Life After Content Blocking

Not sure if this describes Google Contributor, but I've been thinking about this as a solution:

Build an ad network that serves blank ads - content that does not try to capture the user's attention, on the contrary, tries to blend into the background of the host site.

Have users sign up for the service, paying whatever nominal amount into their account balance. Whenever a logged-in user requests a page somewhere on the internet, the service outbids all the other ad networks to make sure the user sees the blank ad instead. Whatever fraction of a penny that cost gets debited from the user's account.

If I understand the ad mechanism correctly, this will allow 1) users to filter out ads while paying for content, 2) hosting sites to collect a small payment and 3) the service to take a tiny cut to contribute towards operating expenses.

Anybody care to poke holes in this?

I remember people talking about micropayments for articles when the dot-com bust happened in 2000. It didn't happen, because people aren't going to keep making purchases when browsing the news or their favorite blog or what have you.

Sure, we have some more infrastructure in place now than we had 15 years ago, but we're still not going to put up with (for example) Google Pay or Apple Pay confirmation dialogs every time we click on a link to a news article. And don't think they can just bury the confirmations: app stores have gotten into huge trouble in the past for not providing enough security surrounding IAPs, and we had enough stories of children unknowingly running up their parents' credit cards with IAPs that the FTC had to get involved. We're not going to see anything that lets you unknowingly run up a credit card while browsing the web.

Social media has probably done more to make paywalls more difficult than anything that existed in 2000, too. If you post an article to social media, your friends are going to complain when they click a link and find out they have to pay to read the article. Thus, people don't submit hard-paywalled links to social media so as not to piss off their friends, and hard-paywalled sites find their mindshare and thus their relevance evaporating in favor of sites that don't do this. To get around this, paywalled publishers like the New York Times poke holes in their paywalls for Facebook referrers, because they'd rather lose a bit of paywall revenue then get shut out of social media and see their mindshare drop like a rock. So many people nowadays get their news from links posted to social media that the NYT must be taking a huge hit from their Facebook exceptions. It's a catch-22: they directly lose money by poking holes in their paywalls for Facebook, but they'll also indirectly lose money through loss of relevance if they tell everyone who wants to share their articles on Facebook to pound sand.

Honestly, the best case scenarios are:

- Patreon-style crowdfunding models, where enthusiasts pay content creators before the content is created, and then it's available to everyone with no strings attached.

- Content is offered as a loss leader in order to get people onto the website in order to buy the real moneymaking product. What the real product is, that's up to marketing departments to decide, but it's not the content, and it's not the ad space.

There is a service I read about in the Netherlands, called Blendle - that charges micropayments for articles read from news sites.

I've never used it personally, but their 1-year-later writeup:

https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

References allowing seamless refunds, for content that the reader doesn't find up to quality. With clickbait articles getting higher refund rates.

"At Blendle we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print."

While referencing for content as a whole "On average, in only 5% of the cases a user asks for a refund."

I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, both on my own, and when we diagram these models out in business school, and I haven't been able to come up with a model where both content-producers and consumers win. Their needs are directly at odds with each other.

This is probably because we are thinking about this the wrong way. The news sites today are engineered to catch your attention. But the market rewards companies who keep it. The New Yorker, The Economist, and NYT come up again and again on this site and others as examples of "the only news source I pay for" because of their quality content. Simply put, they don't make you feel stupid when you read them.

The problem is the amount of attention required to keep someone's attention is much less than the amount required to catch it, which is why BuzzFeed exists. What do people usually read on their lunch breaks? HuffPo. Until that changes, the landscape will be what it is.

I'm extremely interested in how Aeon.co will make those choices. They manage to consistently produce interesting, relevant, long articles but have no ads (yet). In an interview from 2012[1], its cofounder says, "Our business model is to spend the first year or so investing significantly in the magazine in order to build up a strong following or community of interested people – readers, writers, artists and photographers. Once we have established that reach we will start to build opportunities for generating revenue. We are not sure what forms these will take and are watching closely how other publications are doing so – from micro-payments for articles, to higher levels of service for subscribers, live events, and online fora." This quote tells me that even those in the industry have no idea and everyone is still making it up as they go along.

[1]http://www.frostmagazine.com/2012/10/brigid-hains-on-the-lau...

I'm hoping Google Contributor gets more traction:

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

We might see the creation of syndicates where you pay $10 a month for access to Collection of Sites A and $5 for Collection of Sites B, etc.

Maybe A will have major newspapers as members and B will have most small town papers, and C will have tech blogs and D will have right-wing political blogs, or something. The fee gets divided up between the members based on page views.