Please support Web Monetization if you want less ads on the web
atodorov.me
atodorov.me
If cable TV taught us anything it is that you can charge outrageous amounts of money and still force your customers to watch ads. Paper newspapers are also full of ads, even the ones the reader pays for. I can not think of any reason why the web should be different. Ads will stay, monetization will just be income on-top.
None, of course. It's possible to disable ads for users with Web Monetization, but it's also possible to be greedy and use both at the same time. But remember, we're not talking about big companies or anything of the sort, it's more for small scale personal blogs, or, as i pointed out, institutions like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, so greed is IMHO unlikely and will probably be rare.
In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.
Why should everyone block the lowest friction way to pay creators? Besides the security argument which speaks more to JS, IMO.
IMHO setting up ads on your website is higher friction that web monetization is.
Of course there are still plenty of lazy product landing pages and wordpress blogs that don't work without JS and any time I see a hamburger menu I know I'll be navigating the site 'manually'. But many of the bigger news and information sites that used to deliver a blank page at least now deliver some bastardized version of their text content (though usually not their images).
Web monetization is lower friction.
Wikipedia on the other hand makes lots of money with one of the most obtrusive ads on the internet (giant banner that slowly rolls down stating some variant of "if everyone donates just $5 we can stop annoying you right now"). But despite getting more and more donations every year they don't make the ad less annoying or run it shorter. So I have zero confidence that giving them another revenue stream will help
That is why personal blogs do not create content on the scale and depth required to be sufficiently high-profile and monetizable. If your blog can't be found on the first page of Google for questions people are asking, it may as well not exist to anyone but yourself.
Even if someone is comfortable, $100 a month can make it worthwhile to them to spend time considering and writing.
Sometimes that money just proves someone's finding big value in your continued efforts.
If I remember, Wikipedia is rather controversial, for having a ginormous war chest, but still having PBS-style begfests all the time.
I don't think they do any ads, now, except for their begging headers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Would you care to backup this outrageous claim by demonstrating similarly popular website, awash with content, that spends less?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
Staff expenses are harder to break down, as they don't break out who's working on e.g. wikipedia development and funding and who's working on, e.g. the social movement strategy, which is allocated approximately the same budget as running wikipedia.org: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?
But from just the information they provided us, can you give a reason why Wikipedia in 2019 would need 33% more staff expenditure than 2018 for running the site? And similar increases in the years leading up to that?
But thats a moot point. If there is no other organisation, more efficient than wikipedia, then you have no right to call them wastefull. It shows your idea of how efficient wimipedia should be is a fantasy with no grounding in reality and would, in the long term, lead to death of wikipedia.
if once == "allYearLong" { clapYourHands() }
I don't think that I've opened a Wikipedia page in months, that didn't have a beg header.
But, to be fair, I do consider it a valuable resource; especially as a way to direct people with different language requirements to a common definition, and begfests are better than ads (as long as they don't get too intrusive, as some PBS stations get).
If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you. So while I agree with the vibe and block for convenience along with security, it's an uneasy feeling knowing that such benefits for me only exist because many others aren't taking advantage of content creators like this.
Sure, but would the impact be positive or negative? While some people rightfully ask to be compensated for high quality content, money also encourages many more people to contribute to the glut of low value, derivative, and outright plagiarized content.
web is the same. tons of lazy blogs copy pasting without any effort in understanding or explaining from a different angle.
That's a fair question and not sure I have the answer to it other than stating a personal preference. Much smarter people than me have been trying to solve this content conundrum for decades now and it doesn't seem like anyone has found something workable for all parties involved.
It's a bitter pill to swallow that maybe what exists now is the best system we have and it will be around for a long time going forward.
That is already the status quo. The entire premise of this article is that web monetization will reduce the actual ads. It changes nothing if I still have to use my ad blocker. I don't think and but avery small minority of content creators will actually reduce their ads, and these might in any case be the people who are already very conscious of and respectfully of their consumers' privacy.
Websites that don't disable ads for subscribers will get fewer subscribers.
How does that differ from today?
Maybe it fails, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Newspapers are dying and clinging on to a model that worked when being one had a high barrier to entry. Would you honestly think of taking out ads in a newspaper these days? Apart from for very specific things, I wouldn't.
There are less incentives to ruin the experience for those who are directly giving them money.
Post-purchase is technically still there, but less obtrusive to me.
Web ad-blocking technology is much better than cable ad-blocking technology.
Cable is mostly oligopolies, which are big on extractive behavior and revenue maximization. A lot of the good stuff on the web is individuals and small groups of people who want to make stuff sustainably but aren't focused on maximum revenue.
