Exploring alternative funding models for the web
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.
The second thing is making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. With services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner.
So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received.
Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult, but I'd rather something like that than hope that my favorite blogger is somehow able to get onto Scroll or another service like that.
This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser.
You can either tip directly/manually, or setup a monthly payment that gets split automatically among the places you most read. It doesn't require the creator already be a member, but rather it holds the funds until they register, or until 90days have passed.
They've also built in some significant privacy features so that no one can determine who/what you're donating to. Though this leads to one of the contentious issues as refunds are not possible, so when the above mentioned 90 days passes without a donation being claimed, the funds go into the "User Growth Pool" which basically means they are given out to new people joining BAT as an incentive to join.
The big controversy though was exactly the issue of not requiring people sign up before they started accepted BAT donations to them. They had a system of showing if a user was 'verified'[0] meaning they were registered to receive the donations, and nothing would be shown if they were not verified.
This led to an issue where Tom Scott commenting that Brave was taking donations on his behalf without his consent. [1]
Imho that was hugely damaging to the potential of BAT and I think really stemmed from people who didn't use BAT and didn't understand the Verified/Unverified aspect of it. They've added a Non-Verified statement and icon now to make it explicit, but the damage has been done.
[0] http://se.ri0.us/2018-12-22-184516548-9adee.png [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
The difference is in OP’s proposal one gets money. Brave sends people its token things.
At costs fixed (e.g. setting up cryptocurrency trading privileges, going through KYC, clearing receiving cryptocurrency proceeds with your bank) and variable (e.g. regulatory, accounting, tax wise, et cetera). To say nothing of volatile, uncertain and likely to get stolen.
This is an example of a good idea ruined by shoving cryptocurrencies where they only add marketing value.
They’re costs. Material ones, particularly if one is dealing with micropayments. A simpler solution would have been batching payments with real money. There is counterparty risk, but given we’re talking about micropayments that’s negligible compared to the risks and costs cryptocurrencies brought to the table.
Cryptocurrencies don’t deserve to be rejected out of hand. But they don’t need to be unquestioningly choked into otherwise-fine products.
That seems like a fair trade-off to me, but it is indeed a trade-off between privacy and usefulness it is one I appreciate though.
If I'm a publication business, if I start accepting BAT tokens, I lose my ties with my bank. Not really a ideal situation.
The circular: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11243
BAT is a bad idea done badly by bad people.
Given my track record of predicting winners and losers (eg JavaScript), I can only assume BATs will be hugely successful.
They're made by the same person too. That's among the reasons I won't touch it.
Perhaps you don't want people knowing who you're donating to, and the third party offers that privacy?
This is one of the largest problems (if not the largest problem) on the web that I've been thinking about recently. Services like Venmo aren't designed for commercial use. Paypal is a privacy nightmare, and it's bad for sellers too because their chargeback policy is a mess -- and that's even ignoring the fees. Bank transfers are insecure and cumbersome (and again, often come with fees).
Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem for a metric ton of different reasons -- it's proponents are too concerned with worrying about inflation and investments and alternate currencies then with actually practical questions like, "can the payment reliably be completed in less than 1 minute", and "does it have fees associated with that kind of speed?".
It's a very complicated situation, and I have no idea what the answers are or where to even start looking for the answers, but I'm increasingly frustrated by online payment systems, both as a consumer and as someone looking to accept payments. They're almost universally bad.
I think this might be one of the big reasons why advertising works so well -- it's not that advertising is efficient, or that fraud isn't a problem, or that consumers like it. But advertising is an easy way to have a micropayment of as low as a cent or two linked to a page view. And as far as I can see, there is no alternative to that.
In the absence of a way to do actual micropayments, paid subscriptions on the web are also far more costly than ads are. Your average website doesn't get 25 cents every time you load a page. But you have to scale everything up, because otherwise all of your gains just get eaten by fees.
I'm convinced our lack of a decent payment system is seriously holding the web back.
The second you let an American tip an Iranian there will be trouble somewhere.
