Google Contributor: Buy an ad removal pass for the web
contributor.google.com
contributor.google.com
There aren't just a handful of Ad networks, there are thousands if not millions out there. On top of that, they utilize each other to push out ads in a horrid rat king like incestuous jumble. Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require compensating all of these companies, the end result predictably would be movie studio accounting that leaves the content provider with nothing in the end.
This setup does nothing to address the privacy issues people have with companies like Google tracking their comings and goings. Google is still at the heart of this system and still knows everything about you. To get any benefit from this system actually requires you to embrace Google. People want to maintain their privacy, they don't want to login to Google to get rid of ads.
It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser that you fill occasionally and that prompts you to pay a site similar to the manner in which Location Services work simply based on a meta tag a site provider puts in their page head containing their wallet and request pay amount and schedule. It's impossible to imagine Google, Apple, Facebook, or anyone who wants in your pants to allow themselves to be cut out of a revenue stream by such a system. Companies like this are double dipping by charging everyone else to be the broker and also by being the service provider being paid.
I honestly don't know if an ad free web is allowable. It's technically possible but everyone who isn't the content creator is going to do everything they can to stop it form happening.
*Most relevant demographics
I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work; the publisher integrates Google's contributor code in such a way that if you pay them, they don't show you any ads, no need to worry about the ad ecosystem.
> People want to maintain their privacy
I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US.
> It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser
Brave is really killing it with their user numbers, right?
No, I understand perfectly well how it works. If you pay Google, then Google doesn't show you ads and it gives the Content Creator a cut.
Google is part of the Ad ecosystem. Contributor not only excludes other Ad providers from participating, it also requires the Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem. And Google is still gathering metadata about you.
So who benefits? Google has compelled Content Creators to join it's Ad Network, Google has compelled you to disable your Ad Blocker under the guise of compensating Content Creators, Google gets paid whether it serves an ad or not, and Google gets to track you in ways it couldn't with your Ad Blocker up.
You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I'm sure it will work just fine with whatever Google Ships in Chrome though.
I don't think there has been any indication of this one way or another, and I'd be sort of surprised if this is the tack they're taking.
We'll see how it turns out, but it doesn't sound (to me) like they are compelling companies to show Google ads, merely providing the paywall technology.
> You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker.
I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, so I have no idea where you're getting this idea from.
It is not an either or situation. Google wants to track you and get paid for doing so. They don't care if the money comes from you or advertisers. They do however care if they can't track you.
A contribution system could be setup completely independent of the ad serving system. That however has not been the case. With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all.
"This time is different", or at least I think this time it will be different, since the whole point is to reach users who have ad blockers enabled, I guess we'll see how it goes.
It's a different market to chase money from people that actually read their content instead of companies who want to sell their products, and outside of a few large paywalled sites like Bloomberg or WSJ, many attempts to charge for content online have failed - but the conundrum is they don't fail for lack of readers, just lack of readers willing to pay.
As far as privacy issues, compared to 2 billion active chrome installs[1], the 611 million people that use ad-blockers[2] is only 30%, assuming they're all using Chrome (which I doubt), and even then, privacy tracking blocklists aren't turned on by default, so the percentage of Internet users that know about the privacy aspect, and care deeply enough about it to do something, is surely smaller still.
Google, then, is one of few parties with enough clout to create such a system and possibly prevail. Content creators have already explored a relationship with Google, many end-users already have logins for Gmail, and many have already paid Google directly in some fashion (Google Play store on Android).
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-... [2] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
For regular people, if Brave somehow started eating meaningful chunks of Google's market share they'd just integrate contributor into Chrome and get roughly the same effect.
> I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US.
That's like saying, "I will start believing people don't want viruses when they stop opening attachments, start carefully examining every URL before clicking on it, and verify MD5 checksums before installing any downloads.
We don't blame the spread of computer viruses on untechnical users. The creators of operating systems and browsers have the vantage point and the expertise, and are in the best position to do the right thing. But of course profits always come first. The same goes with privacy.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-t...
