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Comment by highace | Hacker News Reader

I'd be totally cool with a paywall instead of slow and distracting ads.

Here's an idea - why don't a bunch of publishers (or a third party) get together and build a subscription service for a reasonable monthly fee that automatically gets me through their paywall when I visit their sites. In theory it would be open for any publisher to join, and they get to split my monthly fee based on pageviews.

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It would be 10 or 100 such subscriptions to various "networks" of sites, and in the end these micropayment-networks would live more from selling the visitors' behaviour patterns than from the fees themselves (just like ad networks are in the bulk information collection business).

The solution imho is a good micropayment system where I can choose to view a page for $.01 or view it for free with ads.

I personally wouldn't mind. They could track me all day long (except why would they - they aren't doing ads any more) as long as the Internet gets free of the shit that's eating everyone's bandwidth, battery power, CPU cycles and sanity.

If your sanity is so easily upset by advertising, I suggest you get off the internet, and avoid TV, radio and print altogether.

Being on the internet or not is no longer optional. In lots of places governments now require that you communicate with them via their website, it's the way people stay in touch with each other (and you'll be left out if you don't) and it is the way companies do business, hire people and communicate between each other.

Advertising is not an essential part of the internet, but everything else is. Remember: the internet was doing just fine before advertising rolled along.

I avoid TV, radio and print already. But why should I get off the Internet when I can just use an ad blocker?

You'd think that would exist already: A service that costs, say, 8$ a month. It should remove ads and paywalls, and pay the publishers some amount relative to how much I've browsed their site.

There is! It's called Google Contributor - https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ - and people seem to like it. I'm not sure it's gained a lot of traction, but it's a good idea, and Google's the one to do it, given their domination of the ad market.

It doesn't remove the paywall though?

It would be nice if it did but the incumbents seem to be more interested in all out war against the internet as opposed to finding a workable solution?

$8 a month is a pittance. You can't even get the NYT alone for that. You can't get the WSJ either. You can, just barely, get the Linux Weekly Newsletter for that much.

This is like the GMail-without-ads idea. The provider and the user are far out of sync with each other. You _can_ get a Gmail without ads today, if you want. It'll cost you $50 / year.

To make it worse, that decreases the value of your advertising space. When you have a free-only service, the value of your advertising is the benefit of showing the people who can afford things ads. If you have a free and a paid ad-free service, the value of your advertising is significantly lower, because the people with money (and willing to spend it) are no longer going to be shown the ads.

Great, now I'm going to advertise to a bunch of poor people and skinflints. There's no chance I'm going to pay the publisher an equal amount for those ads as I'm going to pay them for the rest. So that publisher will have to charge paying users enough to make up the shortfall.

> $8 a month is a pittance. You can't even get the NYT alone for that. You can't get the WSJ either. You can, just barely, get the Linux Weekly Newsletter for that much.

It would work poorly for the regular NYT readers, but I'd argue that's not most of the Internet. People don't browse websites, they read articles they found using a search engine or were linked to somewhere. I'm not paying NYT, the Economist, WSJ, The Atlantic, and a hundred other websites $10 each, when I read on average one article every two month on each of those sites. So I think the idea mostly works, but we need to make sure that those who read more articles from a single site pay correspondingly more to it.

> Great, now I'm going to advertise to a bunch of poor people and skinflints. There's no chance I'm going to pay the publisher an equal amount for those ads as I'm going to pay them for the rest. So that publisher will have to charge paying users enough to make up the shortfall.

So the system stabilizes at some price point and there are no ads? I'd say "mission accomplished" :).

I dunno how many sites I visit each month, maybe a couple thousand? And what's the CPM these days, maybe 2$? So 10$ per month doesn't seem unreasonable at least for ad supported websites.

For paywalled websites, I'd say that the cost is set very high because the number of paying customers compared to the total number of readers is small.

Blendle [0] aims to do something like this - actually a pay-per-article model. I'm waiting for it to launch in the UK.

[0] https://launch.blendle.com/

One of the nordic countries has done exactly that, if I recall right. I can't remember the name of it though?

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