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On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention.

That's not the most important downside by far.

The downside is that the fabric of the web and the content on it is distorted by the drive to gain views and clicks, at whatever cost, because of a purely advert drive model. Adverts migrate to the positions with the most exposure, editorial content gets thinner and thinner until it represents the minimum effort required to gain views, titles become clickbait, journalism becomes churnalism, advertorial becomes prominent, product placement becomes the norm.

There are very real downsides to the ad supported model, so if you are going to argue for a transaction free web, recognise what you are giving away - it certainly isn't just a little bit of your attention now and then.

Perhaps there are ways to address those pernicious downsides to the advert-driven model and moderate its effects, but those effects are currently distorting a lot of the content on the web to make it less informative, less engaging, and less interesting than the ads it lives to serve.

> Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls everywhere?

No, they don't. I'm developing a technology to make it possible to share a single subscription fee across websites and apps without having to require users to go through a centralised proxy server.

The design allows users to retain anonymity, enables subscriptions to be shared on a usage basis and means that publishers can still retain their other major income streams (ads & paywalls) while getting access to a new one.

The concept only works because it means the subscribing user has no additional cognitive overhead. No tip button to remember to click, no "read more" button to fret over, no worrying about metered content leading to a nasty surprise at the end of the billing cycle.

A single fixed monthly fee and access to ad-free content or apps anywhere.

I've been working on this since 2008 and in the coming 12 months I am preparing to launch my business based on it. Interested persons are invited to contact me -- jacques@robojar.com.

How would that work under competition?

The only thing that will ever matter is reaching a network effect inflection point.

Apart from that, I have a patent pending on the core technology.

Readability.com tried this, and couldn't get many sites interested in participating. http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/

Readability was not the first.

Their mistakes:

1. They charged too little.

2. Their model was meant to be "viral" -- enticing sites to join by saying "hey, we have money for you". But it meant they wound up with money sitting around they can't use for anything else. In fact it imposes overhead.

3. Everything had to go through their servers.

> On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention

It's more than that. You subsidize by giving up your privacy as these ad companies profile you via tracking as much of your web history as they can.

As far as I am concerned (and I suspect it applies to many others), giving up my privacy to a machine that generates customized ads (or even risking losing it to third parties for more ads without my consent) is a much smaller price to pay than the inconvenience of going through paywalls and stuff. This is true especially when there's no guarantee that the article/post/whatever-content being accessed is gonna be of super-high quality. These things have been well captured through theories like Privacy Calculus [0] which basically posit that privacy concerns can often be trumped by the benefits of sharing resulting in a net positive utility.

[0] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=privacy+calculus&b...

Presumably if you have tolls on every service, you're spending at each location you're interested in. Presumably if you're doing this over the Internet, you're doing this with a credit card. Now you've just decided to give the credit card companies some nice information. In fact, this information is even more specific: it's the list of things you're actually willing to pay to use.

So then we're going to decide to change cash (not credit) for Bitcoin (and hope that guy doesn't sell the address to a marketer) and use that everywhere.

So the question then is who you want to be tracked by.

Not really. Your ISP could - for example - see which sites you are visiting and then make a payout on your behalf, aggregated with all its other users.

And then the ISP just sells the data in a marketing profile.

See also: What Verizon already does.

Flattr does this. You pay Flattr once a month, and they pay each site once a month. They just count up how much each user owes each site and makes a lump charge/payment.

Except the small difference, where credit card companies are required to uphold privacy in much greater extent than some random SF startup ever will.

Are they really? Because IIRC various credit rating companies will sell your data to nearly anyone. In fact, a dark web group sold on legitimately purchased data from one of the largest credit rating companies in the world last year. I don't think these companies care about your privacy anywhere near as much as you'd think, and I don't think it's a net positive to rely on them.

Credit card companies are probably the worst, most cynical violators of consumer privacy. They have been selling data on peoples spending as well as their personal details to companies like Acxiom for years before Google or Facebook were even created.

There are almost no requirements in the US for them to "uphold privacy". Most privacy actions (by the FTC etc) concentrate on "online privacy", which is of course only one segment of what the CC companies deal with.

Read [1],[2],[3]. Surprise, surprise: the default narrative of Google and Facebook being the aggressive upstarts pushing the boundaries on what is allowed is almost completely untrue. The credit companies and data brokers have been doing things that Google and Facebook wouldn't dream of doing for years.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/business/a-data-broker-off...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...

http://www.zdnet.com/global-consumer-data-broker-plans-to-re... [3]

That's a side effect rather than an essential part of the model. You would lose privacy with other models too. E.g. micropayment systems would know as much about your spending habits as Google knows about your browsing habits today.

Yeah. Your grocery stores have known more about you than anyone for decades. And it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon, frankly.

They have the data, but trust me, they don't know.

If they had tolls and paywalls everywhere, do you think they still wouldn't track you to profile your interests for advertisers anyway? Your privacy is gone in either case. At least in this case you don't have to pay.

I don't get why Internet can't be funded the same way as Kickstarter campaigns. No ads, but only the people who want to pay actually pay.

I run several non-personal websites. I pay for them because the cost is simply not significant to me. (Getting time to do administrative stuff is much more costly, but that's moistly a matter of bad tooling.) It's not because I'm a billionaire. It's because running a website, even a website with thousands of registered users, is dirt cheap if you it efficiently. When you get to the scale of hundred thousand registered users things begin to get more complicated. But only a fraction of the Web really needs to be that big.

Because most people and organizations will get more return for less effort from pasting third-party ad-units into their source codes. It's not just hosting costs; there's a time investment in creating content and running web services. The Kickstarter approach of creating and promoting videos and giveaways just makes that time investment bigger.

I have made a few tools originally created for internal use at the business I work at (mainly shipping-related documentation). I made them because I couldn't find them anywhere else that met my needs. I realized others would find them useful, and I was right, because more than 500 people visit and use the sites each day. And the use of ads covers the hosting, domain names and some of my time. I wouldn't want to attempt to monetize it any other way, due to demand, time and complexity. It's a win-win situation, and ads make that possible.

My interpretation of this article was that, while there are certainly benefits to having ads as the lowest barrier to entry monetization model, there are also lots of downsides, and we would do well to come up with something else that is easy to do and works well. But nobody knows what that should or could be, or even if it is possible to do, as the other schemes thus far (paywalls, subscriptions, freemium) have lots of trade-offs. I'm personally pretty bullish on micropayments, though a good way to do them hasn't emerged yet.

If there was another option as easy to set up for your little sites that made you a similar amount of maintenance and upkeep money, would you be sad or happy to lose the ads?

> in exchange for some of their attention.

As well as information about what they look at, what they buy, where they go, what they eat, who they associate with, what kind of medical conditions they may have, not to mention the contents of every work document, personal document, love letter, baby picture, vacation picture, nude picture, food picture, work discussion, personal discussion, etc. And they monetize all this, because after all they'd never spend the money bankrolling the internet unless they made more cash from the endeavor than they spent.

Did you even read the article? I don't think you read it. An ad-based web isn't a transaction-less web, the transactions are hidden in the form of ads and the ads are hidden behind numerous layers of behavior that threaten the integrity of the web, such as privacy invasions, editorialization, etc.