It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
Good.
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.
These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.
If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.
With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.
There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.
If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.
Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.
Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.
I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
Where will that revenue come from?
Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.
Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.
With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.
It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.
"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.
Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
Yeah I don't think that worked:
https://marker.medium.com/how-russian-oligarchs-stow-away-th...
There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.
Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.
Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.
I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.
Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...
As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.
Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.
If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.
Here's the lists btw. Enjoy.
https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
Was really the first time in my life I started looking at and appreciating databases as the weapons they are.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.
That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.