Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

As a possibility, a model whereby advertisers pay both content providers and readers for viewing ads.

I can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time.

This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.

Ad networks use real-time bidding to auction banner ad space as the page loads. (I imagine that's part of the reason it can take so damn long for some news sites to load.) Why can't the user (or their user agent) take part in this same auction? If I'm will to pay $0.02 per page view on nytimes.com, but advertisers are only willing to pay $0.01 then I should be able to win the auction.

So, exactly this:

https://contributor.google.com/u/0/

You even have control over who gets your money:

http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png

Interesting! I thought Google Contributor was more of a direct micropayment system for content, but from that link it looks like real-time bidding.

That's a slick idea and one you could actually execute with some amount of success today. The basic idea would be that you could sign up for an advertiser account on a DSP (Demand Side Platform), create a retargeting audience, cookie your own web browser cache to place yourself in your retargeting audience, and then buy ads against that audience - ie yourself.

That would be essentially the same thing this guy did to his roommate: http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

What is the point of a system that pays people less than a cent?

Right, that part needs some improvements. I'm thinking, advertisers might compete for viewers by paying more for a given keyword, i.e. the prices are not fixed and the highest bidder wins the viewer.

Another question is whether these ads are skippable or not. Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.

> Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.

I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?

Some content providers may choose to allow that, because it's in their interest to deliver content to more readers, be more popular. Let's not forget, the whole point of journalism is to reach out to more readers. How the journalist's job is paid exactly is secondary really, as long as it's legal of course.

So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.

The point is that lots of cents make up a sizeable income. The problem is that processing 'a cent' or a fraction of one costs more than you'll end up getting and nobody - to date - has been able to create a functioning micro payments system with associated wallet to gain sufficient adoption to make it work. It's a combination of a technology problem with a chicken-and-the-egg problem.

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