The study you linked to asked people "whether they would take discounts in exchange for allowing their supermarket to collect information about their grocery purchases" and found 43% of people said yes, but I believe that the conclusion you would draw if you asked people "would they pay more to stop their supermarket from collecting information about their grocery purchases", you would get different data.
In the same way that people dislike price discrimination more when it is framed as raising prices on some people rather than giving some people discounts.
And I'm sure this behavior will change further when you actually ask people for money and not just whether they would hypothetically pay money.
This always saddens and upsets me that "movie studio accounting" even exists in the first place. I would be loathe to support a model that could devolve to this.
Check out: https://satoshipay.io/
Adaptation is the key to success. Something like that would be counterproductive.
I'm of the opinion that the best we could hope for is strong silo protections and the ability to request deletion of our gathered personal information for individual companies, and even that's a stretch. Also, even if we got that, good luck enforcing it on remote entities.
uBlock is gonna be just as easy to install as hassling with setting up a contributor account.
The acceptance of half-assed worse-is-better partial solutions has doomed us all to scammy, spammy "Links from Around the Web" until these issues arw resolved.
Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content.
In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the value/quality of the content.
I wish it weren't google (who also already owns advertising), but someone large is the only one who can make it happen.
A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.
The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That is a truth. You need to already have the infra to make this change. I think it'd be too much to both successfully grow a business and try to change browsing behavior at once.
> ...The more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
Not necessarily a bad thing. If the value of adverts drops, and this is a well known alternative it provides even more incentive to move to model where there is still money to be made. Not to mention there probably is a bit of "recapture". Of people who ran ad-blockers for the experience (ie zero-revenue providers) who are willing to pay for content. Similar to people who torrented, but instead became Netflix/Hulu subscribers when it became an option.
That really chaps my ass. These are the people keep shitting in the well, then installed a pipe to inject feces directly into the well and the groundwater - and you're telling us that the only way to deliver disinfectant and filtration systems is through that pipe, and we might as well keep using their system?
> The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That does become a problem if Google is the only game in town, and you're inexplicably banned from their platform, which does tend to happen.
This is what every online newspaper has been saying for over a decade as they saw this problem approaching and didn't have a way to solve it. You can't survive this way in the extremely efficient web.
Either top quality content needs to be able to pay for itself (ie charge more), or you're left with only two successful business models: make junk-food content, or off load your content creation to people willing to do it essentially for free as a hobby.
Neither of those are good destinations for the web. They work in niches, but not across the board. Ex. I don't want my newspaper to consist of only volunteer journalists doing a bit here and there in their spare time.
I was a Google Contributor user/paying subscriber for quite a while. It works to some degree. But Brave is superior and is the best thing to happen to the web since ads.
Ads are the worst thing that happened to the web.
It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.
The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikipedia was written by unpaid but enthusiastic curators, and no one got paid for uploading popular Youtube videos until long after it was already a staple of the internet.
I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best. It's still the best. After all, you're here reading the comments on hacker news, which we are all freely contributing too with no expectation of compensation.
Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. It'll move to different kinds of websites depending on how people want to access content at the time, but it will still be here, just as it always has been. What will vanish is all the mediocre spacefilling bullshit. The stuff so dull you _must_ pay someone to write it because no one would do it for fun or kudos.
Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?
Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?
Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?
Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.
In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.
Yes the internet came about because of academics and hobbyists playing around in their spare time. We as people who often came up during that time have a habit of over-weighting that. The internet is not a side project anymore. The internet is the future of every industry - and absolutely the future of every content creation industry.
You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.
You're implying that it's in some fashion my job to care about those industries.
I don't care what happens to buzzfeed, and I don't care what happens to the wallstreet journal. /My life/ and /my needs/ and met regardless of their existence, so I really don't give a shit whether they are sustainable or not.
Not really, they're owned by long serving members of one of the major parties. Their impartiality is directly proportional to the time until the next Icelandic election.
You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.
> I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free
Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.
> Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.
That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.
I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.
As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.
However, you can't look at something amazing like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/us/turkey-pro...
... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.
I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.
I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.
