Welcome to the ad-free internet
economist.com
economist.com
Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.
Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)
And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so.
Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023
Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.
I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Jet Blue is also showing mandatory ads on the video display in front of you. They last for around 5 minutes and you cannot turn off the display while these ads are showing. This is highly annoying.
2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
You can’t “pirate” Social Media’s original intended functionality, social interactions, because the content isn’t really the point. The connections are.
*I mean, if we have to misuse the term, which is actually about threatening to kill/killing people and robbing their boats, to mean unauthorized copying
Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad.
But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares. And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little...
I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences.
> What if it is related to another show you watched?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching.
> What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit.
If I can't opt out then it's an ad
But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)?
I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
"Enjoy ad-free music listening".
They still get paid to promote particular artists/songs to you on the home page.
Songs themselves include ads too (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/) so "ad-free music listening" is no certainty, but I guess we can't blame spotify for that.
* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.
* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.
* Ads for merchandise under the content.
* Ads for paid subscription to channels.
* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.
The official app is absolute GARBAGE now. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. I'm on the verge of cancelling Premium. Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it's a product offered by a private company.
who pays for the bandwidth, engineers, data centers? will the 3rd party pay for these things? if youtube is forced to break it's own TOS, and this leads to users moving away from YouTube but still somehow taking advantage of YouTube's offerings, why even provide the service at all, what exactly would be the point as the product would be loss making? and will capping access be back in the cards (we can't offer any more of these videos because it will cause losses)? and what about tracking viewers, how can we track these viewers when they're coming in from some 3rd party?
I feel like I'm misunderstanding something...
In the EU it's ok to ask companies to do things, even if it costs them money.
They would beat little to none of the video hosting and serving costs.
It's basically adding one more middleman, just like most energy companies in Europe.
what? in which country and how?
> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription
i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.
> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.
If they go too far and Google leaves the EU market, I suspect nobody will be all that sad, goodbye giant competition, a boon for the local service providers.
I think what you are misunderstanding is: countries will sometimes be protectionist toward their own companies, but they don’t actually care if foreign companies have a viable business model, especially for non-critical things like YouTube. Asking the EU to care whether or not YouTube has a viable business model is not really reasonable.
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
True, but that's when you leave the service.
Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotify et al.
It all leads to a deeply pleasant digital life for me and my family; I saw fewer ads/distractions in 2023 than any year before. I know most people won't go through all the steps I did, but I'm surprised there isn't a pricey service rich folks can buy to get this sort of experience out of the box.
Adfree and crowd-sourced sponsor segment skipping is a glorious experience.
On the YT side it feels good paying a few bucks a month for each channel i like and getting to skip the ads. I hope that picks up. I don't like paying for YT premium because then my identity is tied to my watch history.
- the market isn't conditioned to want these services
- awareness of their benefits aren't obvious
- Its still within the realm of the technically literate to understand its purpose
I do think though that people can understand the benefits of adblocking. For example the digital video recorders that cut ads out of broadcasts, that was/is a successful product. And my friends complain about the ads - it is just that the blockers are not at a level where they can use them.
If you use services like Google or Cloudflare to provide DNS over HTTPS they've got access to your traffic and you're vulnerable to being tracked by them anyway.
It’ll be interesting to see how my kid reacts to the always-on TVs at my relatives over Christmas…
So far, he only gets to watch stuff I’ve downloaded or specifically looked up (no recommendations has really quieted things down) on an old laptop. He’s learned how to skip to the next video in VLC, but as I have it set to display a text list of titles, still has to ask me to put on a specific one. That’s fine; it keeps my temptation to park him in front of the screen and do something else in check.
Ironically for being the only American kid at his Kindergarten (German preschool), he has no idea who the American cartoon characters on his classmates’ backpacks and jackets are.
Is there a particular guide you followed or did you put this strategy together over time?
If you're looking to get into it I'd recommend that path. OPNSense works pretty nice out of the box, the documentation is great and there's a million switches for you to experiment with. There's even a tool to link your configuration to a git repo so that if anything ever breaks you can always go back.
