Yeah, the main issue with the "scheme" is "works with your Google account to remove ads". So not only am I paying, I'm also inconvenienced by having to have a Google account and I have to be permanently logged in.
This is online music all over again. I'm not being presented with an option that is superior to the unprofitable solution I'm currently using. As long as using adblockers is a better experience than paying for content, it simply isn't going to work.
im not sure this is a good idea (as a consumer) anything which injects extra buying decisions in my life seems like a bad idea. Imagine having to wonder if I really wanted to spend that 0.01 cents on the next page of popular mechanics or not. I'd rather pay more for say, unlimited monthly access
This has been the predominant reason for micro-transaction services failing in the past - when something costs more than zero there has to be a conscious decision made on the part of the consumer, and that decision making process is often enough of a barrier to stop them purchasing. For something very cheap the financial cost itself may be irrelevant but the cognitive cost of making a decision definitely isn't.
That problem is compounded by the fact a very low cost equates to a very low value in the mind of the purchaser. This manifests as a thought process like "if this only costs 0.01c then it's probably not worth buying", and the user leaves. That's hard to work around.
As far as I'm aware no one has ever implemented micro-transactions successfully. The best example to date, which is mobile gaming in-app purchases, isn't really micro-transactions in the usual sense. In a game like Candy Crush you buy tools to help you advance more quickly so you don't have to grind through a hard level dozens of times. You're really buying your own time (so you can play the game less, which is kind of weird really). Time is something people value, so they're very happy to pay. The model doesn't really apply to other purchases.
That's the thing that really annoys me about human psychology (to which I myself am of course not immune). I don't subscribe to any sites that offer subscriptions because I rarely visit any one particular site to make it worth it (I rarely, if ever, run into, for example, the NYT free article limit). I block all ads, but I certainly wouldn't mind paying a reasonable per-article price all the same.
By not offering per-article pricing, they're actually _losing_ money from me, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if going to per-article pricing would result in less revenue than monthly subscriptions overall.
The problem is that most (all?) site subscriptions now are all-or-nothing, and even if you do like a site, you probably like several, and paying $10-$30 per month (or whatever) each for even 5 different sites starts adding up real fast.
If sites were to offer an "article bank", it might be more compelling: you put in $X and that buys you Y articles, which you can read over the span of days, months, or years. But no one seems to be doing that, probably because they believe the economics of breakage is better.
Perhaps read a book. Just visit your local real or virtual library.
My point is not that articles on the internet are useless. But there is a certain tunnel vision in these discussions where we forget there are other _even better_ ways to spend our time.
Whether you want education or entertainment, paying $x/month to Google is not the right way to achieve it. Go paintballing instead.
Not disputing that. But reading HN is something that I can do during work while waiting on a job to complete. Reading a book is much harder because the information is not quite as bite-sized and thus harder to ingest if you have only five minutes at a time. And paintballing is a whole other level of impossible during work time. :)
Good idea, extremely poor execution. Nobody is going to want to use it if different sites are charging you different amounts per page. People want predictable bills.
I want to be able to pay more for quality content and pay less for buzzfeed articles. I want content creators to be able to charge based on the the content they are producing.
I prefer a world where I can stop in a fine dining restaurant or a fast-food place, get the experience I want and be charged appropriately. I don't want a top of the line steak-house to have to find a way to serve my meal, while only receiving McDonald's priced payments. That's the problem with the current web.
Agreed. As long as it's clear what I'm going to pay before I open each article, I have no problem paying more for an article from a trusted news source than from a tabloid.
Where are the steakhouses? That's my problem with the current state of the paid content web; it seems to be a race to the bottom, with few exceptions (and the exceptions in my experience seem to be mostly enthusiasts doing it not for a living).
Having choices is all well and good, but I worry that making the pricing hard to predict will reduce the reach of this feature. But I guess they are only expecting a small subset of users to use it anyway.
Why not let the users choose what they want to pay? Because Google needs this to be net-positive for their revenue, but it would be a much better web if there was some kind of mechanism to automatically give small amounts of money (say 1/10th of a cent per page view) to site owners.
It's interesting you mention Buzzfeed because actually this price per page per site model doesn't work for them, at all - you'd need to be even more granular. They have both high quality journalistic content and those viral listicles all on buzzfeed.com - it'd be impossible to use a flat price per page sensibly.
