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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

There is a larger pattern here. Is there any large B2C web service that's not monetized by selling the users' data (for advertisement targeting etc.)?

For example, I would absolutely love to pay a monthly fee to Twitter (say, 3-5€) in exchange for an ad-free, unmodified, chronological timeline. And I would also consider paying something (say, 10€ a month) to Google in exchange for an ad-free search site that does not collect any data about me without my explicit consent.

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My guess here is that the subset of users who would be willing to pay a monthly subscription is strongly correlated with the subset that advertisers are interested in targeting most. If a site got say 10% of users to pay a subscription, their value to advertisers - and hence their advertising revenue - might drop a lot more than 10%, leaving them with a net loss.

I run uBlock origin and would pay for a monthly subscription.

That's a very interesting point. I never thought of that and I think you're right.

It seems to me the opposite. If someone cares enough to pay for the content directly ,I suspect that person is the one who will be going out of the way to avoid ads and tracking in the first place.

The trouble is that at this stage hoovering up customer data is in Google's DNA. As far as my perceptions go all a paid option means is that now they attach my credit card details to their data on me.

That's a good point, but it also seems strongly correlated with those that run ad/privacy blockers. (Even with such a blocker, perhaps the data collected is still valuable, though?) My instinct is that by selling an ad and tracking-free site, they would be indicating that the ads and tracking are a bad thing, as opposed to the party line that it's all "to deliver better services to you".

I think there's at least two reasons. With Twitter or Facebook the problem is that they're dependent on network effects so asking for payments from users is out of the question, they would never get to 100s of millions of users that way. With Google search, you may have more of a point, but I guess in the end Procter and Gamble has more money to spend on individual search transactions for ads than the other parties involved (users searching for sites and website publishers who want to appear in results.)

Apple is probably the most successful counter-example but even they are now going to have app store ads.

Don't have to charge everybody. There can be a free tier ("pay with your data") and a paid tier ("pay with your wallet")

It can be complicated. For example, now you're not advertising to your most engaged users, so advertising on the service becomes less valuable.

Over the years I've seen the reaction to a lot of those "Facebook is going to start charging money!" fake posts and it's very negative. I can't imagine the outrage that would ensue if twitter or Facebook offered a "pro" experience. People don't respond well to free things becoming paid, even if the free version remains largely the same.

Thus far, I accomplish that via: Duck, Duck, Go; NoScript; Privacy Badger; and uBlock Origin. Its silly to need to do all that, but it works well for me.

uBlock cannot give me a pristine timeline; Twitter's algorithms still mess with the content ordering. It's not just about ads, it's about how a tool's design is poisoned by the need for maximal ad revenue.

As far as DuckDuckGo goes, I would really love to use them regularly. DDG is even the default search engine on my notebook, but I find myself going to Google in the second step about 90% of the time because DDG's results are too bad.

Also, DDG is still running on ads, so it's more of the same, albeit implemented more privacy-consciously.

I love DDG in theory. In practice, I append !g to about half of my searches because the results aren't good enough. Say what you will about the privacy concerns, but Google knowing I frequently search for programming stuff makes finding other programming stuff a much easier process.

I have this !g routine too, but lately I'm having a much harder time finding good, technical programming answers than before, even on Google. I would love being able to easily blacklist some websites such as stackoverflow and the likes which often have unanswered questions or incomplete answers, and often fills the first 2 Google's result pages.

> Twitter's algorithms still mess with the content ordering.

Settings -> Account, under "Content" unmark "Show me the best Tweets first"

As if I hadn't disabled that long ago.

I have DDG as my default search engine, but for many things (mainly tech related) I use a !s command to search on StartPage. [1] While Startpage claims not to track users, it has some ads similar to Google (these can be blocked easily). Since it searches through Google, the results are great. That leaves me using Google somewhat rarely, like for example, if I want to search based on a specific time range or do a reverse image search. This approach provides me the freedom to be logged into say, Gmail, without worrying that my searches would be recorded and used for profile building and advertising (I take care not to search on Google while logged in to any of its sites in the same browser or a non-private browser window in the same browser).

[1]: https://startpage.com

You can pay less then 10€ a month to get ad free YouTube and Music. Best money I spend every month.

