Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me

19 pointssaimiam16 comments

We recently launched an adblocking product which saves you data on your cellular and Wifi plans. As we were working on Datajoy, we also understood that for creative people, adblocking sucks big time. The more people block ads, the less ad revenue websites make.

Well, we at Datajoy figured we would try to play fair by paying for content we currently view for free. We are calling it the "F-U, Pay Me" model (FUPM).

You can set yourself up to receive payments from users of Datajoy with minimal effort (NO profile creation necessary!) by following the instructions on the FUPM page (https://datajoy.us/fupm.html). As our users visit your site, we will PayPal you for every visit at 1c/visit on the 1st of every month.

Once you do that, it would be great if you could come back this post and let us know that you have set yourself up for FUPM. Thanks!

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Sounds interesting, but I don't really get where the money is coming from. I don't see any paid plans for Datajoy.

As of now, we are funding the payouts ourselves. Not scalable for sure so when it starts pinching the pocket, we'll have to figure out how to continue paying content creators.

i like the concept very much, but what's your idea for a sustainable future revenue model?

We are looking into a few possibilities

1. Users pay a standard, fixed monthly rate into a pool from which we pay site owners. We hope this works like insurance where sporadic users underwrite power users and everyone wins.

2. Bring in Wall Street and public universities to underwrite the internet. Hitherto, the internet has been the domain of ad companies. For example, the stock market would benefit greatly from knowing the true health of companies but they are currently shut out since ad companies have a lock on raw data. Similarly, imagine the sheer scientific horsepower we can unleash if any Ph.D student could just firehose raw (depersonalized) internet data to identify patterns.

3. Present hype aside, a Coin may actually work to underwrite an ad free internet. Instead of blue skies ideas like replacing http, a browsing based Coin is a real option.

It would be nice if there were some prefix or suffix to the file name to avoid collisions. Not that I know of other reasons to create such a file now, but I could see it happening in the future.

On a related note, I'm confused why the hash is even required. Why not just name this file datajoy.txt or some other static name?

It's also a shame that the email has to be the only content in the file. For documentation purposes, it would be nice if subsequent lines would be guaranteed to be ignored so some documentation could be added on why the file exists.

We just wanted to make sure domain owners were setting up a guaranteed unique file name which was unlikely to be needed by some other service.

Also, we wanted to minimize the amount of logic needed to start making payments which is why we ask that the HTML file name be a well known hash function and the content be a single email address.

If this content payment protocol gains traction, we would like to use some form of the ACME protocol which Let's Encrypt uses to verify domain ownership.

Why would allowing extra content in the file complicate the logic? Either way you're reading the first line of the file for an email.

Anyway, I don't want to sound totally down on the idea in general. It's an interesting approach and I'd be happy to see this work!

Good point @ reading only the first line. Letting people add comments can't derail the parsing too much.

How is Datajoy better than competitors like ublock?

Adblocking is essentially a commodity where companies use community curated blacklists to block ads.

Our USP, though it isn't truly unique, is that it is a network level adblocker. No more installing 3-4 apps on each device on your network. Just point your router to our DNS and you're done. In one swoop, can safeguard entire networks - think schools, coffeeshop, airport wifis.

We want to bring innovation in a few areas -

1. Technical - Identify and blacklist adservers in near real time

2. Business - become a one-stop subscription service where ad supported websites can make money from DJ(Datajoy) users without forcing them to subscribe to each site. FUPM is an early prototype of where we want to take the internet - don't bother with profile creation and subscriptions. Just tell us where you want to be paid and we'll pay you for every visitor we send to your site.

Edit1: forgot to add that we want to do business as a public benefit company. Our vision is to become the Mozilla of adblocking - let others like Adblock distort their original mission by inventing "Acceptable Ads" to make money. We'd like to keep ourselves focused on zero ads along with "Acceptable Use" of the internet.

That has to be a big chicken and egg problem.

Not sure what you mean. If no one sets themselves up for payments, we don't lose any money while also continuing to block ads.

Maybe I'm being dense but I don't see the chicken/egg issue.

Maybe I misunderstood the model. But i would guess you'd need lots of relevant sites offering to sell access to their content to make it worth a reader signing up.

But for the sites to use your system they'd want to know there are lots of readers signed up so they'll make a reasonable amount of money.

Oh, i see what you mean. In some distant future when a lot of people are using Datajoy(DJ) to block ads, content creators will (hopefully) want to let in DJ users despite them blocking ads.

The usual solution to a chicken/egg problem is to aggressively solve for one side of the equation and hope the other side is forced to engage. In the case of adblocking, the users of adblockers are actively seeking tools to block ads which means the content creators will be motivated to engage with adblock providers. Does this make sense?

Yes I see. That makes sense. Thanks

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