People will stop paying the extra money if their experience doesn't get better.
I also note that a non-open version of this that I use, scroll.com, negotiates deals with publishers. So setting some standards is a pretty obvious fix if publishers go against the spirit of things in a way that threatens the effort.
This is so annoying. Our office IP blocks are classified as US. So you could see folk sitting in the office in the evening, to watch Netflix content they could not see at home.
The major options (as far as I can tell are):
* FreeView. This is digital TV that comes through your aerial. As the name implies, you don't pay a subscription for a base set of channels - which is quite a large number. Most of these channels have advertising. Some, like the BBC channels, only advertise their own programming, apps, etc.
* Netflix. Pay, and don't get adverts.
* Sky TV. This requires a subscription fee, and provides the FreeView set of channels plus more. There are still adverts, though, so you get to pay and also watch adverts. This is somehow a popular option!
The approach that reduces ads is to have the user bid for and win the ad slots. There are important details about running this auction fairly and cost effectively for users (Vickrey mechanics etc) but the only way to enforce user intent to control their own attention and reduce ad noise is to have the user pay towards that purpose.
I've been working on a recipe website for a while; it's a slow burner project. I have a bunch of feature/UX ideas that I think will improve things a lot, and I also want a site that's not full of nonsense like ads and "oh, you scrolled to see the actual recipe description HAHA FUCK YOU, here's a newsletter popup first instead" and "allow us to send you our fucking notifications" popups and whatnot. It's always hard to be sure, but overall I think it would be pretty viable business.
But ... how do you monetize this without ads? Ask for donations? Things like Patreon have made this more common in the last few years and it could work, but it sure is starting a business on hard mode. The easier all of this becomes, the better there's a chance that a viable sustainable alternative will even exist in the first place.
A big reason why this is a slow burner project is because I just don't rate the chances of actually earning significant amount of money with this in 2-3 years as very high unless I resort to adding ads (and my bar for "signifiant" is really low by the way, maybe €1000/month of turnover). Even though this is very much a project that I built purely because it's the kind if site I want to use myself, it's just really hard to justify spending a lot of time on this right now in the current "internet economy".
So in short: no, it won't guarantee anything, but it does open up new possibilities.
That seems high for a slow burn recipe site which is a commodity.
While it's an interesting prototype right now, actually finishing it will be quite a lot more work as there are some technical challenges remaining in the way I want to do things. Half a year at least, but let's round that up to 10 months because I'm probably underestimating things. If we consider a monthly salary of €3,000 (pretty low for a senior dev) then I'll spend €36k on building the thing, a further €36k building up revenue, so it'll me 6 years to recoup this investment with €1,000/month. In short, I don't think €1,000/month is very high at all.
And this doesn't account for any marketing or other costs. Actually building a platform is one thing, but getting useful content (in this case, recipes) is another. Simply copying existing content would be pointless, so this requires further investment.
Of course, the "start-up way" to do this is to find some investor who will give you money, but that investor will expect a return on their investment (which is reasonable enough) and it means I will need to maximize profit and it'll be like all the other sites that I mentioned before. What I really want is a site built by someone who likes cooking for other people who like cooking. I think the world would be better if it's easier to build something like this while still earning a reasonable amount of money (and €1,000 is very much on the low end of that IMO).
As for "being a commodity", sure. But in my opinion a lot of them aren't very good for various reasons, and I think it can be a lot better.
A forum for cooking that’s well done (harhar) enough to get 100 people to pay $10 a month to support seems possible - but you might need to enlist a YouTube celebrity cook to get it started. Try a partnership?
I don't think you need to be a UX genius to realize that you can do better than [1] (load without adblocker for the full experience). The ridiculous space devoted to ads and popups is the most striking, but hardly the only thing: there are so many things that can be improved on that page if you just spent some effort and brainpower on it. Sometimes I wonder if the designers of those sites ever used it themselves. AllRecipes is hardly the exception; most sites are like this. This is just the biggest one.
[1]: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/214931/oven-roasted-aspara...
Email me if you want to chat about this. Good luck otherwise.
(I already get quite a bit of money through Patreon/GitHub Sponsors for some other things btw)
Make something that people want instead of doi g the same as 163648462 others?
There was a time where you earned money if you added something to the mix
Point in case: half the articles posted to HN from medium.com have complaints about their (ad-free) monetization strategy. From what I can tell, Medium is not even profitable either; they're doing their best to find something that works without plastering every article full of ads, but thus far haven't found it yet. Even Twitter has the same problem: they've got some ads but unlike e.g. Facebook it's not full of them, and they're not profitable either.
tho in fairness, some channels like gun and ww2 ones don't have another choice because youtube demonetized them and not everyone likes to use patreon or the alt tubes.