Remember when we were sold that ads payed for content so that could be free? Now you can pay extra to get ads anyway, the non Google networks don't care.
The web is turning into cable, and it only took a few years.
So, this is kinda like Blendle, but for the open web. I'm not too sure if this'll fly.
Personally, there's a certain flinch, a certain decision before opening any article in Blendle as I evaluate if it's worth the price mentioned. I'm sure the same will manifest itself, perhaps in uglier forms if I set out to use Contributor. Do you guys think so?
But the issue is that for AdSense, Google solicits ad buyers, removes scams, and distributes traffic. If you're paying to not see ads, it's unclear what good Google is doing compared to just paying the publisher.
It's not zero-value, since the transaction costs of paying every publisher are crippling. But there's no definitive reason to look to Google for this value.
Also what I thought. If this starts becoming widely used, then Google would be essentially getting a share out of the tip that readers would be giving to publishers, only for the service of "not showing ads and redistributing money".
I think sites are still free to offer "register and pay us to see no ads" model, like many already do. Implementing that will cost them money too (especially dealing with accepting payments), or they can just use Google's implementation and just give Google their bank account information, Google takes care of the rest.
Whether it comes from Google, or someone else I believe this is the only way the web survives.
Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content.
In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the value/quality of the content.
I wish it weren't google (who also already owns advertising), but someone large is the only one who can make it happen.
A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.
And it has to come from the ad networks, because the infrastructure to make this work is already there - hopefully the ultimate form of this wouldn't require site admins to really do anything special, other than twiddling a few settings in their Google advertising accounts.
The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That is a truth. You need to already have the infra to make this change. I think it'd be too much to both successfully grow a business and try to change browsing behavior at once.
> ...The more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
Not necessarily a bad thing. If the value of adverts drops, and this is a well known alternative it provides even more incentive to move to model where there is still money to be made. Not to mention there probably is a bit of "recapture". Of people who ran ad-blockers for the experience (ie zero-revenue providers) who are willing to pay for content. Similar to people who torrented, but instead became Netflix/Hulu subscribers when it became an option.
> * And it has to come from the ad networks, because the infrastructure to make this work is already there*
That really chaps my ass. These are the people keep shitting in the well, then installed a pipe to inject feces directly into the well and the groundwater - and you're telling us that the only way to deliver disinfectant and filtration systems is through that pipe, and we might as well keep using their system?
> The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That does become a problem if Google is the only game in town, and you're inexplicably banned from their platform, which does tend to happen.
If the time taken to read the buzzfeed article is the same as the high quality report, it is worth the same to an advertiser. The high quality report does good for the organization in terms of retention, a reader is likely to come back and read it if he finds good content.
Market segmentation also routinely leads some advertisers to target the kind of people who prefer high quality reporting. Economist vs Daily Mail, as an analogy.
What you're describing is exactly the problem. The high quality report has to hope to survive on secondary effects (which don't work), unlike the junk-food reporting whose cost is paid for by the single viewing.
This is what every online newspaper has been saying for over a decade as they saw this problem approaching and didn't have a way to solve it.
You can't survive this way in the extremely efficient web.
Either top quality content needs to be able to pay for itself (ie charge more), or you're left with only two successful business models: make junk-food content, or off load your content creation to people willing to do it essentially for free as a hobby.
Neither of those are good destinations for the web. They work in niches, but not across the board. Ex. I don't want my newspaper to consist of only volunteer journalists doing a bit here and there in their spare time.
I was a Google Contributor user/paying subscriber for quite a while. It works to some degree. But Brave is superior and is the best thing to happen to the web since ads.
>A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.
It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.
The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikipedia was written by unpaid but enthusiastic curators, and no one got paid for uploading popular Youtube videos until long after it was already a staple of the internet.
I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best. It's still the best. After all, you're here reading the comments on hacker news, which we are all freely contributing too with no expectation of compensation.
Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. It'll move to different kinds of websites depending on how people want to access content at the time, but it will still be here, just as it always has been. What will vanish is all the mediocre spacefilling bullshit. The stuff so dull you _must_ pay someone to write it because no one would do it for fun or kudos.
Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?
Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?
Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?
Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.
In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.
I'm sure Putin will be very happy to subsidize lots of reporting for Americans coming from Russia Today! There all the content you want! It might not be good for our democracy, but that may not have been included in the problem statement. :-)
Assuming this is serious: actually, no. Academics are ultimately paid by a mix of university tuition fees (paid by students) and research grants (which may come from tax-funded entities, but more generally come from charities and philanthropic orgs).
