I was really keen on building something like this quite some time ago, but the way I understand the US regulation surrounding money transmission made all of the good and fast ways I could think to do it illegal without full KYC and a money transmitter license which is approximately $1M USD per state in which you wish to operate.
Being a US person, I gave up on the idea, although it still deeply saddens me that there is so much red tape around micropayments that the (fairly technologically simple and readily achievable) systems that we could quickly use are basically illegal in the US.
We have all of the infrastructure to do micropayments; from browser extensions and http status codes to the lightning network. It's just against the law.
Well Uphold ( the wallet i personally use) seems to require some documents before withdrawing money, probably to satisfy KYC requirements, so it seems legally possible. Not to mention, the sums involved are rather small, so maybe there are some thresholds ?
Well no, thanks - my ad blocker works just fine. Instead of begging for support of a broken business model and/or trying to come up with technical solutions to what is a problem in economics, find a new one that works. That’s how real businesses operate, you know?
Plus, if this gets widespread, it's more fuel for the link farms and typo scam sites. Why monetize your dark patterns with ads when you can directly suck money out of your users? I'm sure the payment providers will claim to police this, but we know how impossible that is at scale.
You're aware that we're not talking about business, right?
It's for regular people who post random stuff on the Internet that would like to get something out of it and maybe one day turn it into a career. I don't mind posting whatever i've written for free, even if it has taken me tens of hours to research and write, but i also wouldn't mind being rewarded for that.
There's plenty of crap on the Internet, but there's also plenty of good content. Do you think none of it deserves to get any income for the time spent and whatever costs incurred? Because the fact that a lot run ads or use medium or similar, would imply that at least a decent part of content creators would in fact prefer to gain at least some income.
It's fine for you to spend 20 hours producing content and for me to value it at zero. Saying it looks like people prefer any money to no money is not a new or unique observation
This is the main thing. To make money as a business (and running a personal website is a business in that sense if you want to make money from it), you have to give something that others value.
It’s not just personal websites that face this issue, everyone who wants to make money from their interests does.
That’s why the world has business people and employees - both have different strengths and weaknesses
Maybe Posting Stuff To The Internet should not be a career or business. I'd love to get paid for posting to HN. I spend way too much time typing in my brain farts here. But it's not [ethically] monetizable, so it doesn't matter what I'd like. You're not entitled to a way to make money from things you put effort into. If I felt like blogging on my own, I would--and I would not be trying to make a few bucks off it. I already have a few bucks.
> It's for regular people who post random stuff on the Internet that would like to get something out of it and maybe one day turn it into a career.
The more important point is that there are honest ways of making income; shoving memetic malware at people and exposing them to Internet surveillance isn't one of them. But even in purely economic terms, regular people get peanuts for showing ads. Which is why anyone expecting to learn anything from their side publishing has a donate button or a Patreon these days.
What guarantee is there that this will reduce ads in any way?
If cable TV taught us anything it is that you can charge outrageous amounts of money and still force your customers to watch ads. Paper newspapers are also full of ads, even the ones the reader pays for. I can not think of any reason why the web should be different. Ads will stay, monetization will just be income on-top.
> What guarantee is there that this will reduce ads in any way?
None, of course. It's possible to disable ads for users with Web Monetization, but it's also possible to be greedy and use both at the same time. But remember, we're not talking about big companies or anything of the sort, it's more for small scale personal blogs, or, as i pointed out, institutions like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, so greed is IMHO unlikely and will probably be rare.
In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.
Because ads are obnoxious and privacy nightmares, and also security risks. You can just disable JS and third-party cookies, but that might break some websites ( and that number will only increase due to the proliferation of SPAs and fancy frontend frameworks).
IMHO setting up ads on your website is higher friction that web monetization is.
I've actually noticed a bit of a reversal in JS requiring trends over the last year or two.
Of course there are still plenty of lazy product landing pages and wordpress blogs that don't work without JS and any time I see a hamburger menu I know I'll be navigating the site 'manually'. But many of the bigger news and information sites that used to deliver a blank page at least now deliver some bastardized version of their text content (though usually not their images).
The friction of ads is huge, and you pay it when you see them (interupton, distraction, stress, page experience, malware risk), and when you buy things there's a cut that goes to the value-destroying ad/adtech industry.
Small scale personal blogs cost next to nothing (as in: reasonable web hosting packets for $2/year exist), why would they need ads?
Wikipedia on the other hand makes lots of money with one of the most obtrusive ads on the internet (giant banner that slowly rolls down stating some variant of "if everyone donates just $5 we can stop annoying you right now"). But despite getting more and more donations every year they don't make the ad less annoying or run it shorter. So I have zero confidence that giving them another revenue stream will help
Yes, that's why I said it's free for wikipedia. The editors are not wikipedia, as much as the site would like us to feel. I left editing a decade ago, but spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia during university. It was not worth the time, and I regret not chasing skirts instead.
Only if the time required to research and write has no value.
That is why personal blogs do not create content on the scale and depth required to be sufficiently high-profile and monetizable. If your blog can't be found on the first page of Google for questions people are asking, it may as well not exist to anyone but yourself.
I am thinking of things like Slate Star Codex. Scott would have continued to write even if he hadn't been able to run ads, because he can't not write. That is the kind of thing I want to see more of, instead of people creating content to get famous.
Siskind is a guy who reportedly said, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand important ideas and network with important people." Which sounds exactly like a person creating content to get famous.
Exactly. I write to be read. Putting up a personal blog post is, regrettably, one of the lowest-ROI ways to spend my time. And that's true even if I don't care about revenue, but just want to create value. A solid blog post will take me a couple days of research, writing, and polishing.
When personal blogs flourished in the early millennium, keeping the owner somehow compensated made it more likely that good blogs would keep going, because no one’s time to research, write, and then copyedit intellectual content is utterly free. That doesn’t necessarily require an abusive ecosystem of ads that track people personally, but e.g. an affiliate link whenever a book was cited brought in a few hundred euro a year and made maintaining the blog feel worthwhile for some authors.
Wikipedia asks for money once a year. They have a ginormous war chest because they do unmatched incredibly good work for the whole world and don't waste too much of the money, despite all the nitpickers.
No, they have a ginormous war chest because their increasingly intrusive advertising campaigns convince people that the operational costs of wikipedia.org are unsustainable otherwise, and this has so far kept ahead of their also massively inflating expenditure:
90 million a year is an inflated expenditure for the most productice website to ever exist? Its an absolute pittance, that the turnover of a midsized bakery chain!
Would you care to backup this outrageous claim by demonstrating similarly popular website, awash with content, that spends less?
Staff expenses are harder to break down, as they don't break out who's working on e.g. wikipedia development and funding and who's working on, e.g. the social movement strategy, which is allocated approximately the same budget as running wikipedia.org: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?
But from just the information they provided us, can you give a reason why Wikipedia in 2019 would need 33% more staff expenditure than 2018 for running the site? And similar increases in the years leading up to that?
Any number of reasons, maybe to moderate massively growing number of lanuages and articles, to improve their software or working on new projects, or maybe to give existing staff a raise to match market rates.
But thats a moot point.
If there is no other organisation, more efficient than wikipedia, then you have no right to call them wastefull. It shows your idea of how efficient wimipedia should be is a fantasy with no grounding in reality and would, in the long term, lead to death of wikipedia.
I don't think that I've opened a Wikipedia page in months, that didn't have a beg header.
But, to be fair, I do consider it a valuable resource; especially as a way to direct people with different language requirements to a common definition, and begfests are better than ads (as long as they don't get too intrusive, as some PBS stations get).
I don't think Wikipedia does good work. It's been the bane of my existence these last seven years. Since they're not paying anyone to write my biography, the only people who edit my wikipedia page are generally those who harrass me online. I wish the top search result for my name wasn't this creepy wikipedia article that cites tabloids and focuses on my childhood and gender and medical history.
> In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.