I wonder if this ad/paid dichotomy is some tech startup fairy tale. Like, [we burnt capital on building an effective monopoly]^W [gave away our product for free] but now the [entitled lusers]^W [users]^W don’t want to pay 10$ a month in order to be on a social network that mostly only their one-generation-or-older relatives are daily active on.
> For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
Printed, paid-for newspapers also have ads.
Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the article you were reading, and no one tried to shame you for not looking at them, unlike today's HN users.
AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda
Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.
For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But it would require a new service, I’m not going to make an account to pay $1, a good number of newspapers would have to work out a shared system before this sort of thing would be interesting.
Unfortunately the ad-net has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for this kind of business model.
Another way to monetize is to make it interactive and bring back comments. Allow a well-regulated peanut gallery for each article, but have it actively moderated, require people to use their real names, and set a high bar for what comments are even allowed. Have journalists actively engage with them. A comment will only be published if it adds value. Then encourage people to have spirited discussion about each article. And guess what, actively commenting will cost you admission.
On top of financial motivations, newspapers often have different political alignments for example, I suspect some of them basically hate each other; a system where they get along and engage in good faith is too much.
I’d rather see an account where you dump money in, the site can say “buy this article for $x”, and it asks your account for that money. It doesn’t even really need to be a centralized site, it could be an API that multiple services can implement, or whatever.
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
That’s a little more interesting.
IMO an architecture that was a little more distributed and ala cart, as you say, would be nice. But it is definitely neat that at least somebody is taking a swing at this kind of solution.
Depending on what you pay for a gym membership of course, I think I started saving money after 1,5 to 2 years (cheap gym membership compared to relatively cheap equipment at home).
Caveat, I parked my bench inside my pullup rack (don't have to move it before training though).
I just started doing personal training, which is terribly expensive but it's one of the only things that motivates me to go. The other thing that helps is being around other people who are exercising, and in a brightly-lit space.
Finally, I wanted to share that doing personal training, we spend 70% of the time doing calisthenic-type exercises that require basically no equipment at all. So if someone has the motivation, do your squats, stair-steps, stretches, running, and maybe all you need to buy is a set or 2 of free weights (by "set" I mean literally two weights of specific values, not a set of all possible weights). Other cheap and small accessories are rubber bands that go around your legs, a mat so you can crawl on the floor and not get dirty, plastic frisbee-like plates so you can do leg stretches on the carpet. I know this is all "no shit" type information for people who work out a lot, I just want to share that for someone who wants to exercise for cheap, you do NOT need a towering multi-gym set to get started. There's TONS of exercises you can do right now if you just have the motivation.
A gym membership is a complete road block for me. I get distracted by women and that kind of thing. And I don't want to wait for available equipment. Besides I want to make the noises without people looking at me, or me thinking people look at me.
Good luck with the personal training!
If I want to show something on YT to my friend, and I don't know exactly which video is correct, well lots of luck to me to find it in first few tries, as EACH video I click on will first show me a two unskippable ads, no matter how short the video is
Meanwhile (on TV) my parents just record the shows they want and wind through the ad breaks that come up on a set schedule.
I refuse to use the modern web without adblockers, and have a very friendly media usage experience without ads. Every time I listen to radio in the car, or see TV at frieds or parents I'm amazed by the volume of advertisements being hurled at the consumer. In my own environment I never get to see all this crapware.
Yea, I adblock the living hell out of my internet, so I am jaded, but I was at an older persons house with regular broadcast TV on and it was so much worse then I remember TV being when I was young.
The amount of actual show time seems to have dropped even further. The TV ads seem to be all gambling and drugs. It was pretty terrible.
