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Comment by SaturateDK | Hacker News Reader

I really do hate ads, and I've even worked doing ads both for web and TV.

I want to pay for my services, and would like real micro transactions, maybe I read an article i really enjoyed - I want to be able to pay for this, as a donation.

I'm pretty sure we need to look beyond ads for funding services and websites. I'd much rather pay, and while I know not everyone wants to pay... if we could push this behavior, it would really make the web better.

Personally, I have adblockers, privacy badger and even AdGuard/PiHole on my network.

So to all creators, let me pay you, even a tiny amount. I'm aware that transaction fees are en enemy here, so maybe that's a problem to fix?

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> So to all creators, let me pay you, even a tiny amount. I'm aware that transaction fees are en enemy here, so maybe that's a problem to fix?

The bigger problem is taxes. A website getting paid directly by its viewers is selling something to each of those viewers, and has to worry about sales tax or VAT in every place those viewers reside.

A website getting paid by selling ad space to ad networks generally only has to worry about taxes in the country it is in.

The latter is orders of magnitude less of a pain than the former.

> So to all creators, let me pay you, even a tiny amount. I'm aware that transaction fees are en enemy here, so maybe that's a problem to fix?

There are models for this (e.g. Blendle), however they suffer from the same problem as Spotify did and Netflix does: the content creators (newspapers, studios, labels) lose the direct connection to their audience and cannot upsell them any more or gather data about them.

This is why newspapers employ massive amounts of trackers and why studios build their own crappy streaming service instead of licensing to Netflix.

The only idea I see to fix this is regulatory: require rightholders to license their content under FRAND terms to aggregators. Otherwise the negative incentives of modern capitalism will block a user-friendly solution.

I'm generally for heavier regulation vs. rampant capitalism, but regulating what media companies can & can't do with their content isn't the answer. That feels like it'd be heading down the path to a state run media.

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