If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you. So while I agree with the vibe and block for convenience along with security, it's an uneasy feeling knowing that such benefits for me only exist because many others aren't taking advantage of content creators like this.
> If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you.
Sure, but would the impact be positive or negative? While some people rightfully ask to be compensated for high quality content, money also encourages many more people to contribute to the glut of low value, derivative, and outright plagiarized content.
yup, anytime you lookup for something on youtube, the top results are full of lame, short and sponsorship-packed animated Wikipedia summaries often with mismatching theme music because they don't want to read a book, license footage or even proper music.
web is the same. tons of lazy blogs copy pasting without any effort in understanding or explaining from a different angle.
That's a fair question and not sure I have the answer to it other than stating a personal preference. Much smarter people than me have been trying to solve this content conundrum for decades now and it doesn't seem like anyone has found something workable for all parties involved.
It's a bitter pill to swallow that maybe what exists now is the best system we have and it will be around for a long time going forward.
In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you
That is already the status quo. The entire premise of this article is that web monetization will reduce the actual ads. It changes nothing if I still have to use my ad blocker. I don't think and but avery small minority of content creators will actually reduce their ads, and these might in any case be the people who are already very conscious of and respectfully of their consumers' privacy.
Actually, websites that don't disable ads for subscribers will get fewer subscribers. This is true, regardless of whether any form of Web Monetization from the article is in place.
Since you're backed by ad money, you can undercut the subscription price of your competitors. Maybe it makes up the difference, maybe it works better and you force the competition to switch to ads or go out of business.
Maybe it fails, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Cable wasn't in a competitive market. It at least seems like websites are.
Newspapers are dying and clinging on to a model that worked when being one had a high barrier to entry. Would you honestly think of taking out ads in a newspaper these days? Apart from for very specific things, I wouldn't.
If you are willing to pay then you are also a lot more valuable as a target for ads. There is no chance of ad reduction. Unfortunately, “post purchase monetization” is a new buzzword.
Exactly. There was a netflix series a few years back called Maniac where characters could choose to listen to in-person sales pitches if they're unable to afford bus fare, for example. Such a scheme would not work because if you're too poor to avoid bus fare then you're too poor to be likely to purchase an advertised product. Analogously & conversely, if you're willing to loosen your purse strings for paid content then you're also likely to have disposable income to pay for advertised products. This is why Facebook will never offer a paid ad-free service; it would remove all the actually valuable advertising targets from their pool of users.
I am going to use Hulu as an example. They have both and the moment they attempt to introduce ads into their streams in my paid option, I will drop them like a hot cake. I am have no problem paying for service. I do not want ads and I make that clear. Ideally, they wouldn't try to sell my profile either, but baby steps.
Post-purchase is technically still there, but less obtrusive to me.
Prime Video has already dipped their toe in that pool, showing trailers for other series instead of starting your show. Feels like the DVD era all over again, just waiting for the FBI warning screen to appear
Web ad-blocking technology is much better than cable ad-blocking technology.
Cable is mostly oligopolies, which are big on extractive behavior and revenue maximization. A lot of the good stuff on the web is individuals and small groups of people who want to make stuff sustainably but aren't focused on maximum revenue.
People will stop paying the extra money if their experience doesn't get better.
I also note that a non-open version of this that I use, scroll.com, negotiates deals with publishers. So setting some standards is a pretty obvious fix if publishers go against the spirit of things in a way that threatens the effort.
Streaming is currently teaching us the same lesson. We now have all these different islands of content by major content owners and producers where we’re paying $5 here and $10 there for content that includes ads. Hulu, Peacock, Discovery+, Paramount+, Sling, even some content on Prime. I think it’s great most of these have an ad-free tier but for how long?
This is so annoying. Our office IP blocks are classified as US. So you could see folk sitting in the office in the evening, to watch Netflix content they could not see at home.
* FreeView. This is digital TV that comes through your aerial. As the name implies, you don't pay a subscription for a base set of channels - which is quite a large number. Most of these channels have advertising. Some, like the BBC channels, only advertise their own programming, apps, etc.
* Netflix. Pay, and don't get adverts.
* Sky TV. This requires a subscription fee, and provides the FreeView set of channels plus more. There are still adverts, though, so you get to pay and also watch adverts. This is somehow a popular option!
It's a popular option because it is the only way to watch some content, especially sport. It's not that people like them, it's just that between paying to watch football with ads and not watching football, they prefer the former.
The approach that reduces ads is to have the user bid for and win the ad slots. There are important details about running this auction fairly and cost effectively for users (Vickrey mechanics etc) but the only way to enforce user intent to control their own attention and reduce ad noise is to have the user pay towards that purpose.
Well, for starters people will at least have the option to earn an income without ads. Right now this can be pretty tricky, depending on the type of site you run.
I've been working on a recipe website for a while; it's a slow burner project. I have a bunch of feature/UX ideas that I think will improve things a lot, and I also want a site that's not full of nonsense like ads and "oh, you scrolled to see the actual recipe description HAHA FUCK YOU, here's a newsletter popup first instead" and "allow us to send you our fucking notifications" popups and whatnot. It's always hard to be sure, but overall I think it would be pretty viable business.
But ... how do you monetize this without ads? Ask for donations? Things like Patreon have made this more common in the last few years and it could work, but it sure is starting a business on hard mode. The easier all of this becomes, the better there's a chance that a viable sustainable alternative will even exist in the first place.
A big reason why this is a slow burner project is because I just don't rate the chances of actually earning significant amount of money with this in 2-3 years as very high unless I resort to adding ads (and my bar for "signifiant" is really low by the way, maybe €1000/month of turnover). Even though this is very much a project that I built purely because it's the kind if site I want to use myself, it's just really hard to justify spending a lot of time on this right now in the current "internet economy".
So in short: no, it won't guarantee anything, but it does open up new possibilities.
I worked on it for about 2 months full-time two years ago, but this was after a burn-out where I really needed to rediscover my joy in programming, which I did through this project so I got a lot of value out of it already in a way :-) Since then I've worked on it on the odd Sunday every once in a while, not all that much really.
While it's an interesting prototype right now, actually finishing it will be quite a lot more work as there are some technical challenges remaining in the way I want to do things. Half a year at least, but let's round that up to 10 months because I'm probably underestimating things. If we consider a monthly salary of €3,000 (pretty low for a senior dev) then I'll spend €36k on building the thing, a further €36k building up revenue, so it'll me 6 years to recoup this investment with €1,000/month. In short, I don't think €1,000/month is very high at all.
And this doesn't account for any marketing or other costs. Actually building a platform is one thing, but getting useful content (in this case, recipes) is another. Simply copying existing content would be pointless, so this requires further investment.
Of course, the "start-up way" to do this is to find some investor who will give you money, but that investor will expect a return on their investment (which is reasonable enough) and it means I will need to maximize profit and it'll be like all the other sites that I mentioned before. What I really want is a site built by someone who likes cooking for other people who like cooking. I think the world would be better if it's easier to build something like this while still earning a reasonable amount of money (and €1,000 is very much on the low end of that IMO).
As for "being a commodity", sure. But in my opinion a lot of them aren't very good for various reasons, and I think it can be a lot better.
It sounds like you want a forum/community with a recipe database attached. Which is probably what you’d need to do to get traction- those who are googling “how to cook bacon” will always hit the ad-spam sites first.
A forum for cooking that’s well done (harhar) enough to get 100 people to pay $10 a month to support seems possible - but you might need to enlist a YouTube celebrity cook to get it started. Try a partnership?
No, not at all. There are actually no "community" features at all. It's just a better recipe website. No bullshit. >99% of people never engage in those kind of things at all. I feel most community features on sites are either pointless or actively harmful. People just want something nice to cook tonight, and there are plenty of community spaces for amateur cooks already that do a fine job.