I wish they atleast put it in the beginning or the end instead of smack dab in the middle of the actual content.
We are paying data harvesters for the privilage of supplying them with the raw materials to make even more money.
I really wish the numbers on both sides increase over time.
The challenge is that when companies are so focused on growing, they run out of ways to grow. For example, if they saturate their market, since they can't find new customers, the only way to grow is to get more money from each customer. So they seem to increase prices to those existing customers, create new products for those existing customers, or create new products for other customers (often advertisers).
This works for majority of mobile apps. This works on YouTube. People are conditioned to expect such an option.
This may be not the cheapest option, though. Consider mass media. They usually have the "three free articles" tier and "all articles + ads" paid tier. I won't mind a "N articles without ads" paid tier, even though just running an ad blocker is easier.
I believe the current deluge of ads unseen since early 200X is the biggest proof that that "Internet economy" does not work, and will not work.
If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
I wish there were a button I could push to take away money from the publishers of 3/4 of the articles I read on the web.
edit: to head off any objections like "but you still read articles on the web so you must be getting some value," I have to state the obvious: I don't get to read articles before I read them. 3/4 of articles are the garbage I have to dig through to find something that meets the standard of mediocre. If it weren't for them, I could spend 3/4 less time reading articles, and 3/4 less bandwidth (so they're environmentally destructive, like bitcoin.)
Financial statements by Google, Facebook, Twitter and co would imply otherwise.
> If somebody does not want to give you money, why would they?
They wouldn't, and that's the point isn't to force them, it's to allow those that do want to give money, to be able to do so easily. If the website you're on is some random crap, you can usually tell quickly, well before the Coil extension kicks in and starts streaming payments; if on the other side spend 10 minutes reading an article or exploring a beautiful map of Westeros, then some cents trickle directly to the creator.
> People will never pay for what people now derisively call "content" nowadays.
Substack and Medium exist, showing that people can and do pay for "content" ( which doesn't mean a TikTok dance or SEO filler).
> The only suggestion I have for the type of one man blogger enterprise complaining about nobody giving them money is to change occupation, and get a normal source of income.
You do you.
Correct, but would you pay for better content? I started a subscription to the local business journal over the holidays. I'm genuinely glad I bought it. About once a week, I see some headline -first- there. For a few weeks, I thought they were repeating articles, but it turns out they were doing more in-depth reporting on a story as time progressed. How rare is that? By the time the headline shows up elsewhere, the biz journal is on their 2nd or 3rd story with more in-depth reporting.
This is really, really nice. For local stuff (land development drama, businesses opening/closing, and general goings-on around town) things are relevant to me, because they're happening where I live/work/play. That is subtly different than me picking up a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post to get reporting on national news which has to cater to a national or international audience.
Impossible to answer. I would absolutely pay for better content but (a) can't tell if it's really good before I pay and (b) I have no guarantee the creator's incentives won't shift and they will keep serving good content.
I don't care about $5. I don't care about $100 even. But I can't be guaranteed that I get value for my money. It's always the same problem.
Furthermore, even the mere fact of paying content creators already shifts their incentives so you're kinda spoiling the pool by entering it (another poster remarked that they could just make good content shortly before payday and then go idle).
Not sure what's the solution but I mostly side with the "get a real job!" side of the argument even if it's far from the perfect response in this situation.
While I won’t miss $5/mo, I’m guessing it would be consumed in the first couple days of the month, possibly leading content creators to optimize to compete for that tiny window of time and switch to ads (or just track full time anyway). Related, when is the meter running? Every time a tab is open on a URL? Only when frontmost, only when being interacted with?
I have come to the sad conclusion that ads are a pretty good match for content payment and any replacement will a hard sell. With ads, I’m paying with my time (and privacy on the web). But I’m already spending my time for the content anyway.
As for when the payments happen, it's only when the page is open and active, and stops if you go idle.
The only way for the average person to browse the web privately is to not pay. Theoretically this might be solved with the right form of digital tokens, but you're going to need anonymous payments (not bitcoin, but monero), and some form of cryptography system that tells the website that you have paid without telling them which person you are that paid. Practically no one does the former, no one does the latter, and the latter would be really difficult to implement if you want to stop people from sharing their accounts with the world at large.
I don't trust the centralized authority to not track me, money based centralized authorities engage in extensive tracking.
The people disbursing my funds cannot currently track me, because there are currently no funds being disbursed.
You're right, I agree that that could work in the sense of preventing the site tracking me via payment information. I don't think that's as likely a business model as "pay per month", but ok.