But then it's not free. It's just that somebody else is paying for it. And that quickly becomes hard, when your readership grows. Especially if you are just starting out. Even Wikipedia was at first sponsored by a private, for-profit organisation.
They're not - and that's one of the big problems facing our civic society. It's just not economically possible to write level-headed content at any real scale.
> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines...
Yes the internet came about because of academics and hobbyists playing around in their spare time. We as people who often came up during that time have a habit of over-weighting that. The internet is not a side project anymore. The internet is the future of every industry - and absolutely the future of every content creation industry.
You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.
>You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.
You're implying that it's in some fashion my job to care about those industries.
I don't care what happens to buzzfeed, and I don't care what happens to the wallstreet journal. /My life/ and /my needs/ and met regardless of their existence, so I really don't give a shit whether they are sustainable or not.
Do you care what happens to your newspaper? Because it's not the Buzzfeeds of the world who are suffering because people like you feel entitled to free content. It's the publishers who can actually hold our institutions and leaders to account.
Not really, they're owned by long serving members of one of the major parties. Their impartiality is directly proportional to the time until the next Icelandic election.
> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines
You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.
> I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free
Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.
> Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.
That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.
"It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about."
As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.
However, you can't look at something amazing like this:
... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.
I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.
I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.
>People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.
I don't believe that applies to even a tiny fraction of people. I work with a LOT of world-class scientists (biotech). I can tell you outright that after they leave work, the LAST thing they want to do is to spend hours updating Wikipedia or arguing in forum posts about scientific minutia. (Yes, it might be different in pure academia, where people love to publish, but even there, they're already getting compensated)
So even if we take your argument ast face value, people who enjoy sharing _ALSO_ enjoy getting paid. To take a relevant example, the primary reason Linux didn't fail (like most hobby projects do) was because companies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay people to actually write code. You want to write a AAA game, a web browser, a compiler, an OS or any other software tool that has hundreds of millions of lines of code and can compete with the leading products, while not spending a dime? Good luck and god speed is what I'd say. So while in principle, I might agree with your proposition that one man MAY give away the fruits of their labor, and that those fruits might be very very delicious, the world is running out of things people can do in their spare time for free that is also worth looking at. Please note that I'm not talking about hacking out a tiny tool over the weekend. I'm talking about sustained efforts to produce something of value.
> The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best.
You need to provide a _LOT_ of evidence if you want people to believe such an outlandish claim.
There's something I'm working on that's essentially a paypal button, but acts as a little widget on the site.
I'm still in the testing phases of it, but a lot of people that I've talked to have said "Yes, I'd pay $1-3 to a site that I visit regularly if it didn't have ads"
https://www.trussapp.com/ for the curious (it's still just a hair away from being a beta product, so keep that in mind)
I feel like I'm going to remember visiting this website for years to come. Either because this is will be future, or this is one of the biggest bets Google has made and failed.
I wonder what kind of reaction site owners will have to this; I can think of a lot of smaller sites or forums that rely on Google ads + premium access with no ads for revenue.
I use uBlock too - it's great. Sometimes a site will have an obnoxious popover or something that's usually relatively easy to create a rule for, but generally it works, and in combination with Ghostery I'm confident it's protecting me from most tracking, which is what I really want to avoid.
However it is an ethical dilemma, especially in a World where Contributor exists. Content is not free, hosting is not free, development and the application of security patches is not free. Currently sites are monetised using ads, and by using uBlock you're getting for free something that is not free. You are also inevitably causing people who do not have uBlock to 'pay' more, or contributing to putting the site out of business.
While Contributor obviously doesn't prevent Google from tracking your every step, and I'll still take steps to avoid data harvesting, I'll be buying it the moment it's available on any of the sites I read regularly.
I strongly disagree that contributors aren't providing content 'for free'. I request a stream of bytes from them, they provide a stream of bytes free of charge. Its up to me how I want to display those bytes, and I'm not stealing anything or breaking any contract by choosing not to render every single one.
Well, I don't have an ethical dilemma. I would absolutely remove the extension the moment I can read or watch something without getting covered by full-volume-autoplay-ads and flashy popups.
Start by respecting my ears, my eyes, my laptop, and my time, then we can have an "ethical" discussion.
