if it wasn't from all the free resource. I learned from Site du Zéro, I was there pretty early when they started, I've seen the website owner going from nothing to building an amazing company. Now they no longer depends on ads, so that's good, but that's only because me seeing their ads at the being was enough for them to work full time on it.
Also note that this is in the context of the typically more valuable video ads. On eg YouTube if you say 1 ad per 10 minutes it would take 9 hours of video watching per day to rack up 54 ads.
I don’t know what rate of ads one can expect from a mobile game but maybe it would be more. I think you would still likely need several hours to get so many. And presumably you want to play less if there are more frequent ads.
Anyone on Hacker News read much more than 250-300 pages a day. Just casually browsing on Hacker News would give a few dozens (multiple pages, looking at comments, going to the actual page). Any software engineer will look at reference on the web. I regularly reach 1000 pages a day myself at works (verified using a Chrome extension) and it doesn't take into account my usage over my phone.
> On eg YouTube if you say 1 ad per 10 minutes it would take 9 hours of video watching per day to rack up 54 ads.
Video ads pay much more, as I said, they can go up to 10$ for 1000 views and that's not included the ad provider part.
It's $5/mo even for the limited list of sites participating (already $60/mo). I suppose removing ads everywhere by paying web sites the amount advertisers from all networks pay them would cost several times as much.
What's worked for me is a combination of aggressive ad-and-tracker-blocking and subscribing to the print versions of content I enjoy.
Internet has given power to people to issue veiled threats that one has to give content to users at price they deem sufficient else users would simply pirate and pay nothing.
It doesn't seem to be growing much though, only having roughly 20 sites it looks like.
But assuming they are promising that paying for Contributor would remove you from all tracking (whatever that means), wouldn't it be a pretty big deal (both legally and ethically) if it was found that they are still tracking you while saying they explicitly won't?
Obviously tracking required to run the service would be excluded (they need to know who you are to take money from you in the US, and they need to "track" your identity to tell that you are the person paying for that service), but don't they already have plenty of controls over how they use your personal information, regardless of whether you are paying for Contributor or not?
Sure, they could stand to make them more obvious, but I get asked all the time to double-check my privacy settings with google, I get asked if I want to enable personalized ads when I'm setting up a new Android phone, and the page where you go to turn it off is a single toggle switch.
Yes. That's how capitalism works. You have to compete in the market.
> With micropayments you ask the customer to say yes every time they click a link.
Yes - do you think you should be able to sell them additional products without getting the buy's permission? That "conative penalty" is the difference between an ethical transaction approved by both sides, and a scam, fraud, or strong-arm tactic such as bundling or abusive contracts of adhesion.
> This imposes a cognitive/mood/whatever penalty every time they consider viewing your content
Yes, consumers are empowered to more buy specifically what they want, and nothing more.
Or, you could try a new business model that avoids some of this penalty in new, innovative ways.
> sell an all access pass to the content on 10, 100, or 1000 websites
That bundles together products that someone does not want into the same payment for the products they do want. This is the same market distortion that the cable companies use, which people have been walking away from over the last ~decade.
When buyers are empowered to bypass market distortions like bundling, product prices are able to move closer to their actual value. For some products that value is zero. That's a signal that it's time to find a better product to sell, not a reason to undermine the core mechanism of capitalism by removing consumer choice.
In fact, what I want I already have. The WSJ will bundle (yes, bundle) all its articles into a single monthly fee. The Economist happily does the same.
If, for some reason, these guys decided to switch me to pay-per-article I just wouldn't read them. That's too much of a cost. I can't afford it. Time is too precious for this nonsense.
This is a federated subscription. It tends to be a precursor to media mergers, though. (For example, Bloomberg buying BusinessWeek.)
Toll gating inherently adds friction to a process whose whole damn point is being low friction - marginal costs per person and free to reference around.
A rational solution would be to pay for what you like but people really aren't trained that way or lack the resources relatively. I suspect "microwork" could work better for viewers with little money and even then it is still a friction akin to annoying ads that drives people away.