It still comes with the previously mentioned problem of the payment provider tracking me. It also comes with the problem that that sounds really latency inducing.
> but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present
Already since when? When I wasn't paying that information wasn't present.
Even if you contribute only $5 per month and browse the internet for 10 hours a day, every day, you'd still be giving over a cent an hour. It's something.
I see very little upside to professionalisation of sports, sex, writing, even reporting. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Some things are just better when done by amateurs or done instead of watched.
Journalism is best (worst) example. We are being deceived by dilettantes with slick production values and almost universally an agenda or served straight-up propaganda. I'd rather delve into less polished material from people who actually know things because they have a deep drive towards understanding them.
The fact that someone would do it without compensation doesn't mean that if they do get compensation they wouldn't spend more time on it. It's precisely for hobbyist-level stuff where web monetization can really shine.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
On a more serious note, eventually amateurs stop loving it and get burned out, because it's a lot of work to make high quality content on top of a day job you hate. Just because they are amateur doesn't mean what they do is effortless.
And I'm not even going into the people who want amateurs to work for free so they can middleman and make money off of aggregated content, which is what techbros love to do.
The problem is that paid content is bad. It's almost universally a signal of low quality.
My Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs have demonstrably better information on everything from the pandemic and nutrition to investment and programming than any well-compensated journalists I've ever read. Not to mention humour. They manage to be more accurate, informative, and funnier at the same time.
It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
I'd love it if you enjoyed programming so much that you'd code a database for me, please. I mean, i see little to no upside of the professionalization of computer engineering. Some things are just better done by amateurs, who do it for pure love of programming and for free.
Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
I refuse to believe you. What are your "Twitter timeline, HN comments, IRC channels, obscure invite-only forums, or nerd/rationalists blogs"'s sources? How the f can they provide better information on the pandemic unless you have actual virologists and public health experts actually working on it there? If you don't ( and having them would be pure chance since you can't possibly follow multiple experts from every single domain on the planet )?
> It should be difficult, nigh impossible, but isn't because paid media is terrible. Pandering to their audience, just the fact that everyone have a book in them but not necessarily four, groupthink in the MSM, adverse selection... I don't know the reason but I'm hardly the only one to see it.
Bullshit. The mere fact that you use the bullsit "MSM" "term" is indicative of your lack of knowledge on the matter. Not only that, the blatant disregard for any traditional media is dangerous on a few fronts - you live in your bubble, you're overly reliant on what information trickles down to you via said bubble, and even if your bubble is magnificent, has all sorts of actual experts in it, and you're actually knowledgeable and intelligent enough to be able to filter and prioritize, your wrong opinion might convince some people that do not have all of the above to follow your example, and that is how you get Q lunatics living in an alternate reality. Furthermore, have you actually recently used any media of good reputation and standing, paid or not? Personally i'm subscribed to the FT, and i have seen tons of stories not readily available through HN, Twitter, etc., and more to the point, in much more depth, usually. There's the occasional not really well written article, which gets compensated by the availability of other sources, but the analysis of professional journalists, with associated graphs, images, direct sources, etc. is IMHO priceless. FT and Fox couldn't be farther apart, yet your ridiculous label "MSM" groups them together. On what grounds?
> Funny since I have half a dozen Windows licenses and use a free Linux distro to respond to you. It was largely written by professionals, sure, but there's still something to your take as well, even if it's a little GPT-like.
Linux is maintained by professionals, indeed. If the initial amateurs never got any funding to do it full time, it wouldn't have come as far. So exactly counter to your argument?
That's a good question. I don't really know what kind of failure causes mainstream sources to be this bad. Here's Scott with his guess which is... I wanted to say just as good as mine but probably much better!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
I don't get the rant around MSM. There's definitely mainstream media. And while they didn't fall for Q (although I still heard Q mocked in my bubble long before it was in the media), they have their own Russiagate conspiracy theory they're pushing. Here's another article from my bubble if you care.
The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-kinshasa-interviews-glenn...
Depends on your definition. "Mainstream" as what people watch/read and commonly accept as decent publications with some sort of professionalism and oversight? Certainly, probably every country has them! However, the people using the "MSM" label usually imply that all such media is bad, too biased, wrong, in a secret plot with X, etc. So which is it for you ? If you really do believe that all even remotely popular ( which would include things as diverse as like Fox, BBC, the Guardian, the FT, Washington Post, New York Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Mediapart, Der Spiegel, etc.) medias are corrupt/wrong/too biased to pay attention to or anything of the sort, and random bloggers, twitterers, forumers are better than them... I honestly do not know how to proceed. It's obviously a ludicrous notion that isn't and cannot possibly be true and the only possible explanation i can imagine is that you're applying the exaggerated logic based on the shitty US media landscape to the rest of the world.