Great. Now they should offer the same for the search engine.

I think you can? https://contributor.google.com . Not that I’ve tried it - I’m not allowed to in the UK.

I get this error when I try to sign-up : Error fetching data. Please try again later.

Contributor is only for sites that use Google's ad products. I don't think it works in Search.

Essentially, it's a way for a site's users to bid for its ad spots. If you bid more than the advertisers, you don't have to see the ads.

It's quite a clever idea really, but I don't think it has much uptake from publishers.

I use it and it probably covers about 65-75% of ads I see, and almost 100% on news websites. I've also seen it work in apps.

It's too bad there wasn't some way to have it cross over networks too.

They have adds on Google Search? I swear my mind automatically just remove them subconsciously.

Also you could just use an add block

> I swear my mind automatically just remove them subconsciously.

That's a (rather quickly) learned behavior called banner blindness. :) [1] People get used to the locations where ads are placed on web pages and also the kind of look that ads have (flashy, colorful, animation, tiny picture with some text, etc., as some examples) and don't even look at them (these have been confirmed by eye tracking studies a long time ago).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

/s/add/ad

The problem is that by paying you are also identifying yourself and what user data would be better than clearly identified user data?

Second problem is that there is potentially more money in you than this proposed relatively low amount because you are probably spending a lot more in a month and it is big attraction to become a middleman in every transaction you make.

The problem is that Google does not want that messaging. If they collected money in exchange for not violating your privacy, they'd be acknowledging that what they do, is actually violating your privacy. At times, Google has even tried to use the rhetoric that providing you more relevant ads is a service to you that improves your experience on the Internet. (LOL)

Basically, the income they'd gain from offering this would pale in comparison of the reputation they'd lose (and following that, users) from admitting what they do is bad for you.

I too would very much like those things. But, how would we know that they were telling the truth about not collecting the data?

It would be illegal.

You could compare your search results to a fresh browser on a new IP address.

A little off-topic, but I was just talking about that Twitter idea the other day with someone. He had asked if I thought Twitter would go private or sell off. I said that Twitter should look at ways to monetize their stream outside of ads. Like you, I would gladly pay a couple bucks a month to customize my feed how I want it.

google does not sell your data. this is such a tired canard.

Selling access to the user that created the data is the same damn thing for the end user. It's just that in the way Google does it, Google gets paid over and over instead of one time selling a static list.

not it isn't. if you sell the data then it goes into 3rd party hands and out of google's control and they can do all kinds of bad things with it.

And what exactly prevents them from doing the bad things themselves? What is the inherent reason that I should trust Google more than any other business?

they have a track record.

A track record of doing bad things behind the scenes, perhaps?

'Bad things' are tracking (Google does this), targeted ads (Google does this), selling access to information so others can target ads and drop tracking (Google does this), allowing Governments access to your activities (Google does this)

Exactly what 'bad things' are being prevented here?

The end result is exactly the same for the end user, its simply a question of who is getting paid how much and how often for that information.

there are much worse things, like spamming.

Spamming isn’t bad, spamming can be fixed with a spamfilter.

Selling your age, gender, location, preferences, etc to anyone who books an ad? That’s bad.

They're not selling your personal information to anyone.

You can read more about how online ads work here: https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html

Except to a foreign government that is actively hostile towards my rights.

That’s more than enough.

Because this foreign government is booking ads?

I don't follow your line of reasoning here.

No, they do that in addition to giving information to advertisers.

If any company gives any information about me to a third party, that's already wrong.

And while advertisers don't get the data directly, they get it indirectly. They get the user specification (age, gender, rough location) they bid on, and the IP, and several advertisers even used that to track you between different websites their AdWords ads were shown on.

They don't give your information, directly or indirectly, to advertisers. Using aggregated information for ad targeting isn't "selling" information to third parties, no matter how hard you try to loosely redefine the semantics of the word.

I'd ask how you think they are giving data to foreign governments, but I have a feeling you'll try to redefine "mandatory court subpoenas for individuals" as the same.

Support costs money. Big money. Just as FB, IG, TW, etc. For the most part, they all suck.

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