It's not an unsolvable problem but you probably need to limit the scope a bit. There's a lot of implementation details hiding behind "accessing the tips they've received". I believe Flattr started out limited to the SEPA area and slowly expanded from there.
Eventually, it'd be no better than using a credit card.
Unlike Brave, we aren't building an entire browser/ad platform, we don't have a special token (we currently use plain Ether), and our plan is to make it possible to donate using stablecoins (most likely Dai) to get rid of the issue of volatility.
We'll solve the creator registration using a couple of smart contracts, one for handling the ESCROW-nature of pending donations (allowing for refunds if the creator chooses not register), and one for the address registry (that maps from emails/URLs to eth addresses). The details are still very much up in the air, but you can read the (early and unaudited) WIP contracts are on GitHub: https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/
Initially they'd need to be bank rolled by someone, but I'd think that if they gained enough traction, operating costs could come out interest gains. Or just donations directly to the org.
I'd also hope that any unclaimed tips would be kept for something like 50 years. They'd just be generating interest for use by the non-profit.
Edit: Contributor [1] seems to have been its name.
But then again, they can just add the link in the website itself like they already do.
Also, if we put bank account numbers in DNS (metaphorically speaking), we will we a lot more DNS spoofing attacks.
The biggest problem is people don't want to pay much for contents. They have no problem paying $2/day for a cup of coffee but then taking about online contents they will talk about cents.
You may want to look at Gittip/Gratipay (no longer active) or Flattr (still going), and the experiences they had while developing their solutions.
We need a modern payment system, that can process micropayments ( that is a fraction of a penny ) with higher security guarantees and cheaper (or free) than the credit cards.
But still, the problem with micropayments is usually not the cost, but the hassle; and if you're going for worldwide coverage, you'll also add ability to pay in an accepted form, and for poorer countries, ability to pay in a meaningful amount.
I like this idea, and would use it myself. I understand the Brave browser does this, essentially, and have been meaning to check it out.
I wonder if a "tip" would be a better system for verifying a real human than Google's captcha (which really goes nuts if you've taken steps to protect your privacy)?
I don't get it, at all.
No one likes turning every action into a financial decision.
History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing - because you only have to make the decision ONCE. There is no financial pain for consuming content.
The problem isn't making things into a financial decision, it's making them into a non-trivial financial decision.
If you want $10/mo for me to access your particular walled garden, I'm going to have to think about it. And if I'm already paying for a couple other walled gardens, the answer is probably "no". But micropayments are supposed to go the other way. If you have an article that looks interesting from the headline and it costs me a nickle to press "read", I'll probably do that without thinking about it at all.
The problem isn't with the idea, the problem is that nobody knows (or wants to know?) how to get the transaction costs down low enough so that the payments are actually "micro". Regulatory bodies don't help here either, as it's not a scenario they've planned around or actually care about.
Netflix is a good example of buffet-style offerings, but you have to remember that Netflix was born out of cable, which is a much better example of buffet-style, and was largely despised because it was buffet-style. People hated paying for dozens of channels when they only wanted sports.
I would add a caveat to this that people like paying a low price for a lot of content. If the price of a buffet is too high, then people will start to ask why they can't just pay for the small amount of food or content that they want to consume.
For all we know, Netflix and Spotify might be special cases. Cable TV uses the same buffet-style pricing and plenty of people object to that, because it means funding content that they have zero interest in.
I'd say the better solution is crowdfunding a la Patreon/Kickstarter, combined with free-and-open content release as an incentive for users to pitch in. This model can be problematic for some forms of media where full costs are hard to assess, especially in advance (feature video), but it would work wonders for "plain" text and other low-commitment stuff.
Maybe, but I don't think anyone could make the claim that a micropayments hypothesis has been tested (market or tech) with anything like the robustness or to anywhere near the scope with which those services have been. There's not yet a solid basis from which to compare.
In any case, appetising or not, the subscription model is deeply antagonistic to the fundamental nature of the web. It's a model borrowed from prior tech. It works, but it retards the web's innate potential.