As for Q mocking in your bubble... Great for you, I guess? Maybe professional journalists have more integrity than to popularize a shitty ridiculous conspiracy theory by discussing it. Maybe their usual sources don't include 4chan or w/e.
> The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.
I don't see how that's relevant, at all. We're talking about "mainstream" media, not irrelevant US partisan politics. The world doesn't end at the US border, you know?
1. I don't think I spend 13hrs a month on enabled content. I feel like coil is getting most of the $5 vs giving more directly via patreon
2. The time spent metric incentives mediocre content, I wish there was some way to support sites you love more / exclusively
3. When I bought / was using it, browsing the web feet subjectivly different, like I had to be conserved about how long I was spending on sites
4. Having to download coils browser for mobile :(
With that said, ads suck and we do need a better monitization scheme. The APIs themselves seem very good even if coil's implementation isn't perfect
It's for regular people who post random stuff on the Internet that would like to get something out of it and maybe one day turn it into a career. I don't mind posting whatever i've written for free, even if it has taken me tens of hours to research and write, but i also wouldn't mind being rewarded for that.
There's plenty of crap on the Internet, but there's also plenty of good content. Do you think none of it deserves to get any income for the time spent and whatever costs incurred? Because the fact that a lot run ads or use medium or similar, would imply that at least a decent part of content creators would in fact prefer to gain at least some income.
It’s not just personal websites that face this issue, everyone who wants to make money from their interests does.
That’s why the world has business people and employees - both have different strengths and weaknesses
Too much monetization and you get the current Google search pages - where most of the stuff on page 1 is spammy SEO material except for stack overflow
The more important point is that there are honest ways of making income; shoving memetic malware at people and exposing them to Internet surveillance isn't one of them. But even in purely economic terms, regular people get peanuts for showing ads. Which is why anyone expecting to learn anything from their side publishing has a donate button or a Patreon these days.
People deserve to get paid, for sure, but I think many overestimate the value of what they put out, and I'd argue much of the web has negative value these days due to the flagrant violations of privacy that come with the raw tripe I have to sift through if I'm seeking to be informed in a particular topic.
Virtually of the free "content" out there is only ever consumed because it is free. It is fast food. It is like watching garbage on television. It's an easy choice between getting no free "content" and paying anything whatsoever for it.
The author assumes that some "content" is valuable. This is probably true. (As an aside, I would say that if you're labeling it "content", it probably isn't valuable.). That value needs to be demonstrated somehow and then affirmatively compensated by the consumer. It's on the producer to figure out how to make this happen. But just hoping that people will pay for the privilege of browsing your "content" belies the reality that the "content" probably isn't all that valuable.
Ugh, "content".
* they are non intrusive, and
* don't track me all over my live.
For the first item: If a news article is a small thing between a huge ad it is not usable. There are ways to make ads not too dominant.
For the second item: Match ads based on the content of the page, not based on the viewer. This would show me ads relevant to what I'm doing right now, not what an algorithm things I might need in general. This is what mad google rich. They look at my search terms and pick the matching items. Same if I read an article about some topic, related ads will have an impact without invading my privacy. Similar to the past, where advertisers picked machines/papers based on the target audience.
IMO the technology most suited for anonymous micro payments are blind signatures, like Chaum's Ecash or GNU Taler. This still has centralized issuers and some implementations require the payment receiver to be identified, but it neither the issuer not the payee can tell how you spend your money.
> Anonymity and privacy are provided by the way things work - that wallets are randomly generated IDs, Coil transfer the money, the wallet provider knows who the recipient is, the content creators knows how much they’ve received, but nobody knows everything. Here’s a post[0] by Coil’s co-founder and CTO Ben Sharafian discussing wallet-side and sender-site (based on PrivacyPassp[1]) privacy techniques they and the wallet providers use to ensure everyone’s privacy is respected.
0 - https://coil.com/p/sharafian/Doubling-Down-on-Privacy/cD_Ziw...
The discussion around this post confuses me. Because in practice it doesn't sound that bad, but the comments seem to be against it. A person pays a subscription to "consume content" [1] and the author is paid for it. But why do I need a wallet? What is this ledger business all about? What's the meta tag for? In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors. I'm beginning to understand the other comments now.
As far as advertisements go, what's stopping people from just selling ad space themselves? Why do I need Google? You sell cast iron skillets, I'm a food blogger. You want some ad space. Email me and send me a check.