I don't think you need to be a UX genius to realize that you can do better than [1] (load without adblocker for the full experience). The ridiculous space devoted to ads and popups is the most striking, but hardly the only thing: there are so many things that can be improved on that page if you just spent some effort and brainpower on it. Sometimes I wonder if the designers of those sites ever used it themselves. AllRecipes is hardly the exception; most sites are like this. This is just the biggest one.
Make a patreon. If you're involved with a community (doesn't have to be on the site, can be a parallel cooking discord), you will have plenty of opportunities to monetize via that route and make a good living with it. Patron-only exclusives such as blog posts once in a while can help immensely to make users feel good about donating money to you -- makes them feel like they got good value out of it. Exclusives could be something cooking themed, and maybe featuring patron submissions (recipe submissions) on your site sometimes.
Email me if you want to chat about this. Good luck otherwise.
Thanks, yeah that's pretty much my plan. It's good if this would be made easier and more common, such as through the Web Monetization API that this story talks about. That was kind of my point.
(I already get quite a bit of money through Patreon/GitHub Sponsors for some other things btw)
I think it could work if web browsers standardized on some crypto to mine, maybe one like Ethereum where you can pay for distributed code to be run, and you could easily give some to websites you visit.
That sounds great, and that's my plan exactly, but "free" is a great feature that's hard to compete against. People don't make rational decisions about these sort of things. I don't make rational decisions about these sort of things either. Although I try to be a bit thoughtful and rational about this, I've noticed I've spent ridiculous amounts of time to avoid fairly small charges, especially before I realized this and started paying attention to this.
Point in case: half the articles posted to HN from medium.com have complaints about their (ad-free) monetization strategy. From what I can tell, Medium is not even profitable either; they're doing their best to find something that works without plastering every article full of ads, but thus far haven't found it yet. Even Twitter has the same problem: they've got some ads but unlike e.g. Facebook it's not full of them, and they're not profitable either.
Medium could squeeze all the blog posts in the world and it still wouldn't be enough to pay rent for its eighty-five San Francisco employees. Hosting documents is so costly that we've come to sympathize with platforms like paupers and where that leaves humble content creators such as myself I don't know.
Apparently Medium seems to provide value to people writing articles. I don't really understand the appeal myself either, but who am I to argue with other people's software choices? shrug
YouTube premium too. At first it was a true guarantee of no ads and now most channels have "sponsored" VPN/RaidShadowLegends/RayCon/Ridge baked in the video.
tho in fairness, some channels like gun and ww2 ones don't have another choice because youtube demonetized them and not everyone likes to use patreon or the alt tubes.
It isn't (except for the demonetized channels maybe), but it shows that most content creators will not reject extra income opportunities even if it dilutes the experience of their paying users. I don't blame them either of course.
I wish they atleast put it in the beginning or the end instead of smack dab in the middle of the actual content.
Happily their sponsors can't read the data on who watched their ad segment. While my TV's youtube app can't be helped, on the desktop I use sponsorblock which is a surprisingly effective solution. I strongly recommend it.
Sadly the number of people visiting with them enabled is very minimal. I used flattr for a few years and remember maybe 4 sites explicitly supporting it - it may be higher now with GH and YT integrations. Now I've got flattr and coil on my (completely tech) content and have not had any hits in 1M views or so.
I really wish the numbers on both sides increase over time.
Cable TV didn't teach us anything. The premium channels are ad-free, the ad-ridden channels aren't getting money from the cable company.
I have Hulu ad-free, it costs me 4 extra bucks a month.
The challenge is that when companies are so focused on growing, they run out of ways to grow. For example, if they saturate their market, since they can't find new customers, the only way to grow is to get more money from each customer. So they seem to increase prices to those existing customers, create new products for those existing customers, or create new products for other customers (often advertisers).
I may gladly pay exactly for absence of ads, explicitly stated.
This works for majority of mobile apps. This works on YouTube. People are conditioned to expect such an option.
This may be not the cheapest option, though. Consider mass media. They usually have the "three free articles" tier and "all articles + ads" paid tier. I won't mind a "N articles without ads" paid tier, even though just running an ad blocker is easier.
> Brave Rewards locally picks which private ads to show you based on your browsing activity. Then, Brave uses an anonymous accounting process to confirm ad event activity, keep personal details private, and ensure people earn rewards for their attention
Compared to Web Monetization, which is transparent to the user and proportional to time spent.
It's very hard to take ads seriously. I only know about and use ~10 websites. Everything else could shut down tomorrow and I wouldn't know. Sorry, ad agencies, it's a lost battle for you.
What’s to suggest I will get the privacy benefits rather than being secretly tracked anyway, especially on sites where my data is worth several dollars per month?
While I won’t miss $5/mo, I’m guessing it would be consumed in the first couple days of the month, possibly leading content creators to optimize to compete for that tiny window of time and switch to ads (or just track full time anyway). Related, when is the meter running? Every time a tab is open on a URL? Only when frontmost, only when being interacted with?
I have come to the sad conclusion that ads are a pretty good match for content payment and any replacement will a hard sell. With ads, I’m paying with my time (and privacy on the web). But I’m already spending my time for the content anyway.
Spending money actually just guarantees you can be tracked, because now you're logging into the same account day after day, and worse you've tied that account to a credit card.
The only way for the average person to browse the web privately is to not pay. Theoretically this might be solved with the right form of digital tokens, but you're going to need anonymous payments (not bitcoin, but monero), and some form of cryptography system that tells the website that you have paid without telling them which person you are that paid. Practically no one does the former, no one does the latter, and the latter would be really difficult to implement if you want to stop people from sharing their accounts with the world at large.
If the web standard was such that the site generated a token (a request for payment) and the browser sent the authorization to pay referencing that token to a centralized authority (that you trusted), then you’d only be being tracked via this method by the group that can already track you by disbursing your funds.
You as the user don't ever give the site a token. The site gives you a token. You then (via the browser) authorize your micropayment platform to pay that token. They pay them. They can track what you're paying (but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present). The site can't [via this information channel] track you.
You're right, I agree that that could work in the sense of preventing the site tracking me via payment information. I don't think that's as likely a business model as "pay per month", but ok.
It still comes with the previously mentioned problem of the payment provider tracking me. It also comes with the problem that that sounds really latency inducing.
> but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present
Already since when? When I wasn't paying that information wasn't present.
If you check out the website of Coil, metioned in the article, they suggest a fixed rate of 30 cents an hour or so, until you've passed above your number of hours, then the rate for an hour becomes = CONTRIBUTION/HOURS.
Even if you contribute only $5 per month and browse the internet for 10 hours a day, every day, you'd still be giving over a cent an hour. It's something.
In the world I live in, content creators get gobbled up by monopolizers, for which I pay monthly subscription fees, and then they also show me ads. And they also gather my data and sell it at will. This idea of “be a good little consumer and then there will be companies that will behave” is utterly absurd.
I believe the current deluge of ads unseen since early 200X is the biggest proof that that "Internet economy" does not work, and will not work.
If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
> People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
I wish there were a button I could push to take away money from the publishers of 3/4 of the articles I read on the web.
edit: to head off any objections like "but you still read articles on the web so you must be getting some value," I have to state the obvious: I don't get to read articles before I read them. 3/4 of articles are the garbage I have to dig through to find something that meets the standard of mediocre. If it weren't for them, I could spend 3/4 less time reading articles, and 3/4 less bandwidth (so they're environmentally destructive, like bitcoin.)
And, that's assuming you got positive value on the remaining 1/4. Which is not always a given. In case of news publishing, quite often that 1/4 has negative information value, in the sense that after reading it, your beliefs will be wronger than they were before.
It took me a moment to understand that you didn’t mean that the money you take away wouldn’t necessarily be going to you. Sounds like we need a universal content rating system I compliment our initial payment system.
You can take away future money by choosing better sites to access and building a list of good and bad sites to remember, or by adblocking and unblocking and paying on good sites.
> I believe the current deluge of ads unseen since early 200X is the biggest proof that that "Internet economy" does not work, and will not work.
