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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like their plan is to block all ads, then sell the new ad inventory created by all the blank space on pages.

Why on earth would users want this browser?

My understanding is that the replacing ads do not use trackers and do not breach your privacy. They could also be less invasive visually I guess, that would be acceptable. However I would prefer the acceptable ads to support the content creator, which is not the case here. So, no reasons to make the switch from a classical adblocker for me either.

There are project which lets you curate where you accept ads and where you really want to block trackers: see https://myrealonlinechoices.inrialpes.fr/ (I actually submitted it to HN a few days ago but it did not catch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886400).

Really? I guess that I didn't read carefully enough. If that's the case, how would it be acceptable? As I recall, a huge cybercrime bust some months ago involved malware that replaced native ads. Also, that was one of the widely criticized features of the malware that Lenovo was putting on its consumer notebooks. I suppose that this is at least legal because it's users who would be installing the browser. But it would still be iffy.

Well, the logical extension of that is that you actually get paid to browse, that might be a gamechanger.

Keep in mind that the supply side right now ends at the owner of the web property that starts the ball rolling when in fact it actually starts with the person sitting behind the computer looking at the page.

So this is a giant cut-out-the-middle-men opportunity and Eich is fairly uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.

Wonder if that rev-share idea is part of the long term plan.

We tried the "paid to browse" thing 15-20 years ago. Didn't go so well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf

Times have changed since then and it definitely would not be the first time that something that fell flat out of the gate the first time became a success the second time around. Lots of current successes are actually just warmed over past failures.

That's not proof in any way that this might succeed now but there is something to be said or giving that a shot with the number of eyeballs available today (and the harder to advertise to markets that have been unlocked by the web but where ad agencies are not yet capable of selling inventory).

If you could centralize that through the browser it would be a fairly powerful strategy if adoption would be large enough (that's the crux), which is why I wondered if it was on their roadmap.

huh. See, I thought the reason it failed last time,besides fraud[1], was a broader reason - it's the same reason paid surveys aren't worth very much. the idea is that the people you want to advertise to are precisely the people who are willing to trade money for their time; the opposite of the people you get when you pay folks to watch advertising.

[1], in 1998, I seem to remember that one of my co-workers had installed a thing on his work computer that would move the mouse and "browse" the internet when he wasn't there, getting paid for seeing ads.

I had one of those ad-display things installed on my computer in that era. I used the manual controls on my CRT to push the ads off the top of the screen, so I could just see like a 2-pixel-wide edge that showed me the thing was still running.

Of the old ad networks only doubleclick survives and they only do so because of google massive anti-fraud measures.

Anybody that gets into ads these days will have to take abuse as their #1 priority to be able to compete so if this is to work at all you can bet that anti-fraud measures would make up a very large component of the package.

Tying the end-user and one of the primary beneficiaries to the same chair is a risky thing but not all forms of advertising are equally susceptible to this kind of risk. For instance, performance based advertising and to a lesser extent branding are not all that much at risk.

On another note fraud is present in all forms of online advertising at the moment (with the same qualifications listed above) and it is simply priced into the ad rates.

We also tried tablets 20 years ago. And VR 30 years ago. And electric cars 140 years ago.

I don't really believe this project will work, but your argument is rarely a good reason not to try something.

I actually founded a get paid to surf website named PayBar that was the first to make it to market. It was far far smaller than AllAdvantage, and paid quite a bit less(no VC money = bootstrapped before it was cool). It was a sustainable model however until the bubble burst and rates went from $60 CPM to $2 or less CPM. The original founder of AllAdvantage has also tried in the recent past to do it again with a company named AGLOCO. I have a soft spot for the get paid to surf portion of Internet history, but I really don't see it coming back looking anything like it used to.

Paying to browse, a terrible idea that has been tried before.

Alladvantage.com raised about 200m on that idea. The wikipedia page isn't correct, they had a pyramid based payout system. Fraudulent users would create enormous numbers of fake users under them and simulate all of their browsing.

It seems to be working well for Wow, which is effectively the same but for phone calls:

http://www.telecompaper.com/news/wowapp-sets-sail-for-voip-a...

In existing model of advertising too, it's possible to fake ad-clicks and cost your competitors a lot of money.

Agree - fraud is rampant in the current ad marketplace as well. Both with fake ad-clicks and malicious installs.

Facebook, twitter and other native ads/sponsored posts are the cleanest ads.

Is getting paid to browse a positive thing or just a sign that something major is going wrong?

We've always been paid to watch advertising. By free websites, free browsers, free content...

This just makes it more explicit, which may have appeal.

We've always generated value for advertisers and therefore implicitly paid content producers. Trying to get a share of that value takes money from one of those two entities if there are no intermediaries. I think it does not make sense to take money from either one.

I can't really think why a user would prefer this, but I can imagine that companies would have an incentive to pre-install it: A browser with unblockable ads (and an integrated micropayment system, if I understand correctly) is the kind of browser I imagine bundled in OEM systems, along with the typical bloatware.

Whether that's their main focus or not, I can't tell.

I question the legality and ethics of selling new ads on top of other people's content.

It worked for Google

only when using that content under fair use (snippets and image thumbnails) or was transformative (e.g. book search, which doesn't even directly have ads)

Google does not do this.

Actually, it sounds more like it'll do what adblock plus does.

https://adblockplus.org/about#monetization

Edit: It looks like I was wrong:

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/68983945486585...

Because the other browsers don't include ad-blockers by default. You can get them as addons, but they're not included by default.

I'm sure for many people this makes a difference. Is that enough to switch? Ehhh...

Because it's quicker. That's why they've got that speed comparison video as the first thing you see on the site.

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