If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I used to have a long commute driving along a highway with trees and mountains along the side and, some mornings, the sky would light up from the brilliance of sunrise. Billboards tracked the highway for kilometres. Billboards were always in view and somehow they were louder than everything else. Like, if you looked at an entire landscape and the billboard, with its clickbaity text, was an absolutely small area of your vision -- it would disproportionately occupy your attention and space in your mind. Just like how you can hear your heartbeat when it's very quiet. It's not gone when you can't hear it -- the quiet things are still there and unchanged but you can't experience them when something else is being loud. In the very same way you can no longer travel down that road and experience the joy of not being sold anything,
I agree, but more than that; if we would find a way to avoid paying attention, a more pervasive way of pushing the adds would be invented.
As this becomes increasingly more common place, I'm left wondering if there is a risk of a reduced quality of life for those with neurological issues (ADHD for example), in the worst case their exclusion from society.
(Then sue Chrome for breaking things with manifest v3.)
I usually notice when I log in since I can barely click on any stories without getting told that it’s for subscribers only.
No. It. Is. Not.
The problem is you've internally moved the goalposts on what you consider an ad, from what would have more historically been considered an ad.
Those clothes with a big nike swoosh on them, those are ads. Individuals wear ads around everywhere. Objects are covered in their own advertising. If you have any electronics on you, god only knows what metrics they are collecting. Hell, these days if you're with anyone else that has electronics there is a non-zero chance those devices are spying on and tracking you.
I once was at Miami Beach and there was a boat mounted with giant-ass LED screens riding by. Where I live, there's new electric "bikes" with large boxes mounted to them and 3 sides of the box display ads. People get paid to just ride this through everyone's field of view, or park it for a while at conspicous locations. I feel impotent rage at this increasing terrorization of the populace.
What is that supposed to mean? There are plenty of websites that are not out to earn any money. It doesn't take anything for them to "survive".
For better or worse, the business model behind many of these sites rely on the ad revenue to continue existing, and ad blocking only works as long as most people still aren’t doing it.
> Don't worry about sustainability. There was life before YouTube and Facebook and there will be life after
Which is it? The point is that this version of the ad-free doesn’t actually exist in the long run. In a discussion about a move away from the “false economy” you highlight via paid subscriptions (presumably not a false economy), it seems odd to say that this already exists while also admitting that it doesn’t/can’t.
I fail to see how this is my problem as an end user.
Direct ads from the site you are viewing, yea adblock is great.
Aren't you feeling thirsty and want the cool crisp refreshing taste of an ice cold coca cola right now?
In content ads, and user posts as ads are far more difficult to deal with, but at least they don't track you.
For example, I was watching a "maker" video where they 3d printed some models for the project that were provided by their sponsor for use in the project they were showing you how to make. That type of "advertising" I can support. It doesn't detract from the content or distract, the product is relevant to what you are watching and, as you said, it doesn't track you other than tracking aggregate viewing numbers and how many people skip that section of the video.
Classic examples would be things like Apple paying to have their laptops or computers used as the props in movies. Or a car manufacturer having their vehicles shown. As long as it doesn't take you out of the content and make you feel like you've been interrupted to be advertised to then that's the one and only form of advertising I don't hate.
I guess there's also "opt in" stuff, like the user taking deliberate action to subscribe to a product magazine or newsletter is fine too... emphasis on "opt in" and "deliberate action", however. Nothing gets me to avoid doing business with a company faster than if their "Sign up to your newsletter" checkbox is default checked or, worse, there is no check box and you've been auto signed up and need to unsubscribe. Thanks for punishing me by doing business with you, assholes.
The rest can go away forever and never come back.
Ah! Wayne's World...way (way) ahead of its time.
If you don't tolerate ads, you could just... not visit the site? Close the tab?
I don't like paying for things, but I've never been in a transaction where I could say "you know what, I don't like the price of this, I'll just take it and give you no money. Deal?"
I am entitled to decide what runs on my computer and how. They only option another party has is whether or not they will provide service to me.
Most ad supported websites aren't like that. They let anybody access the content and only then try to insert ads. That's like trying to close the barn door after the horse has left, and it's a fundamental property of the medium of web publishing.
You can do things to push back against it - put the site behind a username/password and block users who aren't looking at the ads - but this prevents people from discovering the site in the first place.
