Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

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    "Viewing ads is part of the deal if users want content to 
    be free, says Freitas."

I would imagine that a log of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). Any site owners complaining about ad-blockers is missing the opportunity to detect ad-blocking and try to sell that person an ad-free version of their service. Ideally this service would be a pay per view model, where I pay a fixed amount (like 5 cents to 10 cents per article read) or where I pay a fixed subscription fee (like $1 to $2 a month for unlimited articles).

I did the math a while back with NY Times online advertising revenue and I remember the value gained from non-paying users to be around 70 cents per month per user. I don't know about you, but I would happily pay 70 cents or even a full dollar or two for access to the NY Times ad free. Unfortunately, when a site does introduce an ad-free paid version they try to extract like 5x or more of the revenue they gain from advertising. I don't know about others, but when I encounter that type of gouging, I just look elsewhere for my news.

So Mssrs. Publisher, please offer a reasonable paid ad-free alternative or quit your bitching. Every ad you serve is an annoying distraction that distracts me, irritates me and slows down my browsing experience both in terms of bytes download and lines of javascript executed.

I am completely within my right to block all outgoing requests to any host I deem negative to my web browsing experience via my /etc/hosts/ file. If you happen to serve ads from those sites and I can't view them because I block them, that isn't my problem it is yours. Want me to pay, give me the ability to do so and be fair with your prices.

So long as you don't offer a paid service that I can buy and you support yourself via ads, you are not really considering me to be your customer, but your product. You are not in a position to complain when your product doesn't consent to being sold.

>I would imagine that a [lot] of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources).

But that's just it. Even if they could make money off a dollar-per-person-per-month model --even if they could pay all their bills and then some-- they certainly wouldn't make the switch. Ad sales always have the potential for growth, even if the size of your audience is the same. Offering base subscriptions puts a hard floor (edit: ceiling, not floor) on the amount of money you can make with any set number of viewers.

While that's true, that's only the case for sites you regularly visit. If you get linked to a random site or blog post from HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, or what have you, your first thought is not going to be "gosh, I really want to pay for a subscription to this site". In fact, if you run into a paywall, you'll probably just bounce back to the site that linked you to the article and ask for the article text or a non-paywalled version of the same.

Maybe people would be happy (well, happier) with extreme micropayments. The use case you describe should be a rounding error as far as my bank account is concerned, but enough when multiplied by reasonable traffic to sustain online publishing.

Does anyone know the actual value of a single ad impression?

Depends on a large number of things. As an advertiser you can pay based on location on the site (e.g. the advertiser will pay more for a banner than a little side unit below the fold).

Some adverts are pay per view, pay per click, some are commission based (referrer gets a cut). Sometimes it'll be a few dollars for a few thousand views, other times it'll be a few hundred dollars for a week's visibility.

For click throughs, fractions of a cent to a few cents I guess. Commission is obviously worth a lot more (a few percent of the purchase price typically), but harder to convert users.

Have a look at buysellads to get an idea of how this works. Unsurprisingly Adblock has a field day if you try and view the website with it turned on ;)

> Does anyone know the actual value of a single ad impression?

This is often summarized as RPM (revenue per mille) or eRPM (effective RPM), i.e. how much income a site's ads bring in per 1000 page impressions, regardless of how it's paid out (per-click, per-view, per affiliate purchase, etc.). And that varies hugely between sites, anywhere from below $1 to above $100. A typical case is around $5-10 for many publishers, I believe. So that's about 0.5-1.0¢ per page view.

so why don't they charge me 10..20¢ per article, with an option for $x (or $xx if they publish a lot) unlimited monthly subscription, should I like them. Seems like 10-20 times more profitable, yet a rounding error.

Micropayments seem to have had trouble getting off the ground. It's not a lot of money to pay a few pennies per article, but if you put up a paywall and make people pay it, they seem to go elsewhere. Either people are too cheap to pay it, or the interfaces are too clunky, or some mixture of both.

Subscriptions do work for some sites, but from what I can tell most have trouble selling enough subscriptions to cover what advertising would pay for.

I suspect the clunky interfaces are to blame: if the paywall was only 1 click ('confirm $0.1 purchase') instead of a long long form to fill most people would just click.

Even that is too clunky, IMO. I really liked the model that Readability tried to pioneer: pay a monthly subscription, view websites, at the end of the month, all money paid is distributed amongst publishers in proportion to views. Readability's purpose meant that 'view websites' was actually a more complicated step involving explicit user choice, but I don't see why this same model couldn't be used with a set of 'certified' publishers and a central authority. The common link could be 'publishers who reject advertising'.

It's a problem of tracking the payments and keeping track of everything at that point.

If it's 2 dollars a month for 10 or so sites that isn't that much money but setting up 10 different credit card automatic payments is a pain in the ass. Then I lose a card and everything breaks.

If we had a nice model to aggregate articles on one central site with profit sharing from subscriptions then it might be better.

... and thus another feudal aggregator platform is born.

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