I take it as saying something like "why does it have to be Google that does this; someone should have done this a long time ago", maybe.
Google starts a lot of cool projects, it'd be neat to see other companies taking the same initiative in certain areas (I'm sure there are, I just am not well versed in that area).
I don't know of any other companies who control as many display ads on the web, which can be replaced by a "thank you for donating."
There already are other similar services, like Flattr, but it becomes hard to ensure that you get a steady revenue stream by serving ads to some people and getting donations from others, and being able to turn off the ads for those people who donate.
Google runs the largest advertising network on the web.
They already pay for much of the content you see online.
Only they have the ability to say "pay $1-$3 a month, and we'll replace those ads with a thank you", and have it actually affect a significant fraction of what you see.
That's subjective. I don't recall a single product from them that came after search and didn't suck. But the real problem with them is these solutions are being pushed down people throats whether they like it or not similar to what Microsoft was doing in the 90s. This is just another example.
I say GMail and Google Maps are examples of products that were both significantly prettier and better (feature and UX-wise) than any alternative available at that time. But you're right, it's subjective.
No one seems to do any kind of pushing. You're free to not use GMail or Google Maps or whatever; people use it because it sucks less than alternatives.
This looks interesting. Not sure who would be putting money into this, to be honest, but it seems like a fair idea since there are so many companies out there asking for donations to keep running.
I can imagine someone like Wikipedia making a small fortune off of this if it takes off.
How will Wikipedia make anything off this? You have to show Google ads by default in order to participate. This is more about punishing sites for not using Google Ads than about funding creative work.
Google would like everyone's donations to be exclusively given to sites that use Google ads and not to sites that forgo advertising like Wikipedia.
Except that Gratipay is an ethical community site, whereas Google Contributor is only about rewarding sites for annoying people with ads such that people are willing to pay for them to go away. Google Contributor is about Google pushing everyone to use their system only. So, it's actually not like Gratipay at all, except for the idea of ongoing donations, which even Paypal had long before Gratipay ever started.
How do you think this encourages click bait "even more". How would you avoid click bait? Magazines that you deem "not click bait" get granted more money? Who decides what's in this worthy category?
Even before online advertising, it's not like tabaloid magazines didn't exist and make a lot of money.
If people spend their time on a website, why shouldn't that website be worthy of money.
If you went to a site and didn't like it - don't go back there again. Why is it fair for you to visit a site repeatedly and only give money when it publishes an article you like? It's not like you can sign up to the NYT and only pay for the articles you liked that month.
I wanted to do a similar thing for game servers a long time ago. People spends thousands every month to keep a game server alive, but rarely gains any benefits back.
Finally someone took the initiative. I guess I'm glad that it's a company as big as Google.
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
Whenever you think "nobody is doing this", you should start by assuming you're wrong. You really think that in this giant global world, nobody has thought to build a standard way to support sites with donations? There's already a handful of sites with decent history already. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean nobody was already doing this.
"As a reminder of your support, you’ll see a thank you message - often accompanied by a pixel pattern - where you might normally see an ad."
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
Don't underestimate the psychological value of reminding people that they've done something they want to feel good about. As long as it doesn't add to page load time, a reminder saying "thanks for donating to support this page via Google Contributor" in place of an ad helps keep this program in people's minds, keep them willing to pay, and help them think about it at some time other than when they see the cost charged.
Indeed. It's a little thing, but even a small icon at the top of the page that tells me "I'm supporting this site with cash, I'm awesome", would be a small self-esteem boost; a reminder that I do reward the author whose content I benefit from, and a nice feeling that he's getting my money directly. Just keep it unobtrusive.
Come to think of it, where I'd really like to have it is the browser - say right there in the address bar, next to the RSS button (please, please bring it back!). This way it will be unobtrusive, in a consistent place, and won't interfere with the page layout. Win-win for everyone.