This is ultimately a mismatch between the desires of the business and the medium they have decided to use, and it's on _them_ to figure that out, not end users.
Just because the medium allows you to do something that doesn't mean it's right to do it. Anyway what do you propose? That every website with ads stops using the web, creates their own non-standards-compliant browser with their own transfer protocol, and tells users to just use that? You can still reverse-engineer and crack it, because everything in a computer is just bits. They've done something similar with smartphone apps and everyone hates that.
Then what instead? If you decided you can just do whatever you want because of the medium, the business will seek methods beyond the medium to get what they want. You'll have to pay for subscription to access any and all content. And guess what, users hate that too! And that still won't stop users from just abusing archive.org and other proxies to copy paste entire paywalled articles to post it on the internet. Blatant copyright infringement. Thinking they're right because it's still just bits in the end.
Honestly the more I think about it the more it feels like users just think they're entitled to free content and it's impossible to satisfy them with anything else.
That's not even a viewer abusing the protocol, that's specifically how the web was designed.
I really miss those days. There was something special about the internet back then. It felt more like exploring a vast library full of hidden gems rather than being in a mall bombarded with ads and clickbait. Dreaming of a return to that kind of internet feels like wishing for a time machine, but hey, a person can hope, right?
I don't want to see ads, any ad, ever, and so far I'm succeeding, but I wonder how long this is going to last.
But even then, the browser can prerender the page use AI to find and remove the ad and do the final render. :)
1. “Give away” access to build a network effect
2. Get a network
3. Act with righteous indignation when some killjoy like the EU comes and says that you cannot just harvest whatever user data you want at will and users don’t opt to pay the proposed ransom money
[1] Presenting their worldview as just a given, something obvious.
They do require a certain degree of technical understanding, but the extension system on most browsers is fairly mainstream so I don't think it's for this reason alone.
Can it be as simple as the idea that almost all of media is universally disincentivized from talking about them? Of course there is a lot of content on ad-blockers out there, but the pressure may still be high enough to suppress cut-through to the mainstream. If that's the case it would be a nice example as to the extent of media influence more broadly.
This article is a case in point, where you would have thought that ad-blockers may have been relevant. And as a side point, perhaps also a good example of where you don't even have to be rich if you are knowledgable. Technical literacy is in itself a kind of digital affluence.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
I think the internet would be worse. No matter how you put it, the ads are funding content. If ads weren't viable, we wouldn't have a different kind of content. We'd simply have less content.
If there's a content business that can exist in this ad-free internet, it would already exist in the current ad-ful internet.
I don't know what kind of internet anti-ads people envision, but I'm afraid the whole thing is very damn fragile and rocking the boat will more likely break it irreparably than make it better.
Because they don't want you to know about it. Most common users still don't. Look at where the article is published: a website that uses ads.
Regardless of the morality / philosophical questions, the modern web feels to janky and unstable for me to trust the house of cards staying standing if you throw some Adblock in there.
(But maybe I just didn't tweak the blocker enough...)
I find the web far more unstable NOT using a blocker. Far too often the ads themselves break the layout or gobble up as much CPU as possible.
Subscribing merely turns the "Please subscribe yourself" ads into "Give the gift of knowledge to a friend."
Do yourself a favor. That's really the end of this discussion.
That's around what I pay to the maintainer of the Mastodon server I'm on. And I get that nice dumb chronological feed.
Oh, and it's ad-free. For everyone. It's amazing seeing Ublock Origin with "nothing blocking".
The true ad-free internet exists. But it doesn't exist within the FAANG space.
Don't worry, you will only get the best artisanal premium ads, you will learn to love them [1].
I am exaggerating obviously, but I do find it egregious that they would dare show more ads when ticket prices are already extremely high.
My main issue with advertising driven models is that the company will respond to the needs of who pays them, advertisers, and not who actually uses the service. Want to juice profits? Just sell more advertising slots, make them more intrusive, etc. Delivering quality service to customers becomes a cost burden rather than a way to gain more customers.
