Google Contributor
google.com
google.com
This seems targeted at larger, semi-faceless websites which may only be able to survive with tiny contributions from a mass audience. Imgur is probably the best example of that; it's infrastructure that people appreciate, but few want to pay for.
Imgur has taken one round of VC, for $40 million, and most of that was made up of Andreessen Horowitz. Reddit did participate in that round, but they were a small minority share of it.
In the context of HN, I do not think Patreon would be a good fit for programming. Mostly because programmers who have sufficient skill enough to receive a following probably make enough money in their day jobs such that the money earned in a Patreon would be a drop in the bucket. :P
Many websites have been funded through Kickstarter, though.
Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their advertising revenue if it takes off too well - I wonder what their cut of revenue is like compared to their advertising business? This model pays them (and the content producer) per impression rather than per click.
I can't locate any information on what cut they're taking from the Contributor product though.
twitch.tv (video game live streaming website) pays it's broadcasters with advertisements and user subscriptions (50/50 default split on subs)
many broadcasters earn more from their subscriptions (dedicated fans) than advertisements.
with increasing use of ad-blocking software, this seems like the right time for this sort of thing.
Google wants the power to tell sites that they have to use Google ads before they can get these Contributor donations. That's the whole point. So it will only hurt honorable sites like Wikipedia that forgo ads.
They are making $952 per episode, which is more than what annoying ads would pay.
I'd go as far as saying Google are negligent (or malicious) for trying it. They might kill any startup doing the same thing, and then they will inevitably shut this down.
Examples:
Could they really not have transformed Google Reader into something valuable?
Did they really promote Google Wallet for Digital Goods sufficiently to expect any sort of success from it? (I used it and the UX and fees were the best around; promotion was non-existent)
Did Google Helpouts get enough of a push, either?
This new thing is great if Google are going to get behind it and stick with it until it's successful. Their current track-record suggests that they will not.
This seems more like a "like ads but better" thing. Google appears to be saying, "Until now, you paid the advertiser by buying their products, they paid us, and we paid the websites. Let's keep doing that, except without the advertiser." Which is obviously great for Google, though I'm not sure how much it benefits anyone else.
Manually donating to each site isn't realistic given human psychology; people simply won't do it. Something more automatic is better, even if it's not perfect. So I really like the idea.
Downsides for me:
- only works for sites with Google ads on them, not for other ad networks or for sites that want to be ad-free
- tracking presumably still happens; it would be nicer if there was some sort of protocol to automatically pay sites anonymously
Manually donating is indeed a problem, but if you want to send a subscription donation, you don't need Google Contributor. And anyway, you should donate to the sites that forgo ads in the first place — they are the ones that deserve it.
What I wonder though is: what happens if I visit a site that I don't want to support? Can I say no? Otherwise this just invites clickbait even more.
A way for this to work would be simply whitelisting sites you want to support on your adblocker of choice.
Even before online advertising, it's not like tabaloid magazines didn't exist and make a lot of money.
If people spend their time on a website, why shouldn't that website be worthy of money.
If you went to a site and didn't like it - don't go back there again. Why is it fair for you to visit a site repeatedly and only give money when it publishes an article you like? It's not like you can sign up to the NYT and only pay for the articles you liked that month.
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
I think it's a mixed bag on that front: we owe some good sites, but also a big part of web spam, to the fact that people believe they can make money through "internet content creation". Beyond the outright spam (content farms, linkspam, etc.) there's also a lot of really low-quality content put online primarily motivated by a hope of pulling in ad revenue.
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
One might say that advertising has been a hugely POPULAR way to get awesome free services on the internet.
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
So, this is the opposite of people paying to reduce ads. This is actually a scheme to promote more ads.
People who want to donate to creative work should donate to projects that treat us well by forgoing ads and privacy-invading tracking. Google Contributor is a donation system exclusively for projects that engage in these anti-features. It's a ransom / pay-to-stop-being-annoyed, which means it is rewarding sites for annoying you in the first place.
That way I essentially am just tipping sites that I want to visit as I visit them. You can also blacklist sites, set tip amounts, etc.
https://priestc.github.io/Autotip/
On the development side implementation was very easy. All it takes is a meta tag with a bitcoin address and you're good to go. I built it into a social blogging site I've been working on, so that when you visit an article the bitcoin address used for tipping is the author's. Here's a post I wrote explaining it:
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
Come to think of it, where I'd really like to have it is the browser - say right there in the address bar, next to the RSS button (please, please bring it back!). This way it will be unobtrusive, in a consistent place, and won't interfere with the page layout. Win-win for everyone.
They could obviously tell the site the ad should disappear with a JS event or somesuch, though, at which point the DOM can rewire itself.
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
That may seem intrusive, but otherwise this is going to (further) encourage content farms ripping off Wikipedia or just posting random material and optimising the hell out of its rankings (yes I know Google actively tries to stop this, but it just doesn't work well enough).
It's really important to distinguish money coming directly out of my pocket at someone else's whim, and advertising, where I need not purchase anything if I'm not interested.
I suppose that if you're running an appropriately-designed ad blocker (i.e., one that prevents Google's third-party ad cookies from reaching the site), then Google won't be able to route your contribution to the site, anyway.
I wonder how hard it would be to block the script/call on sites you don't want to support (or just whitelist it on ones you do). I'd imagine not very.
Google being a middleman makes it logistically easy but removes the main reason why I would pay some amount directly to sites themselves.