Haha, precisely. On HN, a common idea is that if companies offered ad-free versions for a price, people would pay. But why would you? You can get the ad-free versions for free.
We'll see, I suppose. But most people will just take the approach of the person I replied to. If ad-blocking takes off, we're going to come to a new content winter.
Prisoner's dilemma: If only one ad-supported site switches to pay-per-view or a subscription model, people will go to the other ad-supported sites instead. It would take all of them to switch.
And if that happens, the experience would be strictly worse for the consumer. Every individual is going to have access to less content because they're not going to subscribe to every site that might conceivably have an insightful article at some point.
What does work is patronage-supported content, but only for certain types of content. For example, if Youtube were to remove ads tomorrow, I would expect most channels with original content to survive on crowdsourced patronage (i.e. Patreon or similar), but I would definitely not expect Patreon to be able to support investigative journalism. (It would be great if it were! But I don't see it happening.)
It's not exactly like torrenting music, but a bit (requires some tech skills, ambiguous morality) And at least in my circle of friends, Spotify pretty much killed that.
even assuming 100% buy-in for content providers for google pass as an ad replacement, it doesn't replace all the use cases of a decent ad-blocker (like ublock origin). For me, I block newrelic, google analytics, segment, and a whole bunch of non-advertising related sites that slow down the web. Doing this more than halves the load time and download requirements of just about any major site.
I absolutely agree, but you have to acknowledge that these are mostly things that only highly technical people care about. In the Torrent analogy, this would be like saying you like your music in lossless FLAC format, or DRM-free.
Do you really think that Google cares about somebody's niche blockchain tech? Google Contributor is older than the whole ICO fad and has just been overhauled.
Their own ads of course fit the "standards" that they themselves designed.
Any other way and they'd only harm their own business model. This is a defensive move against full-scale ad-blockers, nothing more.
This doesn't seem that useful to me as only a small number of sites (none of which I visit) support it.
Hypothetical question: If I were allowed to bid on my own ad impressions - and if I won an auction, no ad would be shown - how much would it cost a month for me to see no adverts? (I realize this is heavily dependent upon the type of sites that are involved, so I guess take the average HN user as an example).
The thing is, for Google we have CPI = CPC • CTR. Which means: if you never click an ad, no money ever changes hands. Thankfully our usage of the web is subsidized by those who do click ;-)
This is certainly relevant to the ad-blocker debates. Counting up "lost revenue" at all-user clickthrough rates is a fairly dirty trick when people running adblockers almost certainly have exceptionally low clickthrough rates.
(It's a lot like the creative accounting around media piracy, actually. Assuming that 100% of people who pay $0 for a torrented movie would have paid $10 instead is absolutely deranged.)
Fair points, but... The whole point of contributor seems to be the warm fuzzy feeling that you still contribute, without seeing ads. At what level is the feeling warm and fuzzy enough? That, in my opinion, would be the correct price for contributor.
So each ad gets a quality score based on clicks. After a few days of no clicks, your own ads would be pulled for a higher quality and more profitable ad would replace it.
Maybe if Google went with "Pay us $10 per month for us not to show you any AdSense anywhere on the web", this would be successful. In this form, I highly doubt it.
Sounds a bit like good 'ol protection money, though ("You don't want some malware on your pc, do you?"[0]). A business classic but not exactly what you'd want from a tech company.
This is protection money from the user's POV. Protection against malware delivered to user through ads. Particular site that displays the ads is utterly irrelevant here.
My comment, as TeMPOraL points out, was looking at it from the user's perspective and it was a little tongue in cheek. However, google certainly is aware that its AdSense service has been used to spread malware (see my link above)
Google is the one ad network I'd expect to at least make an effort to scan for and filter malware-infested ads, for one reason: They're a household name and they have other products that actual consumers use.
If there were a headline tomorrow that some random ad network distributed malware onto consumer's computers, everyone would say "never heard of them before" and move on. If the headline were "Google spreads malware onto consumer's computers", it's reasonable to expect that at least a few people would get mad (such as those affected by the malware) and stop using some other Google product(s). So that's a risk that Google has to consider when asking whether malware scanning is a justified expense.
Of course, this doesn't take into account the follow-up question whether malware scanning at the ad-network level (or anywhere, really) offers any sort of protection. (It doesn't appear to be effective, as evidenced by your link.) I, for one, have not whitelisted Google ads (or anything else) in any of my ad/tracking/malware blockers.