Anytime you wanted to get from A to B you would be subjected to noisy TV, and it was invariably something tedious like endless repeats of Ellen or Oprah with loads of adverts.
It was hell and I am so glad the service failed and was discontinued.
This is the reason you could not trust Google or Meta with ad-free stuff. They are already private intelligence(spying) agencies that already have the spying tech. Temptation is just too high.
Just pay people that create products and services without spying on you.
Sadly this is nearly impossible for digital products or services, at least those worth paying for.
I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).
Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article? My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130808023019/http://www.amazon...
But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.
The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.
The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.
One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.
Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.
I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.
FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…
Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.
For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz
I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss
The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…
You can see it in action. Plaid for example: https://plaid.com/blog/get-access-to-the-fednow-service-via-...
You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoever and makes me completely ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Maybe it's OK for some non-technical audience where they have no idea how electricity works, but this is supposed to be a technical crowd, isn't it? Or is it? Sometimes I wonder.
I think you're being unreasonable. False/untrue analogies still work as a rhetorical device and we can appreciate the point being made.
Pedantry has its place (peer-review of scientific papers, for example), HN comments is not one of them. This is how a community develops a reputation for being hostile.
(Now I'm going to feel horrible about myself for even letting myself be tempted to respond to a comment like this in the first place)
There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.
Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?
> Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month
That only works if there's enough independent publishers who agree to band-together and commit to using a single payment processor. I doubt this will happen.
> If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
I suspect it isn't just a technical/billing issue, but a lack of willingness to pay the desired prices...
That would require users to install an app in order to take advantage of IAP (which then means losing 30% of the revenue to Apple or Google). People aren't going to install an app just to view (and pay for) articles on whatever blog-host the writer is using.
It is the fate of any (and every) "Viewer app" to turn into a web-browser, and a sub-par one at that.
They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).
But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?
It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it). The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.
Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.
The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography: Big Pharma and computer games.
The impression I've gotten from articles about OnlyFans is that the business model consists of a mix of monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view content on top of subscriptions, neither of which are typically priced at the levels that would be described as microtransactions. Is that not the case?
The main problem (and reason I cancelled) is that is doesn’t disincentivize clickbait.
If you could curate the homepage to only include feeds of publications you want to pay, then the incentive would be to create a good stream of articles.
As it is, I got sick of clickbait from a few big publications, so their fucking clickbait headlines showed up, but grayed out with a notice that I’d blocked them.
Also, the recommendation system recommends exponentially more clickbait if you click on a few clickbait articles, then it goes into a spiral of garbage.
Most of the actual payment to read papers are from universities subscriptions funded by taxpayers money. And this particular example is why people will always be skeptical of this model.
In 2011, they partnered with some publishers to offer "One Pass", a pass-through billing system that also had an option for pay-per-article: https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/google-...
Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https://9to5google.com/guides/peachpit/
I don't think either service ever took off. Probably people were just too cheap :(
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Edit, at least 3 times, apparently! See fastest963's comment about "Google Contributor": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622362
I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.
Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.
The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.
Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.
Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.
Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.
Afaik Blendle is now a subscription service with a flat fee all you can read model.
I'm waiting for a smart content provider that has a 'never pay more' model. Stream a movie for 6 bucks, but since the all-you-can-eat bundle price point is 30 bucks, once you watch 5 movies, the rest are free for the remainder of the month.
I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts.
I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.
Apparently it's now owned by Adblock Plus and is hooked in to their compensation thing.
The cost of having a human investigate is substantial, and independent of how large the transaction is. There's also a substantial fraud problem in advertising, but consumers don't have to get involved with that most of the time. Until they're blocked by cloudflare occasionally deciding they're a bot.
Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.
Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.
I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.
For last 20 years, tech enabled startups, chose 'postpone profit' strategy adopting 'free to use' or 'ad supported' approach helped by raising high capital to build moats around the target market.
Now this trend can be either seen as a moment where the moat is complete and 'path to profit' is through captive customers. (Or) a decline/failure of the 'postpone profit' strategy accelerated by the current economic recession.