I don't believe that applies to even a tiny fraction of people. I work with a LOT of world-class scientists (biotech). I can tell you outright that after they leave work, the LAST thing they want to do is to spend hours updating Wikipedia or arguing in forum posts about scientific minutia. (Yes, it might be different in pure academia, where people love to publish, but even there, they're already getting compensated)
So even if we take your argument ast face value, people who enjoy sharing _ALSO_ enjoy getting paid. To take a relevant example, the primary reason Linux didn't fail (like most hobby projects do) was because companies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay people to actually write code. You want to write a AAA game, a web browser, a compiler, an OS or any other software tool that has hundreds of millions of lines of code and can compete with the leading products, while not spending a dime? Good luck and god speed is what I'd say. So while in principle, I might agree with your proposition that one man MAY give away the fruits of their labor, and that those fruits might be very very delicious, the world is running out of things people can do in their spare time for free that is also worth looking at. Please note that I'm not talking about hacking out a tiny tool over the weekend. I'm talking about sustained efforts to produce something of value.
> The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best.
You need to provide a _LOT_ of evidence if you want people to believe such an outlandish claim.
I'm still in the testing phases of it, but a lot of people that I've talked to have said "Yes, I'd pay $1-3 to a site that I visit regularly if it didn't have ads"
https://www.trussapp.com/ for the curious (it's still just a hair away from being a beta product, so keep that in mind)
[0] http://www.businessinsider.de/android-malware-spreads-using-...
If there were a headline tomorrow that some random ad network distributed malware onto consumer's computers, everyone would say "never heard of them before" and move on. If the headline were "Google spreads malware onto consumer's computers", it's reasonable to expect that at least a few people would get mad (such as those affected by the malware) and stop using some other Google product(s). So that's a risk that Google has to consider when asking whether malware scanning is a justified expense.
Of course, this doesn't take into account the follow-up question whether malware scanning at the ad-network level (or anywhere, really) offers any sort of protection. (It doesn't appear to be effective, as evidenced by your link.) I, for one, have not whitelisted Google ads (or anything else) in any of my ad/tracking/malware blockers.
They have already served up malware from ads: https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network...
And more importantly, with the guarantee of "no tracking whatsoever" (rather than just not 'showing' ads). Then, some of my friends would start trusting Google again (and are already willing to pay for something like that).
I don't think trust depends on how much you pay somebody who you do not trust. But I may be wrong.
Eventually, you can't know if Google or any company is secretly doing something evil 'against' their own Terms of Services and Privacy Policy, so to be fair to Google we assume that it will stick to them at any given point of time. But, you never know when those privacy policies will change overnight, when the government will change the laws overnight forcing companies to give all the information they have, or when the company will be attacked leaking all data. Also, according to Google's privacy policy there are always some "trusted partners" to which they share the data - whose security measures no one knows anything about. So, the logic is a lot can be done if you have the data. But if you just don't collect it (and it's clearly written in the Privacy Policy), governments/hackers/future evil buyers of the company can't do anything.
And here I wish I could pay for YouTube Red.
From what I've heard, YouTube Red users get Google Play Music for free. Ironically, I pay Google more than $10 a month for Google Play Music alone, but they won't let me pay for YouTube Red, even if I want to.
Why? God knows.
If they're going to be the gatekeepers to paid online content, I'd be furious if they botch that one up too with the same kind of regional discrimination and limitations.
And knowing Google though, that's probably exactly what they're going to do. Because that's what they always do.
Google Red can still impose territorial restrictions.
That's okay, uBlock Origin with its whitelist I compiled with sites I know won't violate my browser with ads is still available in my country.
But that's one of the problems. You know they haven't violated your browser yet but that's no indication that they won't in the future. A lot of people trust/trusted Imgur and whitelisted their ads, and they were rewarded with an ad network that was redirecting them to malware sites. It's cleaned up now, but what's to say it won't happen again? Ars Technica suffered a similar situation a while back. Reddit has had it happen too. All seemingly trustworthy sites.
It's not safe to turn off your ad blocker, there are no third-party ad networks you can trust. The only acceptable ads IMO are native sponsored content, which sites don't like because it's extra work. But guess what: you can't (easily) block native sponsored content.
