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Comment by NoLinkToMe | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?

As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.

You could even have a system where you could pay for a model with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.

I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a solid small market by now.

Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix, newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing overarching.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...

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Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to protect me from those things.

For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).

"How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.

> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?

Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse, when the existing system allows them to do it for free.

Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't, and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like Brave used to).

And whatever users are willing to pay for not seeing ads someone is willing to pay more for users to see ads.

Of course the best would be to let users pay for not seeing ads and then shove them in their face anyway for maximum profit.

I don't think so. The fact you see any particular ad instead of another, is because someone put the highest bid for that slot to show you this ad, and nobody else was willing to pay more.

By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot are not there because someone is not willing to pay that much to show that ad, except for the single one that won the auction.

Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become viable/profitable anymore.

The only difference is that now the user could bid on that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.

If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various platforms.

Yeah. I think this is probably insurmountably hard.

ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase because of some annoying authentication issue.

I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse. That and once you've given something away for free, for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.

> I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse.

People must be ultimately paying the money somehow. Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother.

People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a big purchase or throwing away their life savings.

But it still means they are paying it.

> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?

1. Free competition and lots of it.

2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment

3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the site.

If I had to guess, I think the big reason that never took off is that no one can agree on the standard and everyone wants money on the edges, and won't agree with each other.

So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?

TBH, pay to browse will not work. Look at Netflix/Spotify. Yes, it's a good revenue stream for them, but the incentives are plain wrong:

1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated content, esp. with LLM

2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're paying

I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.

But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.

Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for internet services. It is psychology and competition between the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment. Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off if they had paywalls.

That and regional differences. The amount that people in many regions would be able (not even willing) to pay would be tiny for the company running the site in many cases.

I know. Because for every paid service you have one that is "free".

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