I don't really do a lot to prevent tracking of my activities, because I'm so paranoid that I don't really believe blocking scripts will prevent it from happening (see the whole Verizon thing a little while back). But I don't want to have to let ads in from other sites just to be nice to ones I like.
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: zack@fairblocker.com
I feel like this is one of the things that caused Wave to die -- it was only something useful if many people are using it, and they didn't let many people use it.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
If the primary goal of a site or project is to make money, then clearly advertising is the way to go. If the goal is something else, like providing a community service, then there are reasonable models. I could see bundled microsubscriptions being pretty popular - you set it once and forget it, they get funding to keep doing what they're doing and everyone is happy. Patreon for artists is a good example of this.
I hope the internet starts going in the opposite direction that MMO's have been going, switching towards subscriptions for higher quality content from fremium user maximizers. I'm certainly willing to pay for that - I'm much more likely to trust an organization that doesn't take advertising/"user as the product" money than one that does.
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
Now bitcoins...that would work.
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
If you use Contributor, the site receives $0.00136* and a blank ad is shown, paid for by you.
If you don't use Contributor, the sites receives $0.00136 and an Initech ad is shown, paid for by Initech.
It will make no direct difference in revenue for the site, but hopefully they can get indirect benefits from people being less inclined to use ad blockers.
* $2 CPM at 68% revenue share
My point is the middle-man must be paid but if there is no middle-man you keep 100% of the profit.
So, depending on a site's audience and content, it seems like they could end up with a CPM that is much higher (or lower) than with ads.
Oh, you mean the ones who are already big enough to generate large amounts of revenues (based on their advertized partners) ? My first thought was that this would be a good way to support smaller websites instead.
A pixel pattern appears where you would normally see an add
One can never be too cynical.
Why? Do you only visit one or two sites in a given month?
So either you're guessing whether the article is reeeeaaaally worth 1 cent, or you're wondering if these $0.001 increments are going to add up to a whopper, or you feel annoyed having to press the "tip" button all the time.
This model -- independently invented several times -- removes that entirely.
> Why should it be limited at all?
Small amounts drastically reduce the attractiveness of using this to launder stolen credit card money.
I'll get back to ya'll with the results of the experiment.
Naturally I think I have additional secret sauce, and a patent + patent pending covering a cryptographically-secured scheme for tracking visits.
But I won't lie, competing with a company with 10,000 engineers and $60 billion in revenue seems unfair. So I'm going to give them a head-start on this one.
Persons interested in learning more, or in throwing umptillions of dollars at me to make it happen, can find my contact details in my profile.
That's probably not what Google has in mind, though. This presumably requires that the user have a Google account and be logged into Google to get ad blocking. So Google gets to snoop on the user and sell the information they collect.
I looked for a privacy policy or something that addresses what is tracked, but all I see are links to Google's universal privacy policy.
When I think about watching TV when I was younger, the details of the shows themselves have faded, but the small but constant miseries of ad breaks are relatively vivid. Sure, the show was good enough to leave an overall positive impression, or else I wouldn't be watching it - although I am sure this is part of the reason I watched relatively little TV - but pleasure and annoyance don't just cancel out; they remain in the mind as parallel memories, each with its own effect. Today, I only watch TV on paid video services that lack ads, and it continues to surprise me just how enjoyable a 'clean high' without interruptions is. Instead of my interest level rollercoastering up as the show plays, sharply down as the ads start playing - ending just before it's gotten low enough for me to abandon ship - it just goes up at the beginning and stays there until the end of the episode.
YouTube videos are different from TV shows, of course - they're typically much shorter, and each viewed as only one element out of many in a session of Internet sensory overload, where no one piece of content lasts long enough to engender the level of concentration characteristic of most other types of activities. When there's constant context switching, an additional switch for an ad isn't nearly as bad. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with it, especially when there's an different possible compensation structure that in theory better rewards both me and the creator.
I'm really curious if we just browse completely different subsets of videos or something. What videos are you watching that have so many unskippable ads?
As others have expressed, Google's tendency to abandon things means I don't take this very seriously and would rather see sites that want to use this model go with another company that's committed to the idea as a business.
It's basically a way to have a direct financial relationship between artists and patrons. I am curious as to how this model might work over time. It could be a good way to deal with the inability of musicians, for example, to sell records.
There's some obvious issues. One seems like a problem for a startup to solve (exit plan: be bought by Google): Figure out how much a site is actually used in a meaningful and quantifiable way beyound time on site/counting visits
The other is more philosophical for lack of a better term. It's a little strange that Google is essentially responsible for the adds on the sites it now removes with this new sheme. "Modern" thinking would make me belive that sites that participate should probably go for no adds by default. There'll be "freeloaders" but it's essentially film streaming, non-DRM books and the likes all over.
Edit: I hope there'll be a way to blacklist sites as well or maybe more fine grained controls.
It would probably be easy to distinguish between the paying visitors and the regular ones. So you can also show paying visitors more content?
What would the Googlebot do with that?
I do worry that $1-3 a month is much lower than the value I get from the sites I visit, and consequently not enough to support low-traffic sites that should be supported. They also didn't mention how they distribute your money - equally to all the sites you visit? Proportionally to the number of visits? On a related note, can participating sites choose to eliminate ads only if a user will contribute enough money to them, or must they eliminate ads for every contributor in order to participate at all?
But the real question is, will google.com itself accept Contributor money? And will it eliminate ads for contributors?
I'm going to guess proportionally. Every other such scheme has been proportional. Google can solve the fake visit problem with pattern-matching wizardry. Readability tried to solve it by turning themselves into a proxy server.
I solved it by using a cryