Google's effort to get ad-avoidant site visitors to pay flounders | Hacker News Reader

Google's effort to get ad-avoidant site visitors to pay flounders

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31 pointscpeterso44 comments

The value for the user isn't there.

Netflix: $8 = no ads

Google Contributor: $10 = half as many ads on a few websites.

uBlock is free for no ads. You have to be better than that. The web is a weird place. I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content. Part of the problem is that the internet is brimming with garbage, and no one wants to pay for garbage. If a user incidentally visits a site and it isn't what they were looking for, they don't want part of their monthly ad-bidding funds to go to that site.

I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content. Maybe if we are forced to pay for every view, we'll think twice about where it comes from and not waste money on clickbait. Probably not.

The web is full of misleading garbage, but you can get every book ever written inexpensively or free from some combination of Archive.org and Amazon. Many books are trash, but at least we have some means of sorting them.

The web is a big popularity contest, with Google search / Facebook rank being a modified popularity contest. What's popular and entertaining is unlikely to be what's true or useful.

People are very willing to pay for accurate, useful information. Most people do not need accurate or useful information for the majority of their needs in life -- nor do they even want it as we can tell from their revealed preferences.

The web is not even all that popular compared to television. Judging from the websites of many formerly prestigious magazines, many people just use the web as an enhanced edition of TV Guide with some chat features built in.

TV is many orders of magnitude more popular than computer media in the developed world. Many people are happy to pay TV subscriber fees for inaccurate but entertaining shows. The most popular programs are fantasies and sports games rather than documentary programs.

>I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.

Someone tell Jeff Bezos that all those book sales are illusory. But yes, we should expect the web to more and more be the equivalent of a trash heap of brochures and junk publications pointing people towards higher quality options, with the occasional equivalent of a curated public library (like Archive.org).

>I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content.

They really do when it's important to them. But what people say is important to them when other people are looking is not necessarily what is really important to them.

> but you can get every book ever written inexpensively or free from some combination of Archive.org and Amazon.

Do people really believe this?

I've been chasing a copy of "L'envol des Alouettes" by Charles Marchetti for years. Occasionally, once every few years, a single copy appears on amazon.fr or Abe Books for around 200 Euros and is snapped-up within hours. There is not one single digital copy of it available anywhere.

And that's just one title I've had on my wishlist for over a decade.

You're right to correct me. Most of the works ever written have been lost to history. What I said holds for books that have been popular, historically significant, or valued enough to be widely preserved and archived.

I wish there was an easy way to make micropayments for articles, in the vein of Amazon's one-click feature. Go to an article, hit a paywall, click a shiny ¢5 button, done. If the micropayment was small and I didn't have to enter my CC info more than once, I'd do it all the time. Unfortunately, this would be contrary to the way commerce works on the internet today. In order to maintain security, it would probably have to be the browser, not a third-party service, that handles your CC information. A new browser commerce protocol would have to be created, and every platform vendor would have to support it. So it would probably never happen.

> I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.

Advertising really muddles everything and makes content feel "free", even though it's clearly not. Content producers should do a better job of making it clear that if users don't pay, they won't get their content.

Flattr sort of tried to do that. It never caught on, unfortunately.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

It seems structured to fail. Anyone annoyed enough by ads isn't going to pay for 50% less ads when they could have 100% less ads for free with an ad blocker.

I do. I actually pay for ~30% fewer ads ($5/month on Contributor) whereas I could easily just use uBlock.

There are few reasons I do this: (1) uBlock is overzealous -- it breaks some websites and I'm not interested enough to tweak it to not break them. (2) Sites I like (e.g., boingboing, The Sweethome) don't get any money when I use uBlock, but they do if I use Contributor

I recognize that I'm a weird Silicon Valley type but I'm hopeful that we aren't too rare. There are dozens of us. Dozens!

Plus you forfeit up-to-substantial speed advantages when you are bidding on the ad space yourself.

Fighting my way through the article, looking for some info I read this:

...uptake has been slow... ...the idea has gotten little interest from readers... ...The adoption rate is very, very low... ...a tiny percentage of the site’s overall inventory... ...has not been a meaningful driver of revenue... ...the number of paying subscribers hasn’t been huge...

Dudes! Instead of repeating the same foggy sentence over and over and over to make an article out of a simple number - how about giving a simple percentage of how many readers have signed up and be done with it?

Exactly! I thought I was getting senile reading that article...

The last time Google contributor got brought up, I mentioned I'd be happy to participate so long as I wasn't being tracked and could still block any remaining ads. As is, it seems that running adblock would prevent contributor from paying any of the sites I visit so I don't see the point.

I actually don't even run an adblocker any more - I just use a javascript blocker set for "default deny" which seems to work just about as well as a real adblocker.

How do you propose they pay websites you visit without tracking which websites you visit?

I should have been a bit more clear - obviously they need to know who I am, and they need to figure out billing, but they don't need to keep any long term records or use those records for anything else.

If your browser directly negotiates with the site, there would be no third party aggregating data. If federated, you could choose the payment processor (perhaps bitcoin?), and only companies (or distributed protocols) you implicitly or explicitly trust receive the data.

$5 a month to see 15-25% fewer adverts seems like a bad deal, when I first saw this announced I couldn't see any way of it working.

Google being financed by advertising is interesting, on one hand they pump a lot of money into security (and lead the field in a lot of areas) but on the other they take in a lot through scammy adverts. Just Google 'Chrome' on a new computer and you will be faced with a whole bunch of "Download Chrome from download.safe-webbrowsers.com" that are designed to trick less technical people into installing crapware. Same for the endless diet pill and 'one weird trick' adverts that scam people into eating the pill equivalent of crapware.

On a side note that title took me a while to process, I was wondering what flounders are and why on earth visitors should pay them.

Surely you're familiar with flounders! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder) And they're in decline these days; paying them, to help keep up their population, would make sense. :)

(If Google wanted me to pay flounders, I'd do it; but paying for ad-blocking? I'd rather just block Google APIs with NoScript.)

This seems to be a service that costs more than all other ad-blocking services and blocks vastly fewer ads than those services.

Additionally, it is run by the company that people who would be concerned about ad trackers are probably the most concerned about.

I would be shocked if it gained any traction ever.

I'd be more likely to pay in exchange for no ads whatsoever than to pay money and continue to be exposed to essentially an unaccountable 3rd party (the ad network) when it comes to security issues like being served malware when that 3rd party gets hacked.

If micropayments were a thing I'd be willing to pay $1 for a day pass to view an article on an infrequently read website as opposed to paying $50/yr which is a complete waste of my money.

Micropayments are hopefully becoming a thing: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome-exten...

I use Google contributor, but only because I want something like this to succeed. I don't actually like the implementation they have. The biggest thing for me? I can't see where my money is going. At the end of the month, I want a breakdown of where my money went.

I want to know that when I went and visited John Smith's blog, he earned $0.13 from that visit. Contributing feels good when you know where your money is going. It's like a charity - you want to know your money went to a cause you care about. Right now I think Patreon has a better model, but I like the smaller increments that Google Contributor offers.

They do give you a breakdown of where your money went at the bottom of their website (when logged in): https://contributor.google.com

It would be nice if they offered to e-mail this to you once a week/month or provided more detail. Even better would be for them to show some of that information in the place of the ads you've purchased.

Here is an alternative that actually makes sense for users and content producers, instead of favoring Google's ad business:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome-exten...

Pay flounders?

Sounds fishy to me.

My brain has a kernel panic every time I try to read the title.

Did Google's marketing department not the memo? Literally nobody outside of the tech circle has the faintest clue what Google Contributor is.

If AD Blocking becomes too prevalent I feel bad for the internet. There just seems to be a large contingent of people who just don't want to pay for content.

Just blaming it on people not wanting to pay for content is short sighted.

Are there those people? Of course... just like there are people who won't tip if they have a billion dollars in their bank account...

The reasons for ad blocking is long:

* Screen Real-estate * Cognitive load * Speed up browsing * Data usage * Distracting * Sound based ads * Pop ups * Pop unders * Security * Tracking/Profiling/privacy * Being cheap - or not having any reasonable route to support random-website-#896796987

I could probably add a few more if I took a few minutes, but the same arguments about MP3s ran rampant. Those DAMN KIDS! with no respect REFUSED! to pay for a full CD! HOW DARE THOSE CHEAP BASTARDS!

Then, amazingly... a more flexible model came about and GASP people started buying MP3s. Same for Netflix and other digital content.

The problem is peoples privacy, security, screen time, etc are getting thrown under the bus for some random companies profit...

You give me a more reasonable model and I'll tone down my Ad Blocking (I allow text based ads on Google.com for example)... until then, you can shove your fake "THOSE CHEAP BASTARDS!!!" argument right up yer kiester...

Now get off my lawn dammit.

There was an Internet (WWW, even) before the current ad boom, and there will be one after, if there is an after (fingers crossed).

Google would not be a 300 Billion dollar company. I got down voted for simply saying the truth. A lot of companies are as big as they are due to the Ad revenue.

Is Google being a 300B dollar company a good thing for the internet though? Sure, Google provides a lot of useful things thanks to that, but I'm pretty sure there will still be internet after Google is gone.

If they can't maintain their valuation they'll do what every other company before and after them did - be worth less, and if they can't find a sustainable valuation they can be worth nothing.

It will probably come full circle eventually. If ad revenue stopped being given to content creators then content creators would stop producing content then people would become more likely to give money to content creators then ad agencies would come back and offer money to content creators and then people would stop contributing, etc.

Ads don't pay that well. A small subset of people willing to pay are able to support the content. There will always be freeloaders, but it costs almost nothing to publish content.

As adblocking becomes more prevalent, the garbage-y sites will die, and the market will pay for the content that's actually good. Sounds like a good thing to me.

I don't understand how you can square the idea that the market will pay good amounts for content with the fact that ads are ubiquitous, not just something found on low-quality sites. If ads weren't the best way to make a living, why wouldn't quality publications like Ars Technica just ask people to pay?

There're more freeloaders that you can imaging. And there're lots of paying users love to be freeloader if they can get the same thing without paying. Reference the music industry and napster.

Is there any reason why someone just doesn't make an adblocker that surreptitiously clicks the ads so everyone gets paid and gets to keep their sanity?

Because that's considered ad fraud. There're websites specifically doing this such as have a silent video ad playing in a hidden div and try to get paid for it. But the ad network is not stupid enough to pay for this kind of fake "impression" where users don't even see the ad. In addition, this kind of action will lower the advertising value of the website. So in the end, even for the website itself, it's more harmful to have adblocker click on ads rather than just block it.

Ok wait, fraud? That's a bit strong don't you think? The person running this hypothetical plugin doesn't have any agreements with people to do or not do anything with ads on a page. There is no obligation from someone viewing an ad to not click on it for any reason.

That said, if you wanted to cause the ad industry to implode, you could do a lot worse than creating a plugin that does precisely this and having it reach critical mass.

As a bonus, it would completely screw up the analytics attached to your tracking cookies/IP address.

Well "ad fraud" is an official name for this kind of behavior. Consider in an advertiser's perspective, I pay to get someone see my ad, and I even pay more if people click on it. Now I've paid the click price but my ad is not seen by any real person. That is fraud.

It might not be the user who use the adblocker committing the fraud, but that user is getting involved. And the website ( unfortunately might not have any control on this entire thing) is pulled into this chaos by the user and adblocker, and will get harmed.

That would be fraud, you are now asking the advertiser to fund the web without any upsides.

This would eventually backfire if ad networks look for click fraud.

A webmaster and google can track users who came to the site via ads. It would be brutally obvious if your adverting money went to users who bounced 100% of the time.

because that would be fraud?

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