Presumably because the specifically-sized iframe might be part of the site's design, and Google doesn't want to muck with it if the site designer might have been too lazy to foresee the problem (because Google would be the one getting blamed.)
They could obviously tell the site the ad should disappear with a JS event or somesuch, though, at which point the DOM can rewire itself.
It might be for technical simplicity: this method requires no more work from the site designers, who are often contractors or otherwise expensive, and off the top of my head I don't know how they could do this kind of disabling on the client side without allowing someone to make a plugin that tricks the site into thinking it is in addless mode.
I like the idea of giving users a painless way to donate to the sites they use. And giving thank-yous in place of advertising is a good way to reduce the incentive to freeload.
I do worry that $1-3 a month is much lower than the value I get from the sites I visit, and consequently not enough to support low-traffic sites that should be supported. They also didn't mention how they distribute your money - equally to all the sites you visit? Proportionally to the number of visits? On a related note, can participating sites choose to eliminate ads only if a user will contribute enough money to them, or must they eliminate ads for every contributor in order to participate at all?
But the real question is, will google.com itself accept Contributor money? And will it eliminate ads for contributors?
I assume that you will pay the same way an advertiser would pay - by bidding for the space. If your bid exceeds the bids of anyone else trying to advertise there, nothing will be shown. Otherwise you'll be shown an ad as normal.
Equally doesn't seem intuitively fair; per-visit is good but has to be adjusted in the face of AJAXy sites and how hilariously easy it is to stuff the ballot box.
I'm going to guess proportionally. Every other such scheme has been proportional. Google can solve the fake visit problem with pattern-matching wizardry. Readability tried to solve it by turning themselves into a proxy server.
I solved it by using a cryptographically-assured end-to-end scheme that requires two mutually distrustful parties to verify that a request was made.
The pricing denomination is set both too high and too low at the same time, depending on whom we're talking about. The whole idea of micropayments to support, for instance, content creators was to generally envision a transactional denomination far below $1 -- hence the word "micro." Since even this really never got off the ground in any significant way, isn't it a stretch to imagine that $1/month is a low enough psychological barrier-to-entry for most average consumers. Similarly, for those true supporter zealots, is limiting the top end to $3/month logical? Why should it be limited at all?
My guess (haven't researched yet) is that Google is taking a percentage, and Google needs that percentage needs to be high enough to make it worth while.
Basically, if this is the project I think it is, all they're doing is letting you act as your own advertiser, with the ad that you're running being an empty pixel pattern.
Good call. Basically, they can turn users with a PREF cookie into additional bidders for ad auctions on their network (and others, maybe?). $1-3 isn't much, but if you pool a large number of users' money, you can both drive auction prices to increase your revenue, and drive users to contribute more when their "contribution" stops removing ads.
Protection rackets aren't exactly a new way to make money. People don't like ads, and Google serves many of the ads, so they can shake people down, and use the extra money to make their competitors' lives harder. Meanwhile, their tracking business is unaffected.
Perhaps, but I think $1 across enough sites would be fine to me. The problem for me is that my dollar will almost certainly go to one or two of the sites each month. In that case, I'll just go pay for that website's upgraded service.
Microtransactions didn't work because it either imposed mental overhead or relied on tipping culture.
So either you're guessing whether the article is reeeeaaaally worth 1 cent, or you're wondering if these $0.001 increments are going to add up to a whopper, or you feel annoyed having to press the "tip" button all the time.
This model -- independently invented several times -- removes that entirely.
> Why should it be limited at all?
Small amounts drastically reduce the attractiveness of using this to launder stolen credit card money.
They're experimenting with youtube donations on some channels, also there's a Youtube for kids app on iOS and Android that has ads, but they're limited to children's programming.
I would love it to be applied to YouTube content for myself, although I doubt it will be. The prevalence and duration of ads on YouTube has steadily increased over the years, up to the point where, just a few days ago, I finally got fed up and installed an ad blocker for that site only. I don't usually use ad blockers because I want to support content creators, and few of the sites I visit have intrusive ads anyway; but it got to a point where enough was enough. However, I would be happy to support video creators with my wallet, and they would probably make more money that way, since I never click ads (so they get CPM revenue only).