I see this on HN a LOT, but I am really not sure it's a great model. The thing about ad-supported revenue is that you can still consume the content if you can't afford it.
I'm simplifying a little, but the people who convert on ads are basically subsidizing the content for the rest of us. In our society the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy and the people who fall into the latter group may or not be.
But the point is that with micropayments only the rich have access, and with ad-supported revenue everyone has access. I think most people prefer the latter.
load_ads_unless(payment >= $0.0001)
Whether or not sites would suffer the added complexity probably depends on how much money is on the table.
Do they?
Or is it the people who buy the products, regardless of ad conversion?
I don't think there is a "physical" product here. Mostly Articles and Videos
[citation needed]. Telemarketing used to target people who could only barely afford it, and well educated, well earning folks from the younger generation tend to be tech savvy. The ones who don't know what's up are either old or uneducated (poor.)
That's at least a counter hypothesis if not outright refutation of your claim, since I don't actually know any of the numbers here myself.
Have you ever wanted to buy something small and literally didn't have the money in your account? This is how a huge number of people live, every day, day to day. Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it.
you did claim
> the people that fall into the conversion group are generally wealthy
now you say "yeah okay it sucks ethically", and shift the goal posts to something else entirely, from "wealth" to "they could buy it"? You're playing fast and loose with the exploitation, both financially and mentally, of others.
You can't just ignore the costs of exploitation of people who buy shit they can't afford because their life sucks, and the sheer pollution of minds by advertisement, all the needlessly created "needs", too, because they can't be easily quantified.
> Those people will never have access to micropayment content, because they can't afford it.
So, social services in a country could confirm that a person is actually on welfare. If they are, sites can make certain things free for them, and/or others can donate a small share (10%?) of their micropayments to those who have nothing. That's not a fleshed out suggestion, just the first thing from the top off my head. Allow people to sign up to get a few free articles per month. Before you say it can't be done, show us you thought about it at all. You're also implying that the best or all the essential content would be micropayment content, which is a huge assumption.
My feeling is that the opposite is true, so I'd be happy to see more evidence for one or the other.
A huge percentage of the people who don't buy are doing so not because the ads aren't effective, but because they don't have money to purchase. With a micropayment model those people just won't look at the content, because they don't have money in their account to do so.
These are definitely not the same thing.
Imagine people for whom a dollar is a lot, who have no credit card to link into your system, who have no money to buy your stuff and no way to buy it even if they had the money. Even a $0.01 charge would be impossible because they simply don't have the tool necessary to buy your stuff over the Internet.
I mourn the Internet that included people like them.
Why bother to educate people to donate money when you can just put ads on your content? Also, when 99.9% of content-makers use ads, it means you have a much smaller pool of potential donors, too. When most users on the internet can donate and are used to donating, it becomes much easier to receive donations for any random piece of content.
And second, there's great friction in the existing micro-tip model, because the payment companies take big portions out of the small tips. Plus, there's quite a bit of fragmentation as not everyone has a PayPal account, or Apple account, or Google Contributor account, or Amazon account, etc.
I think cryptocurrencies will eventually solve this issue, if what we've seen so far with Steemit.com, d.tube, and others like them is any indication of that. Once people get into any cryptocurrency at all, the liquidity of tips greatly increases, and it becomes much easier to tip someone with a cryptocurrency. It's still in the super-early stages, though. It could take another 10 years before this becomes more mainstream.
I don't really see any other way for this to work. The Google Contributor or even Flattr models will not work because they are not decentralized and interoperable enough with others like them. You'll never see the majority of people on the web use Google Contributor or Flattr. It needs to be an ecosystem of such services that all integrate and interoperate with no friction and content creators can be paid with any of them. The tipping model needs to be more like email than Apple iMessage, so that everyone can have one and use it with any other similar system.
As a a counter to that, I've been watching 3blue1brown's maths videos on Patreon. Payments get you early access to content, but everything gets posted up eventually and it seems preferable to having ads.
