Ask HN: Is this a feasible idea or rather not?

I would not use it. I object to the tracking networks that power targeted advertising, and believe supporting them is unethical.

I would use a service that replaced all personalized ads with display ads however.

Display ads are targeted to the content, not the consumer. Higher quality content attracts quality audiences, and commands higher prices per impression. This creates a financial incentive to create quality content instead of SEO spam and clickbait.

Also, in my experience, display ads tend to be more relevant than personalized ads, but I regularly clear cookies, etc. I suspect people like me are a larger percentage of the addressable market than advertising networks admit.

This is what I don't get. If there is a forum for fishermen, maybe putting ads there that target those is a good idea. But you would put just the image there and host it yourself. No foreign JS.

If you had a sportsclub you would also just hang up a companies banner, you wouldn't hang a surveillance camera.

"Google Contributor: can I really pay to remove ads? | Google | The Guardian" https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/google-co...

The big G tried this, but seems the site is no longer available

Oh, interesting, thank you! Never realized this was a thing already, it just seemed like an obvious thing to do, to just 'bid more'.

Wonder what their figures were.

Fun idea! I’ve worked in technical roles at agencies and DSPs (the tool brands use to buy programmatic ads), and currently work at a dsp. Here’s my two cents:

Assuming it’s a good idea people will use, you’ll run into a couple issues:

1. To build this you have to break a lot of privacy rules. You’d need to tie and individual user to all of their individual impressions (ad slots they viewed) on every site/page. Because you’re billing them for the ad slots, you need to track and store their behavior, and be able to tie it to individual auctions. Privacy and technical difficulties everywhere.

2. Digital advertising is wildly complicated. You’d need to outbid every single other advertiser on every single impression. Because auction are first price now (rather than second price) it’s going to be ridiculously expensive to accomplish this. At work I have advertisers with some impressions where we bid $200+ cpm. ($0.20 per ad slot, so some page views would cost $1+).

3. This could actually work if you didn’t guarantee 100% coverage and just said like “reduce ads on pages by 33% while still paying pubs”. Then you build an audience segment of all your customers and just go to any dsp and bid on that segment until you reach the profit margin you want. Bill customers an average or just a monthly subscription to avoid tiring individual users to each of their impressions. (Although your creative will get denied/flagged because you must have accurate branding in the creative and it must clickthrough to that same brand’s site)

4. This will probably be impossible after 2024ish when cookies are gone.

5. Users you do this probably clear their cookies or use the global opt out, which would make your system not work.

Good thoughts, but it is somewhat dependent on the implementation. There are other ways to implement than you describe.

The solution doesn't need to be cookie based, as it can be a browser plugin, as it is tied to the user, and therefore, that gets around a bunch of the cookie issues.

You're taking this from the "ad guy" perspective of this is how advertising works, but what about taking the publisher perspective of "how do I get paid for my content". They likely don't care if the money is coming from an advertiser or consumer. They may in fact prefer the consumer payment model.

I don't think you can even begin with attempting to get 100% coverage. But if you can get adoption on a few larger, more visited sites, or within certain niches with certain individuals who particularly dislike advertising, it could spread from there.

But...is this better than the direct subscription model for the publisher?

It’s kinda like Brave right? I wish this were a reality but it’s gonna be a tough battle. Micro transactions are a tough problem…and I definitely don’t want to have to buy some silly crypto token.

You’re gonna need a team of engineers, lawyers, sales people, accountants and bankers…plus a shit load of capital.

The beauty of the scheme is you won't need micro transaction: the regular advertising money streams would suffice to make it work. You essentially function as an agency with a campaign spend to get rid of on behalf of an agency: the people paying for the service. All the rest would be taken care of by the existing channels.

Oh I see that’s an interesting idea.

But you’ll still need a way to send very small sums of money without an outrageous payment processing fee.

You would do a monthly or quarterly bill such that the billed amount is substantial enough for the end user.

And on your part you’re already doing net 60 with all the providers anyways.

So this seems feasible for site that you visit frequently. But how would you handle the random one off articles? There are plenty of domains in my history that I’ve only visited like 1-2 times.

Just like you see ads there, it would still work. Whether you visit a site frequently or only once would rely on the exact same mechanism.

Oh I think I get it. If everything is just served by Adsense then you only need to pay a single monthly bill to Adsense rather than individual sites.

Fascinating idea indeed!

Yes, you got it!

I think there would definitely be a market for this idea! In my mind, if we extend the idea, its a sort of subscription management. Maybe you pay the site manager directly for subscribing to content that lacks ads, or maybe there is a third-party that manages subscriptiopn management for smaller sites (who might not want to deal with overhead of managing paying users, etc.). Let's call this the Roku model, in that, i can use a Roku layer to help me manage video content...and then i use roku to manage payment to a paid streaming service, say, HBO. Sure, i can just directly pay HBO, but roku supposedly adds some value, maybe ease of management, or maybe roku promotes HBO signups, etc....in any case, i pay roku for access to HBO, and roku passes that subscription revenue to hbo - excluding some fee that they charge hbo i suppose, and on and on. So, in my estimation, this has precedent and can be applied to regular web content.