Financial statements by Google, Facebook, Twitter and co would imply otherwise.
> If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
They wouldn't, and that's the point isn't to force them, it's to allow those that do want to give money, to be able to do so easily. If the website you're on is some random crap, you can usually tell quickly, well before the Coil extension kicks in and starts streaming payments; if on the other side spend 10 minutes reading an article or exploring a beautiful map of Westeros, then some cents trickle directly to the creator.
> People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
Substack and Medium exist, showing that people can and do pay for "content" ( which doesn't mean a TikTok dance or SEO filler).
> The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
> People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
Correct, but would you pay for better content? I started a subscription to the local business journal over the holidays. I'm genuinely glad I bought it. About once a week, I see some headline -first- there. For a few weeks, I thought they were repeating articles, but it turns out they were doing more in-depth reporting on a story as time progressed. How rare is that? By the time the headline shows up elsewhere, the biz journal is on their 2nd or 3rd story with more in-depth reporting.
This is really, really nice. For local stuff (land development drama, businesses opening/closing, and general goings-on around town) things are relevant to me, because they're happening where I live/work/play. That is subtly different than me picking up a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post to get reporting on national news which has to cater to a national or international audience.
Impossible to answer. I would absolutely pay for better content but (a) can't tell if it's really good before I pay and (b) I have no guarantee the creator's incentives won't shift and they will keep serving good content.
I don't care about $5. I don't care about $100 even. But I can't be guaranteed that I get value for my money. It's always the same problem.
Furthermore, even the mere fact of paying content creators already shifts their incentives so you're kinda spoiling the pool by entering it (another poster remarked that they could just make good content shortly before payday and then go idle).
Not sure what's the solution but I mostly side with the "get a real job!" side of the argument even if it's far from the perfect response in this situation.
Initially there will be friction. After all the hype has dissipated from the early adopters, then regular users of the web will need to adopt it en masse. It's not going to be smooth sailing from the outset.
Businesses maximize profits, and people showed across many mediums, that they’re ok with ads in content, paid or not (press and cable are great examples - you pay for both, and they’re full of ads).
Getting more paid content will not meaningfully reduce amount of ads, as they can provide extra income for companies, with overall little negative impact.
Idea: Let people donate the processing power of their billions upon billions of personal devices out there, like the SETI/Folding@Home projects but for general distributed computing, give them some kind of e-currency for that, and establish an economy on based that currency.
You can run whatever you want (up to the storage/electricity limits I allow) on my computer/phone when I'm sleeping, give me eBling, and charge me eBling for web searches etc.
Make it so that donating 12 hours of a mid-range phone's CPU would pay for 24 hours of web searches, or something like that.
Why don't we focus on better quality adds to encourage people to not use ad blocker? Speaking of ad blocker, is there not an ad blocker which instead of 'blocks all ads' and have to whitelist. Can't we 'block no ads' and have to blacklist?
I've been thinking about this. How can we get good ads without extensive tracking? I've been blocking ads as long as I could remember, mostly because it's annoying and/or irrelevant.
However, I'd be down to see ads if they're, say, relevant (things I'm actually interested in) 90% of the time. I thought about having a system where I could voluntarily say what I'd like to see in ads (obviously stuff I'm comfortable letting others know eg: sw, t-shirts, etc) - sort of like subscribing to RSS feed. Maybe advertisers could have a button on their site that I could click to let them know I'm interested in promotions, new releases etc. I imagine those advertisers could be part of an ad network I'd whitelist. I could see this as a win-win, though I don't want to think I'm the only one to think of this. Maybe those in the industry feel status quo is the best at scale.
Ads are okay, and as others have pointed out this will not make them go away.
Ad networks that track you, and slurp as much personal data as they can get are a problem.
Invasive ads that make noise or take over the whole page are a problem.
Ad companies that claim to be search engines but produced results based on who’s paying the most instead of what’s relevant to your search are a problem.
Why don't we focus on better quality ads to encourage people to not use ad blocker?
Speaking of ad blocker, is there not an ad blocker which instead of 'blocks all ads' and you have to whitelist ourselves. Can't we just have ads on all websites unless we make the choice to blacklist it?
It's much less to do about ads and more about quality information and content created by people who have invested in it being able to circulate in our society rather than information and content which is free but created by hacks and incentivised by some other motive or has an alternative agenda. We're seeing the ramifications of that every day.
This needs to be brought into the web standards asap IMO.
My biggest issue with ads is the tracking. It sounds like this system will make tracking easier, and leak information about your browsing habits to the wallet provider.
IMO the technology most suited for anonymous micro payments are blind signatures, like Chaum's Ecash or GNU Taler. This still has centralized issuers and some implementations require the payment receiver to be identified, but it neither the issuer not the payee can tell how you spend your money.
Sorry, but i specifically address this in the article:
> Anonymity and privacy are provided by the way things work - that wallets are randomly generated IDs, Coil transfer the money, the wallet provider knows who the recipient is, the content creators knows how much they’ve received, but nobody knows everything. Here’s a post[0] by Coil’s co-founder and CTO Ben Sharafian discussing wallet-side and sender-site (based on PrivacyPassp[1]) privacy techniques they and the wallet providers use to ensure everyone’s privacy is respected.
I based my statement on that paragraph, since the mechanisms the article describes are clearly insufficient to ensure privacy when the participants collude. However the part only mentioned by name, PrivacyPass, uses blind signatures and thus might actually work.
Yeah.... no. Companies want you to think and act like digital "products" are like physical products. Yet in the real world we don't get clothes or cars for "free" just beceause of advertising. "Monetizing" the web will just mean you'll pay for ads. I do however wish there was a micropayments system on the internet that wasn't directly linked to a bank or company. GNU Taler or Monero are the only things that really come close.
Frankly, I want less commercial content. I want to read and watch stuff put out by hobbyists, people who are excited by what they're doing, who would do it without compensation anyway.
I see very little upside to professionalisation of sports, sex, writing, even reporting. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Some things are just better when done by amateurs or done instead of watched.
Journalism is best (worst) example. We are being deceived by dilettantes with slick production values and almost universally an agenda or served straight-up propaganda. I'd rather delve into less polished material from people who actually know things because they have a deep drive towards understanding them.
> Frankly, I want less commercial content. I want to read and watch stuff put out by hobbyists, people who are excited by what they're doing, who would do it without compensation anyway.
The fact that someone would do it without compensation doesn't mean that if they do get compensation they wouldn't spend more time on it. It's precisely for hobbyist-level stuff where web monetization can really shine.
Disagreed. When the money starts rolling in, your thinking changes. Not saying there are no people who resist it but most don't, and I've seen good YouTube and Twitch channels get completely ruined after their creator went past the $3000 donations/subs mark per month.
I too would like people to work to provide content for me for free, which is what you are asking.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
On a more serious note, eventually amateurs stop loving it and get burned out, because it's a lot of work to make high quality content on top of a day job you hate. Just because they are amateur doesn't mean what they do is effortless.
And I'm not even going into the people who want amateurs to work for free so they can middleman and make money off of aggregated content, which is what techbros love to do.
I too would like people to work to provide content for me for free, which is what you are asking.
The problem is that paid content is bad. It's almost universally a signal of low quality.
My Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs have demonstrably better information on everything from the pandemic and nutrition to investment and programming than any well-compensated journalists I've ever read. Not to mention humour. They manage to be more accurate, informative, and funnier at the same time.
It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
> My Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs have demonstrably better information on everything from the pandemic and nutrition to investment and programming than any well-compensated journalists I've ever read. Not to mention humour. They manage to be more accurate, informative, and funnier at the same time.
I refuse to believe you. What are your "Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs"'s sources? How the f can they provide better information on the pandemic unless you have actual virologists and public health experts actually working on it there? If you don't ( and having them would be pure chance since you can't possibly follow multiple experts from every single domain on the planet )?