Hypothetical question: If I were allowed to bid on my own ad impressions - and if I won an auction, no ad would be shown - how much would it cost a month for me to see no adverts? (I realize this is heavily dependent upon the type of sites that are involved, so I guess take the average HN user as an example).
(It's a lot like the creative accounting around media piracy, actually. Assuming that 100% of people who pay $0 for a torrented movie would have paid $10 instead is absolutely deranged.)
It's not zero-value, since the transaction costs of paying every publisher are crippling. But there's no definitive reason to look to Google for this value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Google Contributor was a program run by Google that allowed users in the Google Network of content sites to view the websites without any advertisements that are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.
The program started with prominent websites, like The Onion and Mashable among others, to test this service. After November 2015, the program opened up to any publisher who displayed ads on their websites through Google AdSense without requiring any sign-on from publishers.
Since November 2015, the program was available for everyone in the United States. Google Contributor stopped accepting new registrations after December 2016 in preparation for a new version launch in early 2017.[1] On January 17th, Google Contributor was shut down. As of January 17, 2017 8:40 AM no replacement had been announced.
If Google isn't willing to promise they'll keep it around for a couple years, it simply won't be worthwhile for publishers to invest the engineering (and legal resources) to do these deals and the integrations. I don't expect this latest incarnation to gain traction in its current form.
I do have hope for this subscription model still. If Google or someone else makes a serious go of it, I'll be cheering them on.
If this was more like Youtube Red, I'd be all over this. I would love to pay to remove all google ads. I get that uBlock exists, but I want to support the sites I use.
Unrelated: the sidenav thing is empty? WTF?
The content creator would just like the money. They don't actually want to display the ads. If they could get the money without displaying the ads, they'd be over the moon.
Why doesn't Google make it work across all sites, and pay the sites using Google Ads the average revenue they were already getting per page view?
The problem is that - as described above - many websites use ads from multiple networks, so actually even if you paid, most ads did not disappear. It was more or less random. Also, it turns out ads make sites a lot of money (who knew), so to get even that sketchy coverage required you to pay a LOT.
Online advertising reminds me of airline travel in the sense that people complain about the low quality service but are only willing to purchase the cheapest flights. The industry has shifted to accomodate what people actually want, not what they say they want.
It'll be launching in literally a week or two... it's very simple to integrate and comes with it's own Wordpress plugin (and instructions to integrate your own CMS).
What advice do people have about this per article payment space; I have a load of ideas I want to try so maybe while Google concentrate on ads I'll be able to look at various optional payment models.
Initially I want to just charge a flat 5% + whatever Stripe fees you use to top up your wallet, but I'm concerned I'll get a lot of noise/scaling issues if I don't charge a monthly fee? Thoughts?
Then buy subscription to sites you like.
Dont give google a percentage of everything.
Credit card processors, the post office, transportation companies. ISPs, kinda.
"A percentage of everything" is another way of saying "in the infrastructure business".
If sites were to offer an "article bank", it might be more compelling: you put in $X and that buys you Y articles, which you can read over the span of days, months, or years. But no one seems to be doing that, probably because they believe the economics of breakage is better.
Articles on the internet exist primarily as free entertainment.
If I am going to spend money on entertainment, there are much more fulfilling options.
[1] Read: Addiction. :)
My point is not that articles on the internet are useless. But there is a certain tunnel vision in these discussions where we forget there are other _even better_ ways to spend our time.
Whether you want education or entertainment, paying $x/month to Google is not the right way to achieve it. Go paintballing instead.
[1] https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-better-w...
However it is an ethical dilemma, especially in a World where Contributor exists. Content is not free, hosting is not free, development and the application of security patches is not free. Currently sites are monetised using ads, and by using uBlock you're getting for free something that is not free. You are also inevitably causing people who do not have uBlock to 'pay' more, or contributing to putting the site out of business.
While Contributor obviously doesn't prevent Google from tracking your every step, and I'll still take steps to avoid data harvesting, I'll be buying it the moment it's available on any of the sites I read regularly.
I've done a few PayPal tips but it's just too clunky / unfit for purpose.
Start by respecting my ears, my eyes, my laptop, and my time, then we can have an "ethical" discussion.