However, i imagine over time there will be a centralization of these subscription manager services - we'll call them "middle men" - and over time they will squeeze ever more fees from brands/content destinations...and over time brands who gain enough market power will feel these middle men lack enough value to give them their fees, etc. you know, that old chestnut.

Or...maybe i totally misunderstood your idea. ;-)

I don't think people will pay for content. And the ones who will pay for content may be overwhelmingly attractive targets to advertisers in general? So you will never get any support from platforms for your "subscription ad-space buying service."

But Youtube has something like 20 million premium subscribers - I'm one myself with a family plan. But that is against an estimated 2.6 billion active users. Like, 1%? Round up and call it 2%.

I wonder how many of those 2% of users are the most attractive and desired targets of advertisers?

OTOH, if you said to me you had a service that would bid like 1% more for the adspace on any site or service I consume and that $X00 per year would remove all ads from those sites or service I use . . . I'd buy that.

Putting on my blackhat for a minute. I'm a creator with some small percentage of consumers "opting out" via this type of tool - how can I buy ads on my site/service at an inflated price to optimize my income . . . if I know 2% of my users are willing to pay X+1% shouldn't I try to drive up X? Arbitrage?

This is a service that I would pay for. Even if I had to pay more than the advertisers would.

If I owned a site and chose to place advertising on the site, I wouldn't let someone buy that ad space and then not show ads. I want my site visitors to be used to seeing advertisements, not empty space.

My CTR would be terrible on empty space, so in the future what metrics would I report to advertisers to let them know how effective their ads would be? Plus, I wouldn't be confident you could keep your business going indefinitely so I'd likely end up having to sell to advertisers again in the future. So I'll just keep showing ads because I know I can sell ad spaces to someone. There's only one person who wants to buy empty space (you).

I don't get it - conceptually isn't a site/service provider selling the ad space to the highest bidder already? Isn't the goal to max out that revenue?

Maybe allowing your "best" consumers to opt out of ads makes overall CTR drop to some level below which advertisers will no longer want to use your site.

Any insight into numbers for this? It is way outside my knowledge.

I'm guessing, for example, if I said to you - hey, I like your site and will pay $1,000,000 a year to see it without ads that might be a deal you would take?

> hey, I like your site and will pay $1,000,000 a year to see it without ads that might be a deal you would take?

Depends on who the second place bidder is and what their bid is. Depends on what my site is. Depends on what my longterm goals are.

Remember that I have 0 confidence that the magic buying ad space and leaving it blank company will be around for long.

> conceptually isn't a site/service provider selling the ad space to the highest bidder already? Isn't the goal to max out that revenue?

Kind of and no. There are plenty of ways to maximize revenue today that fuck you tomorrow. My Bible sales website might get a ton of ad money from PornHub today as a gag but it’s not good for business.

CTR is only relevant if it leads to revenue, if you can get revenue anyway why would you bother with the CTR?

Because I have 0 faith that the people buying blank space are going to be around for long.

Amusing, I have run into the same idea with a call from someone on HN. We discussed using crypto to stream payment and auto bid for ad slots against advertisers on pages in the browser. The browser would get rid of ads based on how important a page is for you.

I definitely think it is viable. Execution is going to be hard.

Brave does something similar to what you are saying and they've struggled to gain enough traction in practice.

Seems possible from the technical side, but not so sure about the money part. if I'm following you correctly, XYZ.com would have shown an ad on their site and received, say 1 cent. With your service running, you visit XYZ.com, ad is replaced by a white box, and they receive, let's say 2 cents? If so, seems like efficient microtransactions will be a challenge.

That's the idea, the microtransactions will be taken care of by the existing ad networks and will end up in the aggregate payment from the network to the site. Sites effectively won't even know that it is happening.

I don’t think it is feasible to block all advertising because companies can raise prices to cover the cost of outbidding such a service and some potential customers have massive lifetime value…

…Amazon AWS comes to mind.

I think it's a fantastic idea and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

The problem is that people like you who are willing to pay to remove ads are the minority. The vast majority of the people in the world won't pay to remove ads.

Maybe have the adblocker replace ads, with one of those "buy-me-a-coffee" links that you can click to submit a micropayment.

The replacement is the payment.

I doubt many people would agree to pay dozens of bucks per day (the cost for some highly competitive clicks).

Online newspapers have tried it. Only Financial Times has succeeded to some extent. What you are proposing is "nagging paywall" i.e newspapers are using in-or-out type of paywall whereas your suggestion is to keep users nagging with a "whitespace" for payment. One-time payment request has not succeed, why do you think nagging users with blank page every few minutes is going to succeed.

There will be very few content creator who will benefit, most of them won't. This has a massive scalability problem.

Seems viable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ might pay