[1] i.e. to read, watch and listen to things on the internet. "consuming content" sounds so impersonal, if that's the best word to describe it.
This totally works, but does have some drawbacks:
* High friction. The advertiser needs to seek out sites, send emails back-and-forth, agree on pricing, etc.
* Cheating. How does the advertiser know that their ad is really being shown? How do they know that the publisher really has lots of visitors, and isn't just sending them back traffic?
* Lower payments. Unless you're writing about something where people spend a lot of money (insurance bloggers, etc) you'll likely make more money if you use something that supports personalization.
The way this works out is big publishers (all the brands you've heard of) make direct deals with big advertisers, but (a) they still make a substantial portion of their money by first checking whether there's a high bid from a network and (b) they integrate various vendors to verify the traffic is legitimate.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
1. Are there legitimate safe spaces for people who like friction? Or are they only for people who LARP as Don Draper and Jordan Belfort?
2. How was/is cheating in this sense addressed in print advertisements?
3. This makes sense, but I think the alternative would call for more friction and ethical data collection/sharing on behalf of personalization.
4. The last sentence was the most helpful. Who is the "network" in question?
(Now for my disclosure: If you can't tell I need to sit down and figure out how the online ad business actually works, I likely can count on my hands many times I've ever clicked an ad online and I've definitely purchased something in that manner far less if ever).
Thank you!
2: The primary method of cheating in print was lying about your circulation numbers. Anyone could easily verify that the ad was run in the agreed on spot, but the question of how many people read your paper/magazine is harder. In the US circulation numbers typically come from the nonprofit Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation
3: The world is moving in that direction, but not especially because advertisers or publishers are pushing for it. Instead it's consumer advocacy groups and browsers. My primary project at work right now is (along with a lot of other people) figuring out how we can serve personalized ads without cross-site tracking (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove).
4: An ad network is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. Directly connecting pairs of publishers (P) and advertisers (A) scales at O(PA) while publishers and advertisers both connecting to a network scales at O(P+A). AdSense would be an example: an advertiser who signs up with AdSense can advertise across all its publishers without needing to make 1:1 deals.
(Still speaking only for myself)
The wallet and the HTML meta tag are for people who want their websites monetized. If you just read/watch/etc., only a browser extension and subscription are required.
> In reality how is this even better than Patreon or "Buy me a Coffee" or GitHub Sponsors.
It isn't, it's complimentary, but more widely applicable. You won't sponsor every single blog owner for every single article you found useful or applicable to your use case, because that would be too onerous.
If advertising (1) did not misuse my personal information, (2) weren't A/V noisy, (3) weren't a source of malware, (4) actually stuff I have a chance of being interested in more than the average person, I'm okay with them.
As a content creator, I would also want to be able to constrain the ads that are presented with the content.
What we have now is the bad side of ads, there could be a good like PSAs relevant to the content kind that haven't been explored.
What we have right now though, nope. I am working on my PiHole and adblock rules regularly and I like it when my pages are clean.
And absolutely nobody has been able to make it work over the past 20-ish years.
I'm not going to pretend I know the exact reason why it doesn't work, there are lots of reasons that can be debated.
But the fact that it's been attempted by tons of really smart people at companies large and small and nobody's been able to pull it off, tells me that it's not going to happen. I'm not a pessimistic person at all, but the evidence here is overwhelming.
The technology to make it happen is easy, but the human side isn't: whether it's an unsolvable economic, coordination, or simply consumer demand problem.
The proposal here is about applying that to the entire internet under a single subscription fee, or at least a sizable proportion of sites overall.
Let's say I start off with $20 worth of article reading credits that can be used across all websites. This would be the same as standing in front of the magazine section holding a $20.
Some websites will offer content cheaply (say $0.50/article) with no option to get a bulk rate. Expensive sites like FT can offer a high per-article price, but lower subscription pricing. Besides being a market-oriented way of producing content (charge what you want, not what AdSense deems that you deserve), it would probably make users more mindful of content they consume. And that runs contrary to how our ad-based system persists.
Of course at some point this system would be poisoned by digital middlemen like Yelp popping up to become gatekeepers of 'good' and 'bad' websites.
Is there a way to pause or speed up/increase or whitelist sites with this tool/process? This will 100% cause scammers to find ways to abuse this system just like scammy ad-filled sites, and there seems little point of contributing if your money will go towards building a new scamming industry.
Basically: how do you avoid abuse here? I don’t want to give a penny to sites that for example make it hard to access content to increase the $ they get from me.
You can manually stop the extension on scammy websites, and it only works when the page is open and active, and stops when you go idle. For the money involved (subscriptions are $5 USD/month, and you get less than $0.46/ active hour of use), and the hassle ( to withdraw money from a wallet you need to prove your identity), i don't think abuse will be very profitable.