When I think about watching TV when I was younger, the details of the shows themselves have faded, but the small but constant miseries of ad breaks are relatively vivid. Sure, the show was good enough to leave an overall positive impression, or else I wouldn't be watching it - although I am sure this is part of the reason I watched relatively little TV - but pleasure and annoyance don't just cancel out; they remain in the mind as parallel memories, each with its own effect. Today, I only watch TV on paid video services that lack ads, and it continues to surprise me just how enjoyable a 'clean high' without interruptions is. Instead of my interest level rollercoastering up as the show plays, sharply down as the ads start playing - ending just before it's gotten low enough for me to abandon ship - it just goes up at the beginning and stays there until the end of the episode.
YouTube videos are different from TV shows, of course - they're typically much shorter, and each viewed as only one element out of many in a session of Internet sensory overload, where no one piece of content lasts long enough to engender the level of concentration characteristic of most other types of activities. When there's constant context switching, an additional switch for an ad isn't nearly as bad. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with it, especially when there's an different possible compensation structure that in theory better rewards both me and the creator.
Somebody posted something similar to this a few weeks ago, and I responded there too that I feel like I'm on a different Youtube than the ones described in these posts. Like 90% of ads I see on there are skippable now, which didn't exist at all a few years ago.
I'm really curious if we just browse completely different subsets of videos or something. What videos are you watching that have so many unskippable ads?
YouTube is experimenting with it. However the margin they pay at is still lower compared to say Vimeo for example where the revenue split is 90/10. YouTube is having their content talent being poached and move to other platforms as individual content providers wake up to this reality.
It so happens I've been trying to launch in the same area myself. And I'm not the first to think of it -- Contenture, Kachingle, Readability and I forget the others.
Naturally I think I have additional secret sauce, and a patent + patent pending covering a cryptographically-secured scheme for tracking visits.
But I won't lie, competing with a company with 10,000 engineers and $60 billion in revenue seems unfair. So I'm going to give them a head-start on this one.
Persons interested in learning more, or in throwing umptillions of dollars at me to make it happen, can find my contact details in my profile.
Google's model rests on the assumption that all the ads on the site will be Google ads, and as such this scheme comes with a fairly heavy incentive for content providers to carry Google ads only.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
> I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
I think it's a mixed bag on that front: we owe some good sites, but also a big part of web spam, to the fact that people believe they can make money through "internet content creation". Beyond the outright spam (content farms, linkspam, etc.) there's also a lot of really low-quality content put online primarily motivated by a hope of pulling in ad revenue.
You are looking at this from the point of view of the user (where ads are not a big deal in exchange of consuming the content for free), but step for a moment in the content creators' shoes. While Ads can still be profitable, they grow less and less efective year after year; almost every other monetization model possible is superior for an internet product nowadays. You can easily run a blog with millions of hits per month and still not make enough to work on it full time. It's shitty if you are the content creator and can only monetize via ads.
You are 100% correct, in fact the margin keeps shrinking. A good example would be YouTube where content providers make $6 for every 1000 views. Your cut as a content provider will keep shrinking.
Except non-awful advertising doesn't appear to be a stable equilibrium. Inventory is essentially infinite; publishers see ever-declining margins; we see ever more intrusive advertising. Plus the usual stories about people getting what they want -- lots and lots of clickbait. Yuck.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
On the contrary. Regardless of what people SAY they want when discussing ads on forums, when faced with the choice of getting content for free with ads, or paying and not seeing ads, people vote with their mouse and choose free with ads.
One might say that advertising has been a hugely POPULAR way to get awesome free services on the internet.
I don't think any normal internet user would consider ads in that way, only the lesser of two evils. People "voting with their mice" and choosing to install ad blockers isn't really a ringing endorsement.
I would prefer to look upon advertising as a stepping stone. We needed the advertising ecosystem when the Internet had a bunch of neat ideas and didn't really know how to monetize any of it. Now we're starting to get far more robust payments systems and a more solid understanding of how to offer value add in exchange for money.
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
When I visited wikipedia today, there was a small widget that let me set up a monthly payment. I have never donated before, but I liked the idea of a small monthly amount so I signed up for 3 dollars. Hopefully, they get to keep more of that money by cutting out Google. Bonus: no tracking.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, blocking ads isn't going to make a whit of difference to tracking. Unless you aggressively block cookies and javascript as well, you're up large on the radar.
Not by itself no, but you can't block tracking beacons and then leave gaping holes in the form of AdSense, so if your motive is tracking then you're not going to see most ads regardless.
I think there's something to be said for an ad-free content "subscription" to the whole internet. I block all ads right now but I would still get the warm and fuzzies if I knew that I was free of ads and I was still paying a little bit to the people who create content online.
So... the product I just launched is identical to what you described. An ad blocker with bundled contributions, check it out if you want: fairblocker.com
Interesting. So the difference between Fairblocker and Google Contributor is that Google allows sites to opt-in to blocking with payment, whereas Fairblocker blocks regardless and allows them to opt-in to getting paid.
Pragmatically, it may make sense as an individual website operator to buy into Fairblocker, since adblocking is going to happen anyway, but I can definitely see not wanting to legitimize this system ("I'm blocking your ads whether you like it or not--want some money in compensation?"), whereas GC doesn't have that issue. (But it also doesn't block non-participating ads, so as a user, I'd want an additional adblocker, so may as well just use Fairblocker.)
I dunno how I feel about "we hold your money in escrow until you claim it", since you will literally owe this money to millions of websites and very few will ever claim it, but it's better than "we distribute the money just amongst those that have signed up".
I hope Fairblocker gets big among those who aren't satisfied with blocking ads just on GC participants websites. Definitely seems like a really good idea, and it needs to reach a good scale to be worth the time for website owners to sign up. I may give it a try (as a user).
Ideally, something like this could still contribute to the sites visited while the user has an adblocker enabled or JavaScript disabled. I would be quite happy to chip in to help sites display fewer ads, but it would be tedious to whitelist all of the participants just so they can get their contribution from my visit. In principle I am very interested in consciously supporting those who create the content I get completely for free (since I don't even view the ads), but for it to work for me it would need to be very low-hassle.
Well, if the script would be embeddable from Google's domain, I think it would be easy to whitelist it. Of course it raises some issues with tracking. One could conceive a self-hosted version, but I'm not sure how Google would avoid scammers then, reporting "fake visits".
Good point. Then let's hope that they use a separate script than the advertising scripts I would not be happy about unblocking. Listening, Google?
I don't really do a lot to prevent tracking of my activities, because I'm so paranoid that I don't really believe blocking scripts will prevent it from happening (see the whole Verizon thing a little while back). But I don't want to have to let ads in from other sites just to be nice to ones I like.
Yes, I stand with you here. I also don't really do much about tracking, but I want to be able to let Google Contributor through without enabling normal ads.
We just launched almost exactly what you describe. It is called FairBlocker. An ad blocker with a monthly subscription fee (of your choice), which we then split up among the sites where ads are blocked.
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: zack@fairblocker.com
I understand the sentiment, but I do think that replying to people talking about exactly what my company does is an appropriate place to try and discuss what I'm working on. This is the only thread I've brought my product up in and did it because it is a discussion of the same concept.
Should Google be collecting this revenue for the content providers? Or could the individual content providers not collect this revenue themselves without having Google take a cut.
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
>How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
I don't think Contributor is intended to directly benefit sites at all.
If you use Contributor, the site receives $0.00136* and a blank ad is shown, paid for by you.