All social media and any other free to use switching to subscriptions is quite a probability now.
Instead, the playbook now is:
WE ARE FREE. YES, FREE AS IN NOTHINGBURGER DOLLARS. WE ARE BETTER THAN FREE! WE WILL PROMISE YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT! PUT ALL YOUR INFORMATION HERE AND WE PROMISE TO MAKE YOU FAMOUS AND RICH!
lol jk gimme that data. Also you’re locked in/addicted to our platform. Give us your money.
These things are completely different. Facebook became profitable 4 years after its funding.
YouTube adverts have always been prominent and irritating but without an account they are downright aggressive. I think an 18 minute video I watched last night had a pair of adverts served every ~2 minutes.
I stopped Premium and deleted my account to disincentivise watching YouTube as it became a huge time sink and procrastination tool for me. My solution will either work because the ads make the entire experience unpleasant enough to not bother with YouTube at all, or I'll be driven back to Premium just to save some time.
Of course this is exactly the situation that YouTube wanted to engineer, and have succeeded in doing so, but it just seems such an awful way to incentivise subscriptions.
What I do is toggle reader mode for that site if on mobile. That always bypasses it. I can also select the overlay on uBlock origin. If that doesn’t work I’ll disable JavaScript for the site since these popular need JavaScript. If all that fails I’ll simply not use the site.
PiHole protects your entire LAN (home, office, whatever).
uBlock protects your browser / device wherever it goes.
Defence in depth Is in fact A Thing.
It's appropriate that even the chief of the purveyors of advertisements uses the same language ("load") that clinicians use for viral infections.
In the past, it was about selling convenience. Netflix, for example has beaten conventional torrent sites because it had almost all movies you'd ever want in a single place, steady connection and a good UX. Now there are a dozen different services to juggle, each with a constantly changing library and torrents became more convenient again.
"We use data to create the best experience for you. Together with our 172 trusted partners". Just 172 close friends?
That's what burns my gears not so much ads as the tracking. How did the Internet become a thing that follows you everywhere? An ad I Can take I look and click or not or buy or not but it's the invasive collection and tracking I hate.
Imagine if a TV channel listed to you every company that paid to show an ad that whole day. I guess it would end up being quite a high number as well.
> the Norwegian Data Protection Authority strongly doubts that Meta's proposed ‘consent’ mechanism, often dubbed ‘pay or okay’, complies with the GDPR. The EDPB’s decision is therefore important to avoid Meta's infringement continuing while the company is exploring its options.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/metas_eu_privacy_fee_...
> noyb (None Of Your Business) has filed a data protection complaint against Meta over the "Pay or Okay" subscription model
This feels like calling Facebook a fast-growing social network.
2. Formerly free websites go paid
3. Opening up opportunities for smaller sites to underprice them but get paid for ad-free material
4. Mission. Fscking. Accomplished.
I struggle with this: you have three options: ad-supported, paid, or don't use it. What's the legal challenge?
Note the mandate is not "no ads" but rather "no personalised ads"
Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people.
Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise.
Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone will be happy.
Paywalls might work for some, but the key here is being ethical. Respecting the user.
The user will reward you if you respect it. It may even respect the brands that respect its attention.
As with everything, the problem here is greed. I wish more ads were respectful. I would take them more seriously if they were.
Not necessarily, maybe as a general rule
If the ads are high effort enough, people will actively seek them out, just the effort won't scale
You can argue, "yeah, but what about ublock origin (or another ad blocker)?" To you, they'd (speculatively) say, "ye are few, why bother."
Well clearly YouTube thinks it's worth it to go after AdBlock users now.
I wonder what the median disposable income of people who use archive links to circumvent paywalls is?
And if that is a hassle my little hack to selectively view pages with js disabled works great here https://noscript.it/?p=0#https://www.economist.com/business/...
Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.
Was there anything that was discussed that you disagree with?
It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher than what they’ll get from the platform’s ad share. Yet still it is irritating. The majority of content I consume idly I would never pay for. So again, a fair bargain I suppose.