I don’t find this argument convincing at all. The same could be said about ad impressions (pennies or fractions of pennies per view) but there are whole content farm industries built on this.
I support the idea but abuse should be considered and addressed, not handwaved away.
In principle, I like this. But the devil is in the details. Patreon incentivizes pretty high quality content because creators need to convince patrons to jump through quite a few steps to contribute (perhaps too many). In the worst case scenario, Web Monetization could incentivize clickbait that steals focus and tries to cheat the `isActive()` algorithm as long as possible.
It's automatic, and kicks in ~10s after loading the page. The sums involved are small though ( i don't have a way to test, but it's $0.46 USD/hour, so i doubt <1 minute would be even a cent).
The extension is active only on the currently active open tab, and doesn't work with background ones, even if they try to game the isActive() algorithm.
If we no longer have a right to privacy, the least we can have is the right to pay for that right if we choose.
Your interactions within the world are logged, like it or not. Money is logged (legally, it's a requirement, KYC and all that).
I'm pretty sure every financial transaction for at least a decade is logged and accessible in some form to those who'd need it.
You cannot pay for privacy (since transacting money requires identification in some form).
Getting more paid content will not meaningfully reduce amount of ads, as they can provide extra income for companies, with overall little negative impact.
Instead, how about a system more like the Kindle Unlimited stuff--you pay a fixed amount per month and it's distributed based on your usage.
However, I would handle it differently--when you view any participating site upon leaving you get a pop-up asking you to rate it on a minus one to 10 scale. Rating^2 * pages = score. At the end of the month payments are distributed according to the scores you gave the sites you visited. Note the minus one--that's saying the site was deceptive, not merely worthless and it deducts a bit from what they collect elsewhere. (Kindle does something like this, it's distributed by pages read. Unfortunately, the system is easily gamed.)
I mean, instead of trying to guess who I am or what I like, why not just let me TELL you?
Let me provide some criteria (“pixel art”, “chiptune music”) and feed you some examples (Fez, MegaMan) and try to show me similar games. Then I might actually spend some money on a purchase solely because of an ad for once.
For all the BS about personalized ads and shit, I have yet to see an ad for a product that I loved and didn’t discover through chance or word of mouth. Meanwhile if I search for a coffin even once Amazon keeps recommending more to me. This shit ain't working, unless the actual objective is to just track people and build "profiles" anyway.
Meanwhile, the poor plebs will be left with ad ridden useless garbage they can mindlessly consume.
Even better...why not do it like the Phillipines? Facebook can provide a free service for the poor people where they don't have to pay a subscription for certain sites as long as they browse the web through facebook?
This'll give access to sites partnered with facebook of course, but who needs the rest of that internet anyway?
What a great way to keep poor and uneducated people poor and uneducated. How dare they be able to just hop on the internet and learn whatever they want for nothing more than seeing an ad? Everyone should pay for everything.
The situation is interesting because we have had simple monetisations channels for over a decade it's just that the majority of the content available on the web is low value and in the majority of consumers eyes not worth paying for. Hence if you put this content behind a paywall no one pays for it. I don't think micro-donations will solve this in any way. Not that they don't serve some use case in the bigger picture. There are certainly niches that have benefited. I just don't see it taking off beyond that.
I believe the majority of people have no urge to compensate "content creators" (small businesses marketed differently) for giving away content for free. If a business wants to venture into a market in which there is evidence of there not being a demand above a price point of zero any work done to extract compensation for the effort feels counter productive. I see a lot of arguments about creators "deserving" to be compensated, because they've put in the graft and produced...something. I wish anyone luck with their chosen enterprise and don't want to see anyone's hard work dissipate in vein but people don't deserve to be compensated for pursuing a business idea. I think that's seen as common sense outside of the digital realm.
Being a US person, I gave up on the idea, although it still deeply saddens me that there is so much red tape around micropayments that the (fairly technologically simple and readily achievable) systems that we could quickly use are basically illegal in the US.
We have all of the infrastructure to do micropayments; from browser extensions and http status codes to the lightning network. It's just against the law.
Initially there will be friction. After all the hype has dissipated from the early adopters, then regular users of the web will need to adopt it en masse. It's not going to be smooth sailing from the outset.
If people think content is not worth paying for, they won't pay for it anyway.
If content creators think they can make enough money with ads they'll keep putting ads on their content, they won't give up on the income stream ads provide for a theoretical ROI based on subscriptions
And even if they did, it's still more profitable to sell subscriptions and cry that you don't make enough money and have to put ads on your website, against your will
The current model is fine. We just need fairer money transactions instead of the giants taking too much of a cut.