> because you only have to make the decision ONCE
That's the problem. The web is a web. Each link is a decision point. Portals are portals. Leaping through the locked gate is a single decision. They are different things. Portals can be built on the web, but much would be lost if the whole web were to only be portals.
Micropayments may or may not be a solution to funding the web in its best potential form. We don't know - but the success of portals has little to say about it either way. They were just a known quantity from a previous world.
I'm afraid that embracing periodic "buffet-style" pricing also embraces big centralized platforms, like Medium, that can provide me enough content to consume for the whole billing period and then they can distribute the profits among content creators. Maybe that could work, but I'm sure HNers have a thing or two to say about the idea of making Medium the buffet where everyone's going to eat.
I predict that Mozilla would ban wrong-thinkers from their service using the excuse of hate speech.
Want to donate to a progressive/leftist organization? Mozilla will gladly help you. Want to donate to a right wing conservative? Mozilla doesn't allow "bigots" on their platform.
They did exaxtly that with the Dissenter extension.
It has to be decentralized.
All the payments networks have morals clauses in their payments contracts, InfoWars blatantly violated said contract and has kicked up a fit over First Data doing what they are contractually obligated to do.
Some of the frontends like First Data can be very restricitive with their own morals clauses, banning bars, sex shops, book stores, and various other "wrong think". Bitcoin and other schemes will never have a reliable connection to the USA's current payments system due to this type of embedded moralizing.
That said, I really can't see anything gaining traction unless it's centralized. There is no decentralized means of payments. Cryptocurrencies don't work because very very very few people use them. And fees from Visa/Mastercard/etc are high enough you have to have some form of a "tip wallet" for it to make financial sense.
The non-profit doesn't have to be from Mozilla. It's something any of us with the organizational skills and other resources could do. Is there a way to make something like a legally binding charter? Part of it could say "Unless your content breaks the law, you can register."
('Course, not sure how you'd apply that to countries with governments that suppress free speech...)
If anyone wants to try that, I'd be happy to help with ideas and Linux Sys Admin skills.
Please cite sources when making claims in the future
About 2 years ago I was having a conversation with someone and this was roughly the idea I had. A wallet that users can fill up and apportion appropriately.
So if someone really likes reddit, then they can automatically give say $5/month to reddit out of that wallet. And in exchange they get perks.
And, as you said, if they come across a blog post they really like, they can also tip ad hoc.
Patreon for the web essentially.
We were throwing around ideas for a business, and this was one of mine. I still think it's viable, but I also think it requires a large, established entity, such as Mozilla, to do it.
And the site has to not challenge the current political climate, or (leftist) political activist will pressure payment providers like MasterCard and Visa into banning the site in question from receiving payment from downstream payment services[1].
> Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url.
And the second a anti-religious/anti-Muslim website starts receiving significant money, Mozilla risks getting all payment processing frozen.
> Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult
Actually that’s the easy part. Avoiding censorship and avoiding being made into a political puppet by the current payment-provider duopoly seems to be what’s difficult.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/aa5f3d/mastercard_...
EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.
To try and understand what this is, I go to the landing page of partner's site, Scroll: https://scroll.com/
Their webpage has no obvious explanation of what this is. Is this a tip jar? Micropayments? Subscription?
I then go to Scroll's blog: https://scroll.blog/
Way way down the page, it finally has this blurb:
>Be a flat monthly subscription at a price consumers would happily pay.
Ok... so what's the price? $9.99/month? $19.99/month?
I see Scroll is offering invitations. Would users signing up with their email know the price? Or is it a free trial?
Since Scroll's landing page today in 2019 does not prominently display "$5/month" anywhere, it signals to me that Scroll may have changed its mind about that $5 amount and has yet to commit to a publicized and transparent monthly price. With the "Request Invitation" button, are they collecting emails to gauge the level of interest to help them determine a price?
If Scroll is actually still charging $5/month, why not make that fact obvious on its website?
