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Comment by vrc | Hacker News Reader

You won’t pay enough for it to make sense to support. That’s the harsh reality. Every single ‘altruistic’ browser has ended up on the dole of adtech because consumers will not pay even $0.01/pageview and publishers believe they’re worth $0.10-$1.00 per PV. I worked with an amazing founding team at Google and launched this [0] across many sites across the internet. People able to pay enough to fund the open web don’t, and people willing to pay realize that it gets pricey, fast.

[0] https://blog.google/technology/ads/helping-publishers-recove...

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Give us a break, nobody has done more to ruin journalism that Google manipulating ad auctions (bernake), rewarding click bait (doubleclick), and forcing small papers serving local markets to compete for search placement with massive companies like the NYT.

Google helping with “Adblock” is a farce considering research has shown a key reason people use as blockers is to protect their privacy…from Google.

Imma be honest I don't care about privacy as much as I care about having to actively go out of my way to close an ad.

Yes, that’s absolutely the primary driver, but the #2 reason for adoption is privacy and security concerns. Google still doesn’t understand this, hence the farce that is “Privacy Sandbox” which is utterly delusional.

Give me a Spotify for reading. I don't want to subscribe to Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, Walrus, NYT, etc. Sometimes I want to read from one, sometimes another and all together to expensive to subscribe to all.

I don’t understand what internet users not willing to pay for published content has to do with creating a browser that’s just a browser.

Like Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla did for a long time.

Google subsidized billions per annum to Apple and Mozilla to fund browsers and be the default search engine. So the open web is subsidized by ads. Nobody is willing to fund the alternative.

The main thing to come out of that was ad blocker blocker blockers, which seem to work quite well.

It's not altruistic, its stripping the browser down to its most basic essence. It is the core functionality. Why do we humans have such a hard time acknowledging an abstract thing without dirtying it with our stupid ambitions?

Nothing good is viable with the current tech "economy", where software is an endless death-march of feature-bloat to justify the unlimited (also known as cancerous) growth required by venture capital or public markets.

But I bet a couple guys could pull off an Opera 2.0 and make a nice living for themselves. You only need a couple thousand paying users at a very modest subscription fee to cover a couple of developers' salaries

Incremental revenue in the name of growth

These same tech players have complected the specs for the web/html/http so that only they can build browsers. There is no need for this, but here we are. And the whole Web Industrial Complex went right along with them because complexity is a nice revenue stream. Simplicity doesn't provide the rent seeking footholds that they predatory companies all exploit.

How much do the ads pay? I thought $0.001 per page view would be considered amazing?

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