>Google is the one ad network I'd expect to at least make an effort to scan for and filter malware-infested ads, for one reason: They're a household name and they have other products that actual consumers use.
> Maybe if Google went with "Pay us $10 per month for us not to show you any AdSense anywhere on the web", this would be successful
And more importantly, with the guarantee of "no tracking whatsoever" (rather than just not 'showing' ads). Then, some of my friends would start trusting Google again (and are already willing to pay for something like that).
I think GP means that you're signed in with Google, so you have a cookie linking your browser to your account, but Google does not do anything with the metadata from the requests that include the cookie of a paying contributor.
They already have my sign in information. When I say no tracking, I mean nothing other than that. Like what I search, which sites I go to, which videos I watch on YouTube, or mining my photographs for more advertising hints, and what not.
So, if I'm a publisher, I have a deal with Google to pay me for space on my website. You want to pay Google in such a way that they don't know you're visiting my website. Your payment to Google must make sure there are no ads on my website for you. So now Google can't pay me for the space on my website. Why would I even sign up with Google if they aren't going to pay me for the space?
The OP is not suggesting a technical solution but a contractual one based upon law and trust. The hypothetical scenario is that if she pays Google then Google shows no adverts and does not log her activities for beyond the bare minimum to pay the site its share, Google does not use the logs for other purposes and deletes the logs as soon as legally possible.
I understand your sarcasm. I personally use all of Google's services heavily, but I'll explain my friend's point of view which is not completely unreasonable IMO:
Eventually, you can't know if Google or any company is secretly doing something evil 'against' their own Terms of Services and Privacy Policy, so to be fair to Google we assume that it will stick to them at any given point of time. But, you never know when those privacy policies will change overnight, when the government will change the laws overnight forcing companies to give all the information they have, or when the company will be attacked leaking all data. Also, according to Google's privacy policy there are always some "trusted partners" to which they share the data - whose security measures no one knows anything about. So, the logic is a lot can be done if you have the data. But if you just don't collect it (and it's clearly written in the Privacy Policy), governments/hackers/future evil buyers of the company can't do anything.
> I wish they would launch this; I happily pay $10/month for YouTube Red right now for exactly this.
And here I wish I could pay for YouTube Red.
From what I've heard, YouTube Red users get Google Play Music for free. Ironically, I pay Google more than $10 a month for Google Play Music alone, but they won't let me pay for YouTube Red, even if I want to.
Why? God knows.
If they're going to be the gatekeepers to paid online content, I'd be furious if they botch that one up too with the same kind of regional discrimination and limitations.
And knowing Google though, that's probably exactly what they're going to do. Because that's what they always do.
It's not a distribution issue - he already listens to the same music through Google Music scubscription as would be provided by Google Red, if it were available.
Google Red can still impose territorial restrictions.
It's not Google Red that is imposing territorial restrictions. After all, Google Red doesn't own the copyright to the music in question, and the copyright owners get to make those decisions.
They did that with the previous iteration of Contributor. You can choose your monthly pay, and you'll pay for every AdSense ad on the pages you visited. I chose $2 and I got partial refund every month (probably because on desktop I also have uBlock, so this is mainly for mobile for me), and I got ads replaced by cute cat images. I really liked that Contributor.
Wow, how much does this have to do with their announcement to add ad blocking to Chrome (only for other networks ads, I'm sure)? How have they not attracted regulator action yet? You'd think the EU would be all over that kind of behaviour.
This appears to be a new iteration. According to this Android Police post [1], Contributor was discontinued in late 2016, with Google saying that an improved version would become available in "early 2017."
One has to mention the Brave browser for comparison: https://brave.com/ -- similar concept but using Bitcoin. The accounting at https://brave.com/publishers.html looks like you as the reader can DECIDE whether you want to issue micropayments to a particular site or not, and publishers don't have to explicitly opt-in beforehand (thereby instantly including all of the web). A publisher won't be able to charge different prices, but a publisher with goodwill (hence users opting on their own to pay that publisher) will make money. This seems like a better execution.
It's not that Google "should" be the middleman in this, it's that Google "wants" to be be the middleman in this, since you paying for a subscription directly cuts them out of that sweet ad revenue.