And if that happens, the experience would be strictly worse for the consumer. Every individual is going to have access to less content because they're not going to subscribe to every site that might conceivably have an insightful article at some point.
What does work is patronage-supported content, but only for certain types of content. For example, if Youtube were to remove ads tomorrow, I would expect most channels with original content to survive on crowdsourced patronage (i.e. Patreon or similar), but I would definitely not expect Patreon to be able to support investigative journalism. (It would be great if it were! But I don't see it happening.)
I even pay for three different e-mail services and cloud storage.
If a site doesn't offer an ad-free experience? I block their ads.
I want to be able to pay more for quality content and pay less for buzzfeed articles. I want content creators to be able to charge based on the the content they are producing.
I prefer a world where I can stop in a fine dining restaurant or a fast-food place, get the experience I want and be charged appropriately. I don't want a top of the line steak-house to have to find a way to serve my meal, while only receiving McDonald's priced payments. That's the problem with the current web.
Why not let the users choose what they want to pay? Because Google needs this to be net-positive for their revenue, but it would be a much better web if there was some kind of mechanism to automatically give small amounts of money (say 1/10th of a cent per page view) to site owners.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/06/01/google-launches-fund...
But, most importantly, Flattr guarantees the anonymity of consumers' transactions. So the big G won't have a log of what websites you paid to access.
The data is still being generated. It's a matter of whom you trust with this data.
I pay publishers I like for their content (buying newspapers, subscriptions, etc) and I don't get why Google should be the middleman in this.
Who is winning? (Google) Who is losing? ( everybody else, especially you)
Yeah right...
I don't mind advertising at all.
This is online music all over again. I'm not being presented with an option that is superior to the unprofitable solution I'm currently using. As long as using adblockers is a better experience than paying for content, it simply isn't going to work.
This is incredibly cheeky.
No. Google don't demand that you view ads, the content creators of the pages you visit do.
This is an advertising company imaging a future of ad-blocking browsers and dabbling in a new revenue stream: providing a platform for patron/creator and taking a slice of the dough.
That problem is compounded by the fact a very low cost equates to a very low value in the mind of the purchaser. This manifests as a thought process like "if this only costs 0.01c then it's probably not worth buying", and the user leaves. That's hard to work around.
As far as I'm aware no one has ever implemented micro-transactions successfully. The best example to date, which is mobile gaming in-app purchases, isn't really micro-transactions in the usual sense. In a game like Candy Crush you buy tools to help you advance more quickly so you don't have to grind through a hard level dozens of times. You're really buying your own time (so you can play the game less, which is kind of weird really). Time is something people value, so they're very happy to pay. The model doesn't really apply to other purchases.
By not offering per-article pricing, they're actually _losing_ money from me, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if going to per-article pricing would result in less revenue than monthly subscriptions overall.
Edit:
>How it works You load your pass with $5. Each time you visit a page without ads, a per-page fee is deducted from your pass to pay the creators of the website, after a small portion is kept by Google to cover the cost of running the service. The price per page is set by the creator of the site. You will be informed in advance if a site creator changes their price per page. Contributor is easy to update: change settings and add sites or remove them from your pass at any time.
I love the sound of this, I just do not like the idea that it is Google doing it. It feels ... dirty somehow. A third party doing this I have no problem with.
I've always wanted a way to simply specify the minimum bid (by bidding myself) for my attention into the ad exchange. This peer-reviewed pricing seems like it adds lots of cognitive overhead for me?
Whoever came up with that bright idea?
I'm not saying this isn't a hilarious embarrassment for a global company like Google to keep launching products U.S. only, but it's not as bad as you're making it sound: It will simply not have a noticeable impact on international users.
Thanks, as always, for understanding privacy big G.
You WON'T BELIEVE YOUR EYE what GOOGLE will do NEXT! - $0.5
Of course, if i click on the links to the actual enrolled sites i get 'this service is not available in your country' so it may be there.