Google search doesn't show much written about Scroll by Tony Haile in 2019: https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+haile+subscription+pr...
(To add more confusion, there's another unrelated website that charges $5/month with a similar name: https://scroll.in/subscribe)
EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.
I do a good amount of media buying and content production. From where I stand, the issue is in the consolidation of power. Content discovery and ad placement are far too closely related, which is bad for everyone involved (well, all but the ad platforms). Going directly to publishers is possible but difficult, it's not currently a scalable solution.
Netflix shows that there's an appetite towards paying for content, and HBO furthers the idea while demonstrating how that same approach can be much more profitable.
For journalism side, premium, niche publications like The Information putting bets on the idea that users are willing to pay a lot of money for content as long as it's much better and more useful than the free alternatives.
Content that was originally created with advertising money (The Office). Whether or not Netflix will last the next 5 years is debatable and unknown.
Well, but right now consumers don't even have the option of paying for single pieces of content as their only option usually is to buy the whole subscription to NY Times, etc. (The situation is a little like in the music industry where people had to buy a whole album to be able to listen to the 2-4 really good songs on it.) If it was easier for people to pay/tip for individual pieces of content, good content could amass a significant number of micro donations which in aggregate might become enough to cover the costs incurred in the creation of the content piece.
This is imperfect, but much better than the current broken system.
Many content providers want a funding model for their work. That's fine. Nothing to do with the web, specifically.
IMO the web technology is and should be totally orthogonal to the needs of some businesses that happen to want to use it.
The web should be a mechanism for people to publish documents. That's it. And that's great. In fact we should be making it easier for normal humans to do this. The web had lots of excellent content long before anyone expected they would profit directly from eyeballs on their web-content.
I suspect a news aggregator that provided access to "most content on most major websites" would rapidly hit the same wall; just licensing content from the five biggest U.S. newspapers would require a higher subscription rate than most people would be willing to pay.
Honestly, I think it would work best when combined with a site like Hacker News.
Imagine if Hacker News had a $10 / month plan that guaranteed that I could read 99% of content on the front page.
Otherwise, I'm just not subscribing to 20 different sites so I can skim 4-5 articles a month.
Problems like creating an online tipping protocol could be addressed with work on new web standards, not private partnerships with for-profit companies spearheaded by a single browser developer. If something like this could work, it needs to be an open standard. I appreciate Mozilla's work on this important issue, but don't think they are even starting with the right approach.
It wouldn't, and this whole subthread of tipping is way off from what this article and service provider is even on about. So since we aren't actually talking about micropayment tipping, lets continue:
Having the ISP handle both the subscription and payment would be reducing and bundling a pooled monthly subscription away from consumers.
(It's still from 2019 so HN probably won't add that info to the title)
That said, if it's so little money in it due to ads. Then shop around. If you're going to complain about the elephant in the room, Google being the only choice, then create your own ad network and charge more. Google has such a monopoly, that you may be getting pennies for every thousands they get. As well, ad blockers are becoming a fact of life that there's no solution for.
My opinion; Incredibly, the only way for publishers to publish on Internet and still have food on table is UBI. Sucks if you are the business owner though.
It's pretty straightforward. You bid on ads on the user's behalf, and you show them cat pictures - or nothing, user's choice. The ad revenue still goes to the website and the user doesn't have to see ads. Everyone gets what they want and this is really important sites don't have to opt-in.
I've run large internet sites and we'd get email into our webmaster@ address saying we'd be tipped by some users and if we went to sign up we could claim our $3.35 or something. Nobody got time for that. Just use the existing payment rails (the ad system).
If over time the sites saw more people using this, they might change their business model to support subscriptions or something and cut the exchanges out of the middle, but to start, this would work.
I hate how everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. looking at you Brave. We don't need cryptocurrency to solve this.
Sure, some high quality long form content can pull this off, but would I pay for the Verge, or say, MKBHD’s reviews? No. Maybe Anandtech once in a while.
There’s a paradox of choice as well.