I'm not sure how much value I derive from ad-funded websites, besides maybe Google Search. There was a time most websites were free and run for the good of the community, not for profit and not as a full-time job. I could buy my high-quality content in the form of magazines and newspapers. Maybe that's the paradigm worth investigating - community generated, ad-free content on the web but paid-for, bundled (magazine-style) high quality content for sale. Delivered not through the browser but through some other, open platform (think zines, PDFs, epub/mobi).
For me, this is what an ideal web would look like. My ad-blocker would barely get a workout, and I'd happily pay for bundled (not pay-walled, bundled, downloadable) content as I did for many years with magazines.
No-one wants high quality content to disappear, but advertising and web paywalls are not the only options.
A little concerned, I'm bootstrapping my own version of what they have built, but with a clearer charging model and no need to block Ads IMO. If you care about blocking ads you are already doing it.
It'll be launching in literally a week or two... it's very simple to integrate and comes with it's own Wordpress plugin (and instructions to integrate your own CMS).
What advice do people have about this per article payment space; I have a load of ideas I want to try so maybe while Google concentrate on ads I'll be able to look at various optional payment models.
Initially I want to just charge a flat 5% + whatever Stripe fees you use to top up your wallet, but I'm concerned I'll get a lot of noise/scaling issues if I don't charge a monthly fee? Thoughts?
It's not finished yet! Just Stripe Connect (50% done) and testing everything and a couple of small features that probably shouldn't be in version 1. Send me an email (see profile) or check paypip.com in the coming weeks...
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadYeah right...
I don't mind advertising at all.
This is online music all over again. I'm not being presented with an option that is superior to the unprofitable solution I'm currently using. As long as using adblockers is a better experience than paying for content, it simply isn't going to work.
That problem is compounded by the fact a very low cost equates to a very low value in the mind of the purchaser. This manifests as a thought process like "if this only costs 0.01c then it's probably not worth buying", and the user leaves. That's hard to work around.
As far as I'm aware no one has ever implemented micro-transactions successfully. The best example to date, which is mobile gaming in-app purchases, isn't really micro-transactions in the usual sense. In a game like Candy Crush you buy tools to help you advance more quickly so you don't have to grind through a hard level dozens of times. You're really buying your own time (so you can play the game less, which is kind of weird really). Time is something people value, so they're very happy to pay. The model doesn't really apply to other purchases.
By not offering per-article pricing, they're actually _losing_ money from me, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if going to per-article pricing would result in less revenue than monthly subscriptions overall.
Then buy subscription to sites you like.
Dont give google a percentage of everything.
Credit card processors, the post office, transportation companies. ISPs, kinda.
"A percentage of everything" is another way of saying "in the infrastructure business".
If sites were to offer an "article bank", it might be more compelling: you put in $X and that buys you Y articles, which you can read over the span of days, months, or years. But no one seems to be doing that, probably because they believe the economics of breakage is better.
Articles on the internet exist primarily as free entertainment.
If I am going to spend money on entertainment, there are much more fulfilling options.
[1] Read: Addiction. :)
My point is not that articles on the internet are useless. But there is a certain tunnel vision in these discussions where we forget there are other _even better_ ways to spend our time.
Whether you want education or entertainment, paying $x/month to Google is not the right way to achieve it. Go paintballing instead.
I want to be able to pay more for quality content and pay less for buzzfeed articles. I want content creators to be able to charge based on the the content they are producing.
I prefer a world where I can stop in a fine dining restaurant or a fast-food place, get the experience I want and be charged appropriately. I don't want a top of the line steak-house to have to find a way to serve my meal, while only receiving McDonald's priced payments. That's the problem with the current web.
Why not let the users choose what they want to pay? Because Google needs this to be net-positive for their revenue, but it would be a much better web if there was some kind of mechanism to automatically give small amounts of money (say 1/10th of a cent per page view) to site owners.
It's not zero-value, since the transaction costs of paying every publisher are crippling. But there's no definitive reason to look to Google for this value.
Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content.
In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the value/quality of the content.
I wish it weren't google (who also already owns advertising), but someone large is the only one who can make it happen.
A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.
The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That is a truth. You need to already have the infra to make this change. I think it'd be too much to both successfully grow a business and try to change browsing behavior at once.
> ...The more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
Not necessarily a bad thing. If the value of adverts drops, and this is a well known alternative it provides even more incentive to move to model where there is still money to be made. Not to mention there probably is a bit of "recapture". Of people who ran ad-blockers for the experience (ie zero-revenue providers) who are willing to pay for content. Similar to people who torrented, but instead became Netflix/Hulu subscribers when it became an option.