Let's actually sit down and think about this. If this happened, there would be some big changes to the web. (Note- this is a quick response. I should write a real paper about this)
First of all, now that people would be paying for no ads, websites will overload their sites with ads, because Google will have the solution that "everyone is choosing anyway". It would make it "OK" to have tons of ads on your site, because there's a solution.
Then, your web experience becomes terrible. For a "small fee", you can keep a "nice" experience- one that used to, and always should, be free. However, if you don't give Google your money, then your web experience is going to be so filled with ads that content will take forever to load. And even if it does load, it'll take 30 minutes to read an article, because every 30 seconds you'll have your regular add popups. Then, you'll have the sidebar ads that follow you. Or the mobile ones that get in your way as you scroll. You won't be able to view content, because ads will have taken over even more than they already have.
Now, in this terrible future, what about those that can't afford Google's "small fee"? They'll be condemned to the ad version of the entire web- one that doesn't load properly, that people have started to discard. The true "web" will be the one where you pay to view. These people won't have access. And, if they aren't able to pay the small fee, then most likely they're accessing the internet from a slow connection. Maybe it's a library that can't afford the fee either. Or maybe it's in the home, and they can only afford small internet speeds and second hand computers. Not everyone has the money to buy a brand spanking new macbook /pro/air from Apple.
So now, 5 years down the road, there's two versions of the web. The one that Google controls and tracks 100% (oh yeah, we didn't even get to that yet), and the one that is so ruined with ads, that the people make a decision. A big one. Let's just get rid of the ad version of the web. You can't use it anyway, so there's no use. The only way to go- is to give your monthly payment to Google, so that you can access the web. Now, you gotta pay to view the web at all. The free web is gone. Google took it away.
There's also Google, sitting on their even exponential growth pile of money, tracking every web user. Sure, there may be other competing services that let you "into" the web, but they're also gunna track you. No doubt about that.
There's so much more that I haven't even said. How will websites determine how much a "view" is? What about requests that are half loaded? How will you know how much it costs to view a webpage? Not all web content is created equal. Definitely not.
There's so many more things. So many more.
We can't let this happen.
Basically: you seem to believe people have a right to view the web cheaply. I would argue otherwise. For most of history, humans have had no opportunity to obtain content for free - in fact, for the most part, books and literature have been expensive novelties for all but the most hyper-privileged.
The idea people should pay for content does not seem to me a violation of some inalienable right.
Obviously my comment was the "cynical" view, and looked at a future that may not even come to fruition. There are some benefits too. However, I think that I would prefer that the web be supported in different ways. I haven't thought long and hard about the "best way", but it makes me think of websites that limit how many times you can view their content. Take the New York Times for example. If I remember correctly, they let you view ~10 articles or something, and then from there, you have to pay to see more. That could be a potential way to keep content supported? Let the websites choose themselves how they want to monetize content. Maybe that's better than Google holding accounts for anyone who wants to access the ad free web? I'm not sure what the best solution is.
In the fantasy future I mentioned in the first comment, I could see there being a pay-to-entry model for the web, if the ad free and ad versions of the web started separating and they just "killed" off ads. Then, to access the web in the first place, payment would be required, and would have to be refilled.
This is one reason I love HN - discussions get me thinking. I appreciate your comment, and you're right. All content just can't be free. I guess I just don't like the possibility of the web turning into a pay-to-view model. I'd rather let the sites choose individually, that way, no one has control over it all. But yeah.
I really hope this works out. As much as I dislike advertising...and Google...something has to happen. The "ad blocker" - "ad blocker blocker" arms race is patently stupid. There has to be a way to get money to content providers so they can opt out of the madness. Google will still be able to provide them with all the sweet sweet surveillance data that they thrive on.
One problem at a time, I guess.
You are paying to support sites you visit with money, instead of advertisers doing that, so you are still providing incentive to create the kind of content you consume.
For me, this is what an ideal web would look like. My ad-blocker would barely get a workout, and I'd happily pay for bundled (not pay-walled, bundled, downloadable) content as I did for many years with magazines.
No-one wants high quality content to disappear, but advertising and web paywalls are not the only options.
Eh.
I think BAT makes more sense than Google's response to waning ad bucks. None of it has got off the ground so age doesn't mean too much to me.