There are content creators whom I’d happily support directly for the sake of the value I ascribe to their content, not just to remove their ads, but they don’t offer the option. I understand there are many reasons for any given creator why an ad supported business model may be preferable/simpler/earn more. And maybe this is just a shift in the creator economy which is more slowly dispersing than I personally would expect.
But truly from a superfan or consumer point of view, I end up valuing the paid podcasts I subscribe to on Spotify which are ad free over many pieces of content that I arguably enjoy more but are forced to skip through their ads.
I’ve paid for Ben Thompson’s content for almost 10 years now, and listen to his podcast via Spotify. I remember when he said he’d never put his podcast on Spotify, but their private/paid feed feature got him to jump and Im so glad I got to delete an extra app because of it. I’ve been listening to the McElroy brothers’ stable of podcasts for just as long, but am irritated every time I have to skip through the ad reads. I do support them through the podcast network they are a part of, Maximum Fun, but I honestly pay less than I could because I know that it doesn’t directly support them (it supports the network which in turn supports them). That’s ironic because really I should give _more_ because of that fact, but the indirection makes me uninterested in paying much above the minimum.
I love both these podcasts, and their ability to monetize are clearly different based on the product each are producing. At the end of the day though there is (in my experience) a value add provided through Ben Thompson’s business model of directly charging me for the good.
Please don’t read this as a typical HN “why doesn’t the industry cater specifically to me and the very narrow niche I inhabit”, I’m aware of many of the incentives and challenges inherent in these different business models. But as of late, with so many content creators giving the option to pay them directly in exchange for ad free experiences, paying for an ad free service like Spotify but being unable to skip ads from the creators themselves has started to really stick out to me.
I don’t know what a solution would be, nor do I look forward to paying for the majority of content I consume. In fact Im fairly confident that there is no good solution exactly because nobody wants to pay for most content and people’s time is not free. In a world where increasingly folks are putting up paywalls for content consumers see as differentiated, it starts to look more and more bleak on the ad supported side of that wall.
As a user, it makes sense to pay Spotify for music access, because Spotify, in turn, pays out a few fractions of a cent to the artist. But it doesn't really make sense to use Spotify premium for podcasts, when you can just download them directly or use various free RSS-based clients.
So why do so many people still consume podcasts on Spotify? 1. Because they're already on Spotify, so it's convenient, but more importantly... 2. Because Spotify realized they make more money if most of their users are paying, yet still consuming free (podcast) content. They don't pay out on podcasts per-stream like they do for a typical song. So ultimately, a premium user who consumes 100% podcast material is more profitable than a user who consumes 100% label-published music.
It's not a coincidence that Spotify has gradually taken over its homepage with podcast promotions, and promoted your "podcast library" as a first-class citizen, even placing it above your music library. It's all about profit margins, baby!
Crypto solves this. The barrier to entry is cumbersome because of KYC, but after that the whole ecosystem is ready to go.
People talking 25 cents for an article. The ad revenue from viewing a single page with a few well sold ad impressions at $40 CPM is like 4 cents, and more often more like < 1 cent. I keep hoping to see Basic Attention token BAT get traction for exactly these microtransaction use cases.
Does it? Transaction times and transaction fees on some of the more well-known cryptocurrencies would seem to exclude them entirely.
There’s no particular reason that it has to be a decentralised cryptocurrency that operates in the manner required - preloading a few bucks here and there, which are transferred between accounts in small amounts.
As with many things that “crypto” solves, it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Some cryptocurrencies could form part of a solution. It’s not clear they bring any specific advantages to the table though.
While some of these issues might have been solved (kind of), there's no way anyone touches crypto for end-user microtransactions with a 10-foot pole today.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
So would an sqlite database, possibly even a csv file
Or even better, have a ZK rollup between each client and a single intermediary, who manages ZK rollups with all publishers. Then you, as a client, don't have to worry about large amounts being trapped in escrow, and publisher payouts happen more regularly.
We could call it "Mastercard"