Google has tried this multiple times with Contributor. They tested a few different models but it never seemed to gain any traction.
Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free.
Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done.
Let me get this straight. The idea is that Google has deliberately constructed several different systems over the years to enable micropayments or subscriptions to replace ads with the plan of them failing so they can use this as evidence that the ad model is unstoppable and that people shouldn't try to replace it? And this was done despite knowing that an alternative would make Google more money? And not a single person who was involved in this deliberate sabotage has ever spoken about it?
Come on.
> Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free.
Newspapers are a dying industry and are filled with ads. TV is filled with ads. Even paid streaming services like Hulu (and soon maybe Netflix) are ad supported. Spotify has an ad-driven free service.
> Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done.
Ad revenue continues to grow every quarter. Yes, Google obviously wants another similarly sized revenue stream and there are very few domains that can generate that kind of revenue. But "the ad debate is long-term done" is just not based in facts.
It's not at all hard for me to believe that a company that has built, shipped, and killed multiple chat apps has also built and killed multiple subscription and micropayments systems. Then, the employees who are pushing adtech can use those failures as evidence that adtech is the only way.
I work at Google. What you say here is not true.
Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.
There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization.
I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.
Give me something approaching YouTube premium and I'll go for it. Does Scroll support enough sites ye-- oh no Twitter bought them and gutted it.
Invited and signed up on 2015-04-28, service ended 2017-01-17. I had a $2 monthly reoccurring charge to fund the account, but I just accrued a balance, so I cancelled the charge in 2015-11-15 and that balance lasted until the service ended. In the final email they sent they included some stats:
> Thanks for being a Contributor! Your contribution of $14.01 helped to fund 351 sites! A refund for your remaining balance of -$0.02 is being processed and your account is now closed.
I don't remember it being particularly noticeable, and I think on some sites it would just replace the ads with a banner saying something like "Thanks for being a contributor". I also recall there being tiers / budgets you could set.
Is this the upside or the downside of ad blockers? So hard to decide...