> It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
Bullshit. The mere fact that you use the bullsit "MSM" "term" is indicative of your lack of knowledge on the matter. Not only that, the blatant disregard for any traditional media is dangerous on a few fronts - you live in your bubble, you're overly reliant on what information trickles down to you via said bubble, and even if your bubble is magnificent, has all sorts of actual experts in it, and you're actually knowledgeable and intelligent enough to be able to filter and prioritize, your wrong opinion might convince some people that do not have all of the above to follow your example, and that is how you get Q lunatics living in an alternate reality. Furthermore, have you actually recently used any media of good reputation and standing, paid or not? Personally i'm subscribed to the FT, and i have seen tons of stories not readily available through HN, Twitter, etc., and more to the point, in much more depth, usually. There's the occasional not really well written article, which gets compensated by the availability of other sources, but the analysis of professional journalists, with associated graphs, images, direct sources, etc. is IMHO priceless. FT and Fox couldn't be farther apart, yet your ridiculous label "MSM" groups them together. On what grounds?
> Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
Linux is maintained by professionals, indeed. If the initial amateurs never got any funding to do it full time, it wouldn't have come as far. So exactly counter to your argument?
How the f can they provide better information on the pandemic unless you have actual virologists and public health experts actually working on it there?
That's a good question. I don't really know what kind of failure causes mainstream sources to be this bad. Here's Scott with his guess which is... I wanted to say just as good as mine but probably much better!
I don't get the rant around MSM. There's definitely mainstream media. And while they didn't fall for Q (although I still heard Q mocked in my bubble long before it was in the media), they have their own Russiagate conspiracy theory they're pushing. Here's another article from my bubble if you care.
The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
> I don't get the rant around MSM. There's definitely mainstream media. And while they didn't fall for Q (although I still heard Q mocked in my bubble long before it was in the media), they have their own Russiagate conspiracy theory they're pushing. Here's another article from my bubble if you care.
Depends on your definition. "Mainstream" as what people watch/read and commonly accept as decent publications with some sort of professionalism and oversight? Certainly, probably every country has them! However, the people using the "MSM" label usually imply that all such media is bad, too biased, wrong, in a secret plot with X, etc. So which is it for you ? If you really do believe that all even remotely popular ( which would include things as diverse as like Fox, BBC, the Guardian, the FT, Washington Post, New York Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Mediapart, Der Spiegel, etc.) medias are corrupt/wrong/too biased to pay attention to or anything of the sort, and random bloggers, twitterers, forumers are better than them... I honestly do not know how to proceed. It's obviously a ludicrous notion that isn't and cannot possibly be true and the only possible explanation i can imagine is that you're applying the exaggerated logic based on the shitty US media landscape to the rest of the world.
As for Q mocking in your bubble... Great for you, I guess? Maybe professional journalists have more integrity than to popularize a shitty ridiculous conspiracy theory by discussing it. Maybe their usual sources don't include 4chan or w/e.
> The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
I don't see how that's relevant, at all. We're talking about "mainstream" media, not irrelevant US partisan politics. The world doesn't end at the US border, you know?
In all seriousness how similar (or different) is this to Ted Nelson's Xanadu franchises?
The discussion around this post confuses me. Because in practice it doesn't sound that bad, but the comments seem to be against it. A person pays a subscription to "consume content" [1] and the author is paid for it. But why do I need a wallet? What is this ledger business all about? What's the meta tag for? In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors. I'm beginning to understand the other comments now.
As far as advertisements go, what's stopping people from just selling ad space themselves? Why do I need Google? You sell cast iron skillets, I'm a food blogger. You want some ad space. Email me and send me a check.
[1] i.e. to read, watch and listen to things on the internet. "consuming content" sounds so impersonal, if that's the best word to describe it.
> You sell cast iron skillets, I'm a food blogger. You want some ad space. Email me and send me a check.
This totally works, but does have some drawbacks:
* High friction. The advertiser needs to seek out sites, send emails back-and-forth, agree on pricing, etc.
* Cheating. How does the advertiser know that their ad is really being shown? How do they know that the publisher really has lots of visitors, and isn't just sending them back traffic?
* Lower payments. Unless you're writing about something where people spend a lot of money (insurance bloggers, etc) you'll likely make more money if you use something that supports personalization.
The way this works out is big publishers (all the brands you've heard of) make direct deals with big advertisers, but (a) they still make a substantial portion of their money by first checking whether there's a high bid from a network and (b) they integrate various vendors to verify the traffic is legitimate.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
1. Are there legitimate safe spaces for people who like friction? Or are they only for people who LARP as Don Draper and Jordan Belfort?
2. How was/is cheating in this sense addressed in print advertisements?
3. This makes sense, but I think the alternative would call for more friction and ethical data collection/sharing on behalf of personalization.
4. The last sentence was the most helpful. Who is the "network" in question?
(Now for my disclosure: If you can't tell I need to sit down and figure out how the online ad business actually works, I likely can count on my hands many times I've ever clicked an ad online and I've definitely purchased something in that manner far less if ever).
1: I don't think it's very common. I have a blogger friend who used to host simple image ads, but then they migrated to substack.
2: The primary method of cheating in print was lying about your circulation numbers. Anyone could easily verify that the ad was run in the agreed on spot, but the question of how many people read your paper/magazine is harder. In the US circulation numbers typically come from the nonprofit Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation
3: The world is moving in that direction, but not especially because advertisers or publishers are pushing for it. Instead it's consumer advocacy groups and browsers. My primary project at work right now is (along with a lot of other people) figuring out how we can serve personalized ads without cross-site tracking (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove).
4: An ad network is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. Directly connecting pairs of publishers (P) and advertisers (A) scales at O(PA) while publishers and advertisers both connecting to a network scales at O(P+A). AdSense would be an example: an advertiser who signs up with AdSense can advertise across all its publishers without needing to make 1:1 deals.
> The discussion around this post confuses me. Because in practice it doesn't sound that bad, but the comments seem to be against it. A person pays a subscription to "consume content" [1] and the author is paid for it. But why do I need a wallet? What is this ledger business all about? What's the meta tag for?
The wallet and the HTML meta tag are for people who want their websites monetized. If you just read/watch/etc., only a browser extension and subscription are required.
> In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors.
It isn't, it's complimentary, but more widely applicable. You won't sponsor every single blog owner for every single article you found useful or applicable to your use case, because that would be too onerous.
I remember when the web used to be (mostly) free, with no ads nor any expectation of payment from others. Sites were simpler then, sure, but costs were very manageable even if the barrier to entry was higher.
People deserve to get paid, for sure, but I think many overestimate the value of what they put out, and I'd argue much of the web has negative value these days due to the flagrant violations of privacy that come with the raw tripe I have to sift through if I'm seeking to be informed in a particular topic.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadBeing a US person, I gave up on the idea, although it still deeply saddens me that there is so much red tape around micropayments that the (fairly technologically simple and readily achievable) systems that we could quickly use are basically illegal in the US.
We have all of the infrastructure to do micropayments; from browser extensions and http status codes to the lightning network. It's just against the law.
It's for regular people who post random stuff on the Internet that would like to get something out of it and maybe one day turn it into a career. I don't mind posting whatever i've written for free, even if it has taken me tens of hours to research and write, but i also wouldn't mind being rewarded for that.
There's plenty of crap on the Internet, but there's also plenty of good content. Do you think none of it deserves to get any income for the time spent and whatever costs incurred? Because the fact that a lot run ads or use medium or similar, would imply that at least a decent part of content creators would in fact prefer to gain at least some income.
It’s not just personal websites that face this issue, everyone who wants to make money from their interests does.
That’s why the world has business people and employees - both have different strengths and weaknesses
Too much monetization and you get the current Google search pages - where most of the stuff on page 1 is spammy SEO material except for stack overflow
The more important point is that there are honest ways of making income; shoving memetic malware at people and exposing them to Internet surveillance isn't one of them. But even in purely economic terms, regular people get peanuts for showing ads. Which is why anyone expecting to learn anything from their side publishing has a donate button or a Patreon these days.