If you don't use Contributor, the sites receives $0.00136 and an Initech ad is shown, paid for by Initech.
It will make no direct difference in revenue for the site, but hopefully they can get indirect benefits from people being less inclined to use ad blockers.
I don't think that's how it works. It sounds like the CPM for a particular user's visits is determined by that user -- by the amount they choose to contribute per month and the number of pages on participating sites they view.
So, depending on a site's audience and content, it seems like they could end up with a CPM that is much higher (or lower) than with ads.
What you describe is exactly how my product works (FairBlocker). We split up a user's chosen subscription among sites where they block ads... I imagine it is what Contributor is doing, too. The way it is working out for us is that a ~$6.5 / month subscription is equivalent to a ~$12 net CPM, though it varies depending on how heavy a browser the given user is. So, higher than what many small sites normally make, but also lower than many video ads or top-tier sites with their own sales teams.
I interpreted as you contribute to the websites that are part of the project that you visit (by splitting the your monthly contribution to the various sites you visit that month). However, it's definitely vague enough on the landing page where either interpretation could be true.
200 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadGoogle starts a lot of cool projects, it'd be neat to see other companies taking the same initiative in certain areas (I'm sure there are, I just am not well versed in that area).
There already are other similar services, like Flattr, but it becomes hard to ensure that you get a steady revenue stream by serving ads to some people and getting donations from others, and being able to turn off the ads for those people who donate.
They already pay for much of the content you see online.
Only they have the ability to say "pay $1-$3 a month, and we'll replace those ads with a thank you", and have it actually affect a significant fraction of what you see.
No one seems to do any kind of pushing. You're free to not use GMail or Google Maps or whatever; people use it because it sucks less than alternatives.
I can imagine someone like Wikipedia making a small fortune off of this if it takes off.
Google would like everyone's donations to be exclusively given to sites that use Google ads and not to sites that forgo advertising like Wikipedia.
What I wonder though is: what happens if I visit a site that I don't want to support? Can I say no? Otherwise this just invites clickbait even more.
[1]: https://flattr.com/howflattrworks
A way for this to work would be simply whitelisting sites you want to support on your adblocker of choice.
Even before online advertising, it's not like tabaloid magazines didn't exist and make a lot of money.
If people spend their time on a website, why shouldn't that website be worthy of money.
If you went to a site and didn't like it - don't go back there again. Why is it fair for you to visit a site repeatedly and only give money when it publishes an article you like? It's not like you can sign up to the NYT and only pay for the articles you liked that month.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
Come to think of it, where I'd really like to have it is the browser - say right there in the address bar, next to the RSS button (please, please bring it back!). This way it will be unobtrusive, in a consistent place, and won't interfere with the page layout. Win-win for everyone.
They could obviously tell the site the ad should disappear with a JS event or somesuch, though, at which point the DOM can rewire itself.
I do worry that $1-3 a month is much lower than the value I get from the sites I visit, and consequently not enough to support low-traffic sites that should be supported. They also didn't mention how they distribute your money - equally to all the sites you visit? Proportionally to the number of visits? On a related note, can participating sites choose to eliminate ads only if a user will contribute enough money to them, or must they eliminate ads for every contributor in order to participate at all?
But the real question is, will google.com itself accept Contributor money? And will it eliminate ads for contributors?
I'm going to guess proportionally. Every other such scheme has been proportional. Google can solve the fake visit problem with pattern-matching wizardry. Readability tried to solve it by turning themselves into a proxy server.
I solved it by using a cryptographically-assured end-to-end scheme that requires two mutually distrustful parties to verify that a request was made.
One can never be too cynical.
Why? Do you only visit one or two sites in a given month?
So either you're guessing whether the article is reeeeaaaally worth 1 cent, or you're wondering if these $0.001 increments are going to add up to a whopper, or you feel annoyed having to press the "tip" button all the time.
This model -- independently invented several times -- removes that entirely.
> Why should it be limited at all?