Ads on the web are not going away for a long time to come.
> Brave Rewards locally picks which private ads to show you based on your browsing activity. Then, Brave uses an anonymous accounting process to confirm ad event activity, keep personal details private, and ensure people earn rewards for their attention
Compared to Web Monetization, which is transparent to the user and proportional to time spent.
However, I'd be down to see ads if they're, say, relevant (things I'm actually interested in) 90% of the time. I thought about having a system where I could voluntarily say what I'd like to see in ads (obviously stuff I'm comfortable letting others know eg: sw, t-shirts, etc) - sort of like subscribing to RSS feed. Maybe advertisers could have a button on their site that I could click to let them know I'm interested in promotions, new releases etc. I imagine those advertisers could be part of an ad network I'd whitelist. I could see this as a win-win, though I don't want to think I'm the only one to think of this. Maybe those in the industry feel status quo is the best at scale.
The pull attraction of Netflix has been demonstrated for its end-users.
Just waiting for the ad-free websites to develop a similar following via same pull attraction (hello, Amazon) instead of a push.
You can run whatever you want (up to the storage/electricity limits I allow) on my computer/phone when I'm sleeping, give me eBling, and charge me eBling for web searches etc.
Make it so that donating 12 hours of a mid-range phone's CPU would pay for 24 hours of web searches, or something like that.
https://help.coil.com/docs/membership/coil-extension/index.h...
And the code for all of them is FOSS, so adapting for another browser should be relatively easy.
It's much less to do about ads and more about quality information and content created by people who have invested in it being able to circulate in our society rather than information and content which is free but created by hacks and incentivised by some other motive or has an alternative agenda. We're seeing the ramifications of that every day.
This needs to be brought into the web standards asap IMO.
- Zero guarantees that a new buyer of the website (or acqui-hirer of the content creator) won't pump it full of ads.
- Zero guarantees for that the website will not be full of trackers, with or without paying.
- Promotion of the "content creator" profession which has its place but I worry that it gets promoted as the default way of sharing content. Knowledge must be free or else no human race progress is possible.
- ...It's actually quite OK to want to charge money for your knowledge in some cases, sure. I know I would support 3 particular channels on YouTube personally, if I had more need of their videos (currently it's just a casual and rarely exercised interest). Making a guy like me pay will just make him leave. Everybody loses.
- The proposed ways of implementing this monetization are deeply flawed. There are huge forum threads where freelancers are happily describing how to deceive a time-tracker software (not 100% related but IMO pretty close).
- Zero guarantees the content won't get edited or deleted for variety of reasons, dodgy DMCA requests included. Why must I pay for something that the government or rich lawyers can disappear at any time?
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As a programmer this general idea gets a hard "NOPE!" from me, mostly because its execution cannot be guaranteed to be consumer-friendly.
We need a new generation of tech that's completely divorced from corporations' and governments' interests for the web monetization to have even a small chance of ever taking off.
One example: machine-enforceable contracts. ZERO human intervention must be possible. If I accept contract X on my machine then I don't care if the creator changes their mind tomorrow; they must grand-father my terms and conditions until I end the contract from my side.
As for the monetization model: people will just compare pros and cons and will bail out when they are asked to pay for one more streaming-like service. Did we learn nothing from the rise of piracy which comes as a response to content fragmentation?
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TL;DR:
Why must I play a game of dice when the dice are loaded?
Ad networks that track you, and slurp as much personal data as they can get are a problem.
Invasive ads that make noise or take over the whole page are a problem.
Ad companies that claim to be search engines but produced results based on who’s paying the most instead of what’s relevant to your search are a problem.
Basic advertising I’m okay with.
I'm still hoping that those companies that I despise and that fill the internet with mass-produced garbage (which they call news or content) will finally go bankrupt and stop.
Plus, the way to optimize for higher conversion rates with paywalls and subscriptions is to have even more outrageous public claims, meaning even more click-bait-y headlines and even more addictive (they call it "engaging") time sinks.
I predict that once Web Monetization works friction-less, we'll see insane amounts of GPT-generated nonsense articles behind paywalls. Because even if people approve the paywall only by mistake (e.g. 0.1% of visitors), it'll still be a solid revenue stream, if you mass-produce enough random "content" :(
And if you believe that companies will stop shoving ads in your face, just because you paid them, read this: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/suc...
It's a Samsung whitepaper on how using the "smart ads" in their $5000+ premium 8K TVs you can finally reach those people who avoid regular TV because they hate ads.