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Comment by Paul-ish | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to think two steps ahead here. Say everyone starts using ad blockers and disables flash. Then what? Websites still need to make money.

In this case Brave is betting that websites will want to ask for money from their users, but that each website maintaining their own subscription service is not viable. Maybe large websites like WSJ can get people to subscribe, but most probably cannot. Do you want to be subscribed to every website you ever read a single article on?

I think Brave in this case is positioning themselves to be the middle man. They want to become an essential layer that sits on top of the ISP. If their vision of the future turns out to be accurate, being the first mover here will be very profitable.

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I think we need to think two steps ahead here. Say everyone starts using ad blockers and disables flash. Then what?

Websites die out.

We're only 30 years in to the web, and only 20 or so of those where advertising has been a workable system for funding an online business. In business model terms that's still very much in the "proof of concept" stage. Arguably the concept has been proven only to work when users have no way to block it. When they can block it and still view the media they often choose to do so, which means the business model fails.

This is true everywhere. The hayday of TV advertising was 40 years ago but now people have demonstrated a preference for subscription services that don't carry adverts (Netflix etc). Ad-funded print newspapers and magazines are dying because they don't offer something that many readers want, so their advertising model falls apart because they don't have the scale necessary to make it work. Radio seems to be bucking the trend somewhat as commercial radio is actually bouncing back, but that may be due to the costs falling dramatically.

Now it's online advertising lead businesses time for a reality check. 10 years ago online businesses could make a great deal of money by showing adverts to users who came for the content, but with the rise of social and the contraction in ad revenue they can't really continue. Maybe the answer is subscriptions (eg paywalls). Maybe it's micropayments (eg Brave). Or maybe, and this is what I'd bet on for the overwhelming majority of websites, it's just death. Everyone moves their content to Youtube and Facebook.

Websites die out.

No, a certain portion of websites will die out. There is a huge portion of website that do not make any or very little profit from advertising.

This. The cost of serving even a fairly large website is within a hobbyist's budget and trending toward zero.

The technical side of a web business has always been cheap. Even 20 years ago you could pay the hosting costs of a huge site for the less than the salary of a junior dev. The content production side (writers, designers, film makers, media, marketing, etc) is where 99% of the costs lie.

It may well be the case that the future of the web is a return to sites built and run to host content produced by the site owners themselves instead of paid writers, but considering very few bloggers even come close to earning a living through their work now I doubt it.

You can't reliably adblock vertically integrated sites like Facebook and Google search who sell and serve their own ads on their own domains. There's a scenario wherein monetization as we know it dies for the majority of long-tail sites and content creators migrate en mass to the large platforms in order to survive. Not a great scenario to think about if you love the decentralized nature of the early web but a plausible scenario nonetheless. There a few startups out there trying to "defeat" adblock by allowing smaller sites to mimic the vertically integrated nature of the largest platforms, and counterintuitively the web might be much better off in the long run if they succeed.

Really?

ublock and even adblock seem to cope quite well with both. I haven't unintentionlly seen a Google search ad in a decade, or any Youtube ads. In the case of FB they block 95%+ - periodically a few ads seem to slip through for a day or two at most.

So what do you call reliable?

So what's Bitcoin have to do with it? Seems like that's a gimmick. Just provide a normal refillable/subscription account, then pay out the websites. Isn't that what Flattr or some such company already does? Onboarding customers with Bitcoin is a sure way to avoid making money. You could pay out on the backend with BTC but that's a minor detail.

With current Bitcoin you can't even do micropayments. So they're almost certainly looking at doing some grouping and batch pay system anyways.

Yes, and they take a 15% cut for doing so.

(Bitcoin was supposed to support disintermediation, but it hasn't worked out that way. So was the Internet, yet now half of all traffic goes through Google or Facebook.)

> With current Bitcoin you can't even do micropayments.

False. https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments

This seems to be a protocol to coalesce multiple payments between a single sender and receiver, provided that the sender is willing to commit money up front. It does nothing for the case where a single sender wants to send one-time payments to multiple receivers, nor the case where many individual senders want to send to one receiver. In those cases it would only add overhead.

In the case of Brave it doesn't help them much since there is no real-time requirement, so they could accomplish the same by increasing the time between payouts. With some engineering they should be able to support literally thousands of users before they need to take everything off-chain.

That still requires 2 transactions for every (user, site) pair. On a network that can do 10 transaction/second total. It might be usable for certain classes of micropayment, but certainly not for a "every website I visit" scenario.

I agree, but 10TPS is actually about 4x as many as Bitcoin can handle. It's more like 2.7TPS with actual usage:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-transactions-per-second-shoul...

There are a few ways to do bitcoin micropayments. There's lightning payment channels, probabilistic micropayments [PassShelat 15,16].

There are a few developments trying to crack down the micropayment Holy grail

> Then what?

If one agree with ads as a mean to fund specific sites, then they should just whitelist themselves these sites they think should receive advertisement revenues?

I don't get the idea of bringing in even more 3rd parties in between users and publishers.

That is too much friction, it creates a non-monetary transaction fee that is too high. People don't want to think hard about whether each article (or even website!) is worth reading before they read it. I think this is why Netflix and Spotify is successful.

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