That really chaps my ass. These are the people keep shitting in the well, then installed a pipe to inject feces directly into the well and the groundwater - and you're telling us that the only way to deliver disinfectant and filtration systems is through that pipe, and we might as well keep using their system?
> The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That does become a problem if Google is the only game in town, and you're inexplicably banned from their platform, which does tend to happen.
This is what every online newspaper has been saying for over a decade as they saw this problem approaching and didn't have a way to solve it. You can't survive this way in the extremely efficient web.
Either top quality content needs to be able to pay for itself (ie charge more), or you're left with only two successful business models: make junk-food content, or off load your content creation to people willing to do it essentially for free as a hobby.
Neither of those are good destinations for the web. They work in niches, but not across the board. Ex. I don't want my newspaper to consist of only volunteer journalists doing a bit here and there in their spare time.
I was a Google Contributor user/paying subscriber for quite a while. It works to some degree. But Brave is superior and is the best thing to happen to the web since ads.
Ads are the worst thing that happened to the web.
It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.
The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikipedia was written by unpaid but enthusiastic curators, and no one got paid for uploading popular Youtube videos until long after it was already a staple of the internet.
I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best. It's still the best. After all, you're here reading the comments on hacker news, which we are all freely contributing too with no expectation of compensation.
Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. It'll move to different kinds of websites depending on how people want to access content at the time, but it will still be here, just as it always has been. What will vanish is all the mediocre spacefilling bullshit. The stuff so dull you _must_ pay someone to write it because no one would do it for fun or kudos.
Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?
Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?
Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?
Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.
In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.
Yes the internet came about because of academics and hobbyists playing around in their spare time. We as people who often came up during that time have a habit of over-weighting that. The internet is not a side project anymore. The internet is the future of every industry - and absolutely the future of every content creation industry.
You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.
You're implying that it's in some fashion my job to care about those industries.
I don't care what happens to buzzfeed, and I don't care what happens to the wallstreet journal. /My life/ and /my needs/ and met regardless of their existence, so I really don't give a shit whether they are sustainable or not.
Not really, they're owned by long serving members of one of the major parties. Their impartiality is directly proportional to the time until the next Icelandic election.
You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.
> I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free
Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.
> Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.
That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.
I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.
As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.
However, you can't look at something amazing like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/us/turkey-pro...
... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.
I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.
I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.
I don't believe that applies to even a tiny fraction of people. I work with a LOT of world-class scientists (biotech). I can tell you outright that after they leave work, the LAST thing they want to do is to spend hours updating Wikipedia or arguing in forum posts about scientific minutia. (Yes, it might be different in pure academia, where people love to publish, but even there, they're already getting compensated)
So even if we take your argument ast face value, people who enjoy sharing _ALSO_ enjoy getting paid. To take a relevant example, the primary reason Linux didn't fail (like most hobby projects do) was because companies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay people to actually write code. You want to write a AAA game, a web browser, a compiler, an OS or any other software tool that has hundreds of millions of lines of code and can compete with the leading products, while not spending a dime? Good luck and god speed is what I'd say. So while in principle, I might agree with your proposition that one man MAY give away the fruits of their labor, and that those fruits might be very very delicious, the world is running out of things people can do in their spare time for free that is also worth looking at. Please note that I'm not talking about hacking out a tiny tool over the weekend. I'm talking about sustained efforts to produce something of value.
> The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best.
You need to provide a _LOT_ of evidence if you want people to believe such an outlandish claim.
I'm still in the testing phases of it, but a lot of people that I've talked to have said "Yes, I'd pay $1-3 to a site that I visit regularly if it didn't have ads"
https://www.trussapp.com/ for the curious (it's still just a hair away from being a beta product, so keep that in mind)
However it is an ethical dilemma, especially in a World where Contributor exists. Content is not free, hosting is not free, development and the application of security patches is not free. Currently sites are monetised using ads, and by using uBlock you're getting for free something that is not free. You are also inevitably causing people who do not have uBlock to 'pay' more, or contributing to putting the site out of business.
While Contributor obviously doesn't prevent Google from tracking your every step, and I'll still take steps to avoid data harvesting, I'll be buying it the moment it's available on any of the sites I read regularly.
