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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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