Small amounts drastically reduce the attractiveness of using this to launder stolen credit card money.
When I think about watching TV when I was younger, the details of the shows themselves have faded, but the small but constant miseries of ad breaks are relatively vivid. Sure, the show was good enough to leave an overall positive impression, or else I wouldn't be watching it - although I am sure this is part of the reason I watched relatively little TV - but pleasure and annoyance don't just cancel out; they remain in the mind as parallel memories, each with its own effect. Today, I only watch TV on paid video services that lack ads, and it continues to surprise me just how enjoyable a 'clean high' without interruptions is. Instead of my interest level rollercoastering up as the show plays, sharply down as the ads start playing - ending just before it's gotten low enough for me to abandon ship - it just goes up at the beginning and stays there until the end of the episode.
YouTube videos are different from TV shows, of course - they're typically much shorter, and each viewed as only one element out of many in a session of Internet sensory overload, where no one piece of content lasts long enough to engender the level of concentration characteristic of most other types of activities. When there's constant context switching, an additional switch for an ad isn't nearly as bad. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with it, especially when there's an different possible compensation structure that in theory better rewards both me and the creator.
I'm really curious if we just browse completely different subsets of videos or something. What videos are you watching that have so many unskippable ads?
Naturally I think I have additional secret sauce, and a patent + patent pending covering a cryptographically-secured scheme for tracking visits.
But I won't lie, competing with a company with 10,000 engineers and $60 billion in revenue seems unfair. So I'm going to give them a head-start on this one.
Persons interested in learning more, or in throwing umptillions of dollars at me to make it happen, can find my contact details in my profile.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
I think it's a mixed bag on that front: we owe some good sites, but also a big part of web spam, to the fact that people believe they can make money through "internet content creation". Beyond the outright spam (content farms, linkspam, etc.) there's also a lot of really low-quality content put online primarily motivated by a hope of pulling in ad revenue.
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
One might say that advertising has been a hugely POPULAR way to get awesome free services on the internet.
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
Google being a middleman makes it logistically easy but removes the main reason why I would pay some amount directly to sites themselves.
Pragmatically, it may make sense as an individual website operator to buy into Fairblocker, since adblocking is going to happen anyway, but I can definitely see not wanting to legitimize this system ("I'm blocking your ads whether you like it or not--want some money in compensation?"), whereas GC doesn't have that issue. (But it also doesn't block non-participating ads, so as a user, I'd want an additional adblocker, so may as well just use Fairblocker.)
I dunno how I feel about "we hold your money in escrow until you claim it", since you will literally owe this money to millions of websites and very few will ever claim it, but it's better than "we distribute the money just amongst those that have signed up".
I hope Fairblocker gets big among those who aren't satisfied with blocking ads just on GC participants websites. Definitely seems like a really good idea, and it needs to reach a good scale to be worth the time for website owners to sign up. I may give it a try (as a user).
I don't really do a lot to prevent tracking of my activities, because I'm so paranoid that I don't really believe blocking scripts will prevent it from happening (see the whole Verizon thing a little while back). But I don't want to have to let ads in from other sites just to be nice to ones I like.
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: zack@fairblocker.com
I don't come to HN to repeatedly learn about your FUCKING STUPID companies in every reply. Go advertise somewhere else.
Chill out.
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
Now bitcoins...that would work.
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
If you use Contributor, the site receives $0.00136* and a blank ad is shown, paid for by you.
If you don't use Contributor, the sites receives $0.00136 and an Initech ad is shown, paid for by Initech.
It will make no direct difference in revenue for the site, but hopefully they can get indirect benefits from people being less inclined to use ad blockers.
* $2 CPM at 68% revenue share
My point is the middle-man must be paid but if there is no middle-man you keep 100% of the profit.
So, depending on a site's audience and content, it seems like they could end up with a CPM that is much higher (or lower) than with ads.
No thank you, I'll stick to Flattr.