If cable TV taught us anything it is that you can charge outrageous amounts of money and still force your customers to watch ads. Paper newspapers are also full of ads, even the ones the reader pays for. I can not think of any reason why the web should be different. Ads will stay, monetization will just be income on-top.
None, of course. It's possible to disable ads for users with Web Monetization, but it's also possible to be greedy and use both at the same time. But remember, we're not talking about big companies or anything of the sort, it's more for small scale personal blogs, or, as i pointed out, institutions like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, so greed is IMHO unlikely and will probably be rare.
In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.
Why should everyone block the lowest friction way to pay creators? Besides the security argument which speaks more to JS, IMO.
IMHO setting up ads on your website is higher friction that web monetization is.
Of course there are still plenty of lazy product landing pages and wordpress blogs that don't work without JS and any time I see a hamburger menu I know I'll be navigating the site 'manually'. But many of the bigger news and information sites that used to deliver a blank page at least now deliver some bastardized version of their text content (though usually not their images).
Web monetization is lower friction.
Wikipedia on the other hand makes lots of money with one of the most obtrusive ads on the internet (giant banner that slowly rolls down stating some variant of "if everyone donates just $5 we can stop annoying you right now"). But despite getting more and more donations every year they don't make the ad less annoying or run it shorter. So I have zero confidence that giving them another revenue stream will help
That is why personal blogs do not create content on the scale and depth required to be sufficiently high-profile and monetizable. If your blog can't be found on the first page of Google for questions people are asking, it may as well not exist to anyone but yourself.
Even if someone is comfortable, $100 a month can make it worthwhile to them to spend time considering and writing.
Sometimes that money just proves someone's finding big value in your continued efforts.
If I remember, Wikipedia is rather controversial, for having a ginormous war chest, but still having PBS-style begfests all the time.
I don't think they do any ads, now, except for their begging headers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Would you care to backup this outrageous claim by demonstrating similarly popular website, awash with content, that spends less?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
Staff expenses are harder to break down, as they don't break out who's working on e.g. wikipedia development and funding and who's working on, e.g. the social movement strategy, which is allocated approximately the same budget as running wikipedia.org: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?
But from just the information they provided us, can you give a reason why Wikipedia in 2019 would need 33% more staff expenditure than 2018 for running the site? And similar increases in the years leading up to that?
But thats a moot point. If there is no other organisation, more efficient than wikipedia, then you have no right to call them wastefull. It shows your idea of how efficient wimipedia should be is a fantasy with no grounding in reality and would, in the long term, lead to death of wikipedia.
if once == "allYearLong" { clapYourHands() }
I don't think that I've opened a Wikipedia page in months, that didn't have a beg header.
But, to be fair, I do consider it a valuable resource; especially as a way to direct people with different language requirements to a common definition, and begfests are better than ads (as long as they don't get too intrusive, as some PBS stations get).
If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you. So while I agree with the vibe and block for convenience along with security, it's an uneasy feeling knowing that such benefits for me only exist because many others aren't taking advantage of content creators like this.
Sure, but would the impact be positive or negative? While some people rightfully ask to be compensated for high quality content, money also encourages many more people to contribute to the glut of low value, derivative, and outright plagiarized content.
web is the same. tons of lazy blogs copy pasting without any effort in understanding or explaining from a different angle.
That's a fair question and not sure I have the answer to it other than stating a personal preference. Much smarter people than me have been trying to solve this content conundrum for decades now and it doesn't seem like anyone has found something workable for all parties involved.
It's a bitter pill to swallow that maybe what exists now is the best system we have and it will be around for a long time going forward.
That is already the status quo. The entire premise of this article is that web monetization will reduce the actual ads. It changes nothing if I still have to use my ad blocker. I don't think and but avery small minority of content creators will actually reduce their ads, and these might in any case be the people who are already very conscious of and respectfully of their consumers' privacy.
Websites that don't disable ads for subscribers will get fewer subscribers.
How does that differ from today?
Maybe it fails, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Newspapers are dying and clinging on to a model that worked when being one had a high barrier to entry. Would you honestly think of taking out ads in a newspaper these days? Apart from for very specific things, I wouldn't.
There are less incentives to ruin the experience for those who are directly giving them money.
Post-purchase is technically still there, but less obtrusive to me.
Web ad-blocking technology is much better than cable ad-blocking technology.
Cable is mostly oligopolies, which are big on extractive behavior and revenue maximization. A lot of the good stuff on the web is individuals and small groups of people who want to make stuff sustainably but aren't focused on maximum revenue.
People will stop paying the extra money if their experience doesn't get better.
I also note that a non-open version of this that I use, scroll.com, negotiates deals with publishers. So setting some standards is a pretty obvious fix if publishers go against the spirit of things in a way that threatens the effort.
This is so annoying. Our office IP blocks are classified as US. So you could see folk sitting in the office in the evening, to watch Netflix content they could not see at home.
The major options (as far as I can tell are):
* FreeView. This is digital TV that comes through your aerial. As the name implies, you don't pay a subscription for a base set of channels - which is quite a large number. Most of these channels have advertising. Some, like the BBC channels, only advertise their own programming, apps, etc.
* Netflix. Pay, and don't get adverts.
* Sky TV. This requires a subscription fee, and provides the FreeView set of channels plus more. There are still adverts, though, so you get to pay and also watch adverts. This is somehow a popular option!
The approach that reduces ads is to have the user bid for and win the ad slots. There are important details about running this auction fairly and cost effectively for users (Vickrey mechanics etc) but the only way to enforce user intent to control their own attention and reduce ad noise is to have the user pay towards that purpose.
I've been working on a recipe website for a while; it's a slow burner project. I have a bunch of feature/UX ideas that I think will improve things a lot, and I also want a site that's not full of nonsense like ads and "oh, you scrolled to see the actual recipe description HAHA FUCK YOU, here's a newsletter popup first instead" and "allow us to send you our fucking notifications" popups and whatnot. It's always hard to be sure, but overall I think it would be pretty viable business.
But ... how do you monetize this without ads? Ask for donations? Things like Patreon have made this more common in the last few years and it could work, but it sure is starting a business on hard mode. The easier all of this becomes, the better there's a chance that a viable sustainable alternative will even exist in the first place.
A big reason why this is a slow burner project is because I just don't rate the chances of actually earning significant amount of money with this in 2-3 years as very high unless I resort to adding ads (and my bar for "signifiant" is really low by the way, maybe €1000/month of turnover). Even though this is very much a project that I built purely because it's the kind if site I want to use myself, it's just really hard to justify spending a lot of time on this right now in the current "internet economy".
So in short: no, it won't guarantee anything, but it does open up new possibilities.
That seems high for a slow burn recipe site which is a commodity.
While it's an interesting prototype right now, actually finishing it will be quite a lot more work as there are some technical challenges remaining in the way I want to do things. Half a year at least, but let's round that up to 10 months because I'm probably underestimating things. If we consider a monthly salary of €3,000 (pretty low for a senior dev) then I'll spend €36k on building the thing, a further €36k building up revenue, so it'll me 6 years to recoup this investment with €1,000/month. In short, I don't think €1,000/month is very high at all.
And this doesn't account for any marketing or other costs. Actually building a platform is one thing, but getting useful content (in this case, recipes) is another. Simply copying existing content would be pointless, so this requires further investment.
Of course, the "start-up way" to do this is to find some investor who will give you money, but that investor will expect a return on their investment (which is reasonable enough) and it means I will need to maximize profit and it'll be like all the other sites that I mentioned before. What I really want is a site built by someone who likes cooking for other people who like cooking. I think the world would be better if it's easier to build something like this while still earning a reasonable amount of money (and €1,000 is very much on the low end of that IMO).
As for "being a commodity", sure. But in my opinion a lot of them aren't very good for various reasons, and I think it can be a lot better.
A forum for cooking that’s well done (harhar) enough to get 100 people to pay $10 a month to support seems possible - but you might need to enlist a YouTube celebrity cook to get it started. Try a partnership?
I don't think you need to be a UX genius to realize that you can do better than [1] (load without adblocker for the full experience). The ridiculous space devoted to ads and popups is the most striking, but hardly the only thing: there are so many things that can be improved on that page if you just spent some effort and brainpower on it. Sometimes I wonder if the designers of those sites ever used it themselves. AllRecipes is hardly the exception; most sites are like this. This is just the biggest one.
[1]: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/214931/oven-roasted-aspara...
Email me if you want to chat about this. Good luck otherwise.
(I already get quite a bit of money through Patreon/GitHub Sponsors for some other things btw)
Make something that people want instead of doi g the same as 163648462 others?
There was a time where you earned money if you added something to the mix
Point in case: half the articles posted to HN from medium.com have complaints about their (ad-free) monetization strategy. From what I can tell, Medium is not even profitable either; they're doing their best to find something that works without plastering every article full of ads, but thus far haven't found it yet. Even Twitter has the same problem: they've got some ads but unlike e.g. Facebook it's not full of them, and they're not profitable either.
tho in fairness, some channels like gun and ww2 ones don't have another choice because youtube demonetized them and not everyone likes to use patreon or the alt tubes.
I wish they atleast put it in the beginning or the end instead of smack dab in the middle of the actual content.
We are paying data harvesters for the privilage of supplying them with the raw materials to make even more money.
I really wish the numbers on both sides increase over time.
The challenge is that when companies are so focused on growing, they run out of ways to grow. For example, if they saturate their market, since they can't find new customers, the only way to grow is to get more money from each customer. So they seem to increase prices to those existing customers, create new products for those existing customers, or create new products for other customers (often advertisers).
This works for majority of mobile apps. This works on YouTube. People are conditioned to expect such an option.
This may be not the cheapest option, though. Consider mass media. They usually have the "three free articles" tier and "all articles + ads" paid tier. I won't mind a "N articles without ads" paid tier, even though just running an ad blocker is easier.
> Brave Rewards locally picks which private ads to show you based on your browsing activity. Then, Brave uses an anonymous accounting process to confirm ad event activity, keep personal details private, and ensure people earn rewards for their attention
Compared to Web Monetization, which is transparent to the user and proportional to time spent.
While I won’t miss $5/mo, I’m guessing it would be consumed in the first couple days of the month, possibly leading content creators to optimize to compete for that tiny window of time and switch to ads (or just track full time anyway). Related, when is the meter running? Every time a tab is open on a URL? Only when frontmost, only when being interacted with?
I have come to the sad conclusion that ads are a pretty good match for content payment and any replacement will a hard sell. With ads, I’m paying with my time (and privacy on the web). But I’m already spending my time for the content anyway.
As for when the payments happen, it's only when the page is open and active, and stops if you go idle.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376118
The only way for the average person to browse the web privately is to not pay. Theoretically this might be solved with the right form of digital tokens, but you're going to need anonymous payments (not bitcoin, but monero), and some form of cryptography system that tells the website that you have paid without telling them which person you are that paid. Practically no one does the former, no one does the latter, and the latter would be really difficult to implement if you want to stop people from sharing their accounts with the world at large.
I don't trust the centralized authority to not track me, money based centralized authorities engage in extensive tracking.
The people disbursing my funds cannot currently track me, because there are currently no funds being disbursed.
You're right, I agree that that could work in the sense of preventing the site tracking me via payment information. I don't think that's as likely a business model as "pay per month", but ok.
It still comes with the previously mentioned problem of the payment provider tracking me. It also comes with the problem that that sounds really latency inducing.
> but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present
Already since when? When I wasn't paying that information wasn't present.
Even if you contribute only $5 per month and browse the internet for 10 hours a day, every day, you'd still be giving over a cent an hour. It's something.
I believe the current deluge of ads unseen since early 200X is the biggest proof that that "Internet economy" does not work, and will not work.
If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
I wish there were a button I could push to take away money from the publishers of 3/4 of the articles I read on the web.
edit: to head off any objections like "but you still read articles on the web so you must be getting some value," I have to state the obvious: I don't get to read articles before I read them. 3/4 of articles are the garbage I have to dig through to find something that meets the standard of mediocre. If it weren't for them, I could spend 3/4 less time reading articles, and 3/4 less bandwidth (so they're environmentally destructive, like bitcoin.)
Financial statements by Google, Facebook, Twitter and co would imply otherwise.
> If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
They wouldn't, and that's the point isn't to force them, it's to allow those that do want to give money, to be able to do so easily. If the website you're on is some random crap, you can usually tell quickly, well before the Coil extension kicks in and starts streaming payments; if on the other side spend 10 minutes reading an article or exploring a beautiful map of Westeros, then some cents trickle directly to the creator.
> People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
Substack and Medium exist, showing that people can and do pay for "content" ( which doesn't mean a TikTok dance or SEO filler).
> The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
You do you.
Correct, but would you pay for better content? I started a subscription to the local business journal over the holidays. I'm genuinely glad I bought it. About once a week, I see some headline -first- there. For a few weeks, I thought they were repeating articles, but it turns out they were doing more in-depth reporting on a story as time progressed. How rare is that? By the time the headline shows up elsewhere, the biz journal is on their 2nd or 3rd story with more in-depth reporting.
This is really, really nice. For local stuff (land development drama, businesses opening/closing, and general goings-on around town) things are relevant to me, because they're happening where I live/work/play. That is subtly different than me picking up a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post to get reporting on national news which has to cater to a national or international audience.
Impossible to answer. I would absolutely pay for better content but (a) can't tell if it's really good before I pay and (b) I have no guarantee the creator's incentives won't shift and they will keep serving good content.
I don't care about $5. I don't care about $100 even. But I can't be guaranteed that I get value for my money. It's always the same problem.
Furthermore, even the mere fact of paying content creators already shifts their incentives so you're kinda spoiling the pool by entering it (another poster remarked that they could just make good content shortly before payday and then go idle).
Not sure what's the solution but I mostly side with the "get a real job!" side of the argument even if it's far from the perfect response in this situation.
Initially there will be friction. After all the hype has dissipated from the early adopters, then regular users of the web will need to adopt it en masse. It's not going to be smooth sailing from the outset.
Getting more paid content will not meaningfully reduce amount of ads, as they can provide extra income for companies, with overall little negative impact.
You can run whatever you want (up to the storage/electricity limits I allow) on my computer/phone when I'm sleeping, give me eBling, and charge me eBling for web searches etc.
Make it so that donating 12 hours of a mid-range phone's CPU would pay for 24 hours of web searches, or something like that.
However, I'd be down to see ads if they're, say, relevant (things I'm actually interested in) 90% of the time. I thought about having a system where I could voluntarily say what I'd like to see in ads (obviously stuff I'm comfortable letting others know eg: sw, t-shirts, etc) - sort of like subscribing to RSS feed. Maybe advertisers could have a button on their site that I could click to let them know I'm interested in promotions, new releases etc. I imagine those advertisers could be part of an ad network I'd whitelist. I could see this as a win-win, though I don't want to think I'm the only one to think of this. Maybe those in the industry feel status quo is the best at scale.
Ad networks that track you, and slurp as much personal data as they can get are a problem.
Invasive ads that make noise or take over the whole page are a problem.
Ad companies that claim to be search engines but produced results based on who’s paying the most instead of what’s relevant to your search are a problem.
Basic advertising I’m okay with.
It's much less to do about ads and more about quality information and content created by people who have invested in it being able to circulate in our society rather than information and content which is free but created by hacks and incentivised by some other motive or has an alternative agenda. We're seeing the ramifications of that every day.
This needs to be brought into the web standards asap IMO.
IMO the technology most suited for anonymous micro payments are blind signatures, like Chaum's Ecash or GNU Taler. This still has centralized issuers and some implementations require the payment receiver to be identified, but it neither the issuer not the payee can tell how you spend your money.
> Anonymity and privacy are provided by the way things work - that wallets are randomly generated IDs, Coil transfer the money, the wallet provider knows who the recipient is, the content creators knows how much they’ve received, but nobody knows everything. Here’s a post[0] by Coil’s co-founder and CTO Ben Sharafian discussing wallet-side and sender-site (based on PrivacyPassp[1]) privacy techniques they and the wallet providers use to ensure everyone’s privacy is respected.
0 - https://coil.com/p/sharafian/Doubling-Down-on-Privacy/cD_Ziw...
1 - https://privacypass.github.io/
I see very little upside to professionalisation of sports, sex, writing, even reporting. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Some things are just better when done by amateurs or done instead of watched.
Journalism is best (worst) example. We are being deceived by dilettantes with slick production values and almost universally an agenda or served straight-up propaganda. I'd rather delve into less polished material from people who actually know things because they have a deep drive towards understanding them.
The fact that someone would do it without compensation doesn't mean that if they do get compensation they wouldn't spend more time on it. It's precisely for hobbyist-level stuff where web monetization can really shine.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
On a more serious note, eventually amateurs stop loving it and get burned out, because it's a lot of work to make high quality content on top of a day job you hate. Just because they are amateur doesn't mean what they do is effortless.
And I'm not even going into the people who want amateurs to work for free so they can middleman and make money off of aggregated content, which is what techbros love to do.
The problem is that paid content is bad. It's almost universally a signal of low quality.
My Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs have demonstrably better information on everything from the pandemic and nutrition to investment and programming than any well-compensated journalists I've ever read. Not to mention humour. They manage to be more accurate, informative, and funnier at the same time.
It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
I refuse to believe you. What are your "Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs"'s sources? How the f can they provide better information on the pandemic unless you have actual virologists and public health experts actually working on it there? If you don't ( and having them would be pure chance since you can't possibly follow multiple experts from every single domain on the planet )?
> It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
Bullshit. The mere fact that you use the bullsit "MSM" "term" is indicative of your lack of knowledge on the matter. Not only that, the blatant disregard for any traditional media is dangerous on a few fronts - you live in your bubble, you're overly reliant on what information trickles down to you via said bubble, and even if your bubble is magnificent, has all sorts of actual experts in it, and you're actually knowledgeable and intelligent enough to be able to filter and prioritize, your wrong opinion might convince some people that do not have all of the above to follow your example, and that is how you get Q lunatics living in an alternate reality. Furthermore, have you actually recently used any media of good reputation and standing, paid or not? Personally i'm subscribed to the FT, and i have seen tons of stories not readily available through HN, Twitter, etc., and more to the point, in much more depth, usually. There's the occasional not really well written article, which gets compensated by the availability of other sources, but the analysis of professional journalists, with associated graphs, images, direct sources, etc. is IMHO priceless. FT and Fox couldn't be farther apart, yet your ridiculous label "MSM" groups them together. On what grounds?
> Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
Linux is maintained by professionals, indeed. If the initial amateurs never got any funding to do it full time, it wouldn't have come as far. So exactly counter to your argument?
That's a good question. I don't really know what kind of failure causes mainstream sources to be this bad. Here's Scott with his guess which is... I wanted to say just as good as mine but probably much better!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
I don't get the rant around MSM. There's definitely mainstream media. And while they didn't fall for Q (although I still heard Q mocked in my bubble long before it was in the media), they have their own Russiagate conspiracy theory they're pushing. Here's another article from my bubble if you care.
The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-kinshasa-interviews-glenn...
Depends on your definition. "Mainstream" as what people watch/read and commonly accept as decent publications with some sort of professionalism and oversight? Certainly, probably every country has them! However, the people using the "MSM" label usually imply that all such media is bad, too biased, wrong, in a secret plot with X, etc. So which is it for you ? If you really do believe that all even remotely popular ( which would include things as diverse as like Fox, BBC, the Guardian, the FT, Washington Post, New York Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Mediapart, Der Spiegel, etc.) medias are corrupt/wrong/too biased to pay attention to or anything of the sort, and random bloggers, twitterers, forumers are better than them... I honestly do not know how to proceed. It's obviously a ludicrous notion that isn't and cannot possibly be true and the only possible explanation i can imagine is that you're applying the exaggerated logic based on the shitty US media landscape to the rest of the world.
As for Q mocking in your bubble... Great for you, I guess? Maybe professional journalists have more integrity than to popularize a shitty ridiculous conspiracy theory by discussing it. Maybe their usual sources don't include 4chan or w/e.
> The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
I don't see how that's relevant, at all. We're talking about "mainstream" media, not irrelevant US partisan politics. The world doesn't end at the US border, you know?
The discussion around this post confuses me. Because in practice it doesn't sound that bad, but the comments seem to be against it. A person pays a subscription to "consume content" [1] and the author is paid for it. But why do I need a wallet? What is this ledger business all about? What's the meta tag for? In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors. I'm beginning to understand the other comments now.
As far as advertisements go, what's stopping people from just selling ad space themselves? Why do I need Google? You sell cast iron skillets, I'm a food blogger. You want some ad space. Email me and send me a check.
[1] i.e. to read, watch and listen to things on the internet. "consuming content" sounds so impersonal, if that's the best word to describe it.
This totally works, but does have some drawbacks:
* High friction. The advertiser needs to seek out sites, send emails back-and-forth, agree on pricing, etc.
* Cheating. How does the advertiser know that their ad is really being shown? How do they know that the publisher really has lots of visitors, and isn't just sending them back traffic?
* Lower payments. Unless you're writing about something where people spend a lot of money (insurance bloggers, etc) you'll likely make more money if you use something that supports personalization.
The way this works out is big publishers (all the brands you've heard of) make direct deals with big advertisers, but (a) they still make a substantial portion of their money by first checking whether there's a high bid from a network and (b) they integrate various vendors to verify the traffic is legitimate.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
1. Are there legitimate safe spaces for people who like friction? Or are they only for people who LARP as Don Draper and Jordan Belfort?
2. How was/is cheating in this sense addressed in print advertisements?
3. This makes sense, but I think the alternative would call for more friction and ethical data collection/sharing on behalf of personalization.
4. The last sentence was the most helpful. Who is the "network" in question?
(Now for my disclosure: If you can't tell I need to sit down and figure out how the online ad business actually works, I likely can count on my hands many times I've ever clicked an ad online and I've definitely purchased something in that manner far less if ever).
Thank you!
2: The primary method of cheating in print was lying about your circulation numbers. Anyone could easily verify that the ad was run in the agreed on spot, but the question of how many people read your paper/magazine is harder. In the US circulation numbers typically come from the nonprofit Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation
3: The world is moving in that direction, but not especially because advertisers or publishers are pushing for it. Instead it's consumer advocacy groups and browsers. My primary project at work right now is (along with a lot of other people) figuring out how we can serve personalized ads without cross-site tracking (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove).
4: An ad network is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. Directly connecting pairs of publishers (P) and advertisers (A) scales at O(PA) while publishers and advertisers both connecting to a network scales at O(P+A). AdSense would be an example: an advertiser who signs up with AdSense can advertise across all its publishers without needing to make 1:1 deals.
(Still speaking only for myself)
The wallet and the HTML meta tag are for people who want their websites monetized. If you just read/watch/etc., only a browser extension and subscription are required.
> In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors.
It isn't, it's complimentary, but more widely applicable. You won't sponsor every single blog owner for every single article you found useful or applicable to your use case, because that would be too onerous.
Ads on the web are not going away for a long time to come.
People deserve to get paid, for sure, but I think many overestimate the value of what they put out, and I'd argue much of the web has negative value these days due to the flagrant violations of privacy that come with the raw tripe I have to sift through if I'm seeking to be informed in a particular topic.
perpetuating a model that has lead to the cancers on our culture and species that are FB, Twitter, Insta, etc, etc. is not the answer.