Usually, in most of the business models, your most heavy users tend to subsidize/bear the cost of not so heavy but casual users. At the very core that is. For adverts it fails, since the heavy users are of less value than the casual ones. (how many times you can show the same ad to a user? Also, they are well trained on how to look past the ads).
With gold-like concept, great content is rewarded, and incentivized as well. Also, given the scale of reddit, it works really well (along with ads) but not too sure how well it will work with ad dependent publications.
The problem with one player covering costs for all publishers is the monopoly it brings. Also, sounds more like cable, where there is a cost to access 100s of sites on the internet. Moreover, the users are not convinced to pay for one site they use, do you think they will be convinced to pay/donate for 100s of sites they have not even heard of? If it is forced as a package, then it is exactly like cable.
I am not saying it cant work, but would require a lot of work to convince the users to pay. Also you are covering for not just the server costs, but publication's staff costs, business costs, which vary over time. With just one time lifetime payment, they are in a bound themselves.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/21/is-indias-big...
Micropayments raise difficult tax issues, especially for small sites.
In the United States, for example, if I've counted correctly 34 states require or will require by early 2019 out of state sellers of goods or services into the state to collect, report, and remit that state's sales tax. Another 13 states could do so, but have not yet amended their laws to require it [1]. 4 have no sales tax at all. (I'm counting DC as a state here).
Whether or not a state actually can force this on a given seller depends on whether or not the seller has a "nexus" with the state. 24 states' laws say you have a nexus if you have 200 sales a year in the state or sales in a year totaling $100k.
With micropayments, a site could hit 200 sales in a state easily and have to deal with sales tax, while only earning a small amount of revenue. For example, suppose your site accepted micropayments for reading articles. Say you did $0.05 per article. If 200 people in a "200 or $100k state" bought articles, that would $10 revenue.
Congratulations...you have to collect tax on that! Worse, tax depends on exactly where the person lives in the state. You have to get their address, and lookup the tax based on that. Going just by state, or even just by zip code within the state, is not sufficient as you might collect too little [2]. You also have to file quarterly tax reports, which have a filing fee in most states, which will almost certainly swamp your $10 revenue.
There are services you can use to do this for you. 24 states have banded together and formed a Streamlines Sales Tax group (SST), letting you register and file and remit taxes for all 24 through a single entity, and they have agreed to provide tax data (rates and tax district boundaries) in a common file format. Even better, if you agree to collect tax for all 24 of those states, then the states will pay the costs of you using any of several third party tax services companies (Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, and a few others), including the costs of using those company's APIs to handle all the lookups up and calculation, and the costs of preparing and filing the reports.
Unfortunately, there are some big states that are not part of SST. California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, New York for example. CA, TX, and NY don't collect on out of state sellers (yet), but those others do.
Avalara, TaxCloud, TaxJar, etc., can handle those states for you too, but that won't be free. TaxCloud, for example, if you use their "automatic compliance" plan, which requires collecting tax in all the SST states (so that the SST states pay TaxCloud), you can add non-SST states for 0.5% (less for large volume sellers) of your revenue in each such state, and that will cover address verification, tax lookups, reports, and filing. (No affiliation with TaxCloud. I just happen to be using them for my first attempt to get our site at work to handle out of state US sales taxes--before we had just been collecting for sales in our own state and collecting VAT for EU sales. VAT is vastly simpler since it is per country, and the EU has something equivalent to the US Streamlined Sales Tax called VAT MOSS, so VAT was pretty trivial to deal with without needing an outside service).
Anyway, all of the above probably will dampen interest at a lot of sites. Especially having to collect address information to calculate the tax. That raises privacy issues that I think many will find more troubling than the current ad site privacy issues.
[1] It was only in the middle of this year that it became legal for states to require out of state sellers to collect. In 1992, the Supreme Court had ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to do so, unless Congress specifically authorized them to do so. Congress never did so. But this year, the Supreme Court revisited that issue and decided that it is OK, after all.
[2] Realistically, the state probably won't come after you for the difference or penalties, but it is a risk you need to evaluate.