I've done a few PayPal tips but it's just too clunky / unfit for purpose.
Start by respecting my ears, my eyes, my laptop, and my time, then we can have an "ethical" discussion.
And if that happens, the experience would be strictly worse for the consumer. Every individual is going to have access to less content because they're not going to subscribe to every site that might conceivably have an insightful article at some point.
What does work is patronage-supported content, but only for certain types of content. For example, if Youtube were to remove ads tomorrow, I would expect most channels with original content to survive on crowdsourced patronage (i.e. Patreon or similar), but I would definitely not expect Patreon to be able to support investigative journalism. (It would be great if it were! But I don't see it happening.)
I even pay for three different e-mail services and cloud storage.
If a site doesn't offer an ad-free experience? I block their ads.
I think BAT makes more sense than Google's response to waning ad bucks. None of it has got off the ground so age doesn't mean too much to me.
Hypothetical question: If I were allowed to bid on my own ad impressions - and if I won an auction, no ad would be shown - how much would it cost a month for me to see no adverts? (I realize this is heavily dependent upon the type of sites that are involved, so I guess take the average HN user as an example).
https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/
(It's a lot like the creative accounting around media piracy, actually. Assuming that 100% of people who pay $0 for a torrented movie would have paid $10 instead is absolutely deranged.)
[0] http://www.businessinsider.de/android-malware-spreads-using-...
If there were a headline tomorrow that some random ad network distributed malware onto consumer's computers, everyone would say "never heard of them before" and move on. If the headline were "Google spreads malware onto consumer's computers", it's reasonable to expect that at least a few people would get mad (such as those affected by the malware) and stop using some other Google product(s). So that's a risk that Google has to consider when asking whether malware scanning is a justified expense.
Of course, this doesn't take into account the follow-up question whether malware scanning at the ad-network level (or anywhere, really) offers any sort of protection. (It doesn't appear to be effective, as evidenced by your link.) I, for one, have not whitelisted Google ads (or anything else) in any of my ad/tracking/malware blockers.
They have already served up malware from ads: https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network...
And more importantly, with the guarantee of "no tracking whatsoever" (rather than just not 'showing' ads). Then, some of my friends would start trusting Google again (and are already willing to pay for something like that).
I don't think trust depends on how much you pay somebody who you do not trust. But I may be wrong.
Eventually, you can't know if Google or any company is secretly doing something evil 'against' their own Terms of Services and Privacy Policy, so to be fair to Google we assume that it will stick to them at any given point of time. But, you never know when those privacy policies will change overnight, when the government will change the laws overnight forcing companies to give all the information they have, or when the company will be attacked leaking all data. Also, according to Google's privacy policy there are always some "trusted partners" to which they share the data - whose security measures no one knows anything about. So, the logic is a lot can be done if you have the data. But if you just don't collect it (and it's clearly written in the Privacy Policy), governments/hackers/future evil buyers of the company can't do anything.
And here I wish I could pay for YouTube Red.
From what I've heard, YouTube Red users get Google Play Music for free. Ironically, I pay Google more than $10 a month for Google Play Music alone, but they won't let me pay for YouTube Red, even if I want to.
Why? God knows.
If they're going to be the gatekeepers to paid online content, I'd be furious if they botch that one up too with the same kind of regional discrimination and limitations.
And knowing Google though, that's probably exactly what they're going to do. Because that's what they always do.
Google Red can still impose territorial restrictions.
[1] https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-better-w...
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/google-said-to-be-planning...
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/06/01/google-launches-fund...
I pay publishers I like for their content (buying newspapers, subscriptions, etc) and I don't get why Google should be the middleman in this.
For me, this is what an ideal web would look like. My ad-blocker would barely get a workout, and I'd happily pay for bundled (not pay-walled, bundled, downloadable) content as I did for many years with magazines.
No-one wants high quality content to disappear, but advertising and web paywalls are not the only options.
It'll be launching in literally a week or two... it's very simple to integrate and comes with it's own Wordpress plugin (and instructions to integrate your own CMS).
What advice do people have about this per article payment space; I have a load of ideas I want to try so maybe while Google concentrate on ads I'll be able to look at various optional payment models.
Initially I want to just charge a flat 5% + whatever Stripe fees you use to top up your wallet, but I'm concerned I'll get a lot of noise/scaling issues if I don't charge a monthly fee? Thoughts?