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Comment by Trundle | Hacker News Reader

I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all the time.

I think it would be wise for us to reflect on, and admit, that we (power users) are currently getting a far better than average deal in providing for the web services we use.

Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.

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> Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.

Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.

The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as much.

Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.

That may be true for countries with online payments that actually work, but keep in mind that for many third-world countries the jump from $0 to $0.001 is hard, since people often do not have any way to perform an online payment.

Yes, there needs to be an alternative.

The cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.

Consider the huge ecosystem that has developed for serving ads. Each advertiser need not make arrangements with each site owner.

Paywalls also have a negative effect in the linkability of the Web. If I suggest you to go to some page, and you have to pay for it, then independently if the price, I have a much higher responsibility for the content actually being relevant for you.

As it is now, whenever you recommend pages that host third-party ads, you may be pointing people at malware.

Just like someone reading playboy for the articles, I typically read news aggregator sites for the comments.

Major news organisation provide a couple of paragraphs about the latest development and the interesting part is not the journalists opinion, but what the thousands of people reading the article have to say about it.

This holds for good sites, for e.g. youtube and some others - the comments are mostly worthless.

> An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.

There's Google Contributer, which lets you pay several pennies per article rather than see ads. It could work if existing ad networks let you opt out of ads and cover the display impressions.

Edit: It also shows you pictures of cats instead of ads - http://i.imgur.com/v3jSqyg.png

Google is the biggest ad network but still does not run most of the ads you actually see on any given webpage. The price is a lot higher if you really want to subsidize everything.

Right, but it's a step in the right direction IMO. That's how ecosystems change - the leaders add new features and the network follows.

I agree, quality content is expensive to make. But at the same time, we have access to an incredibly large amount of content (good or bad), and mostly for free. Wishing it away won't make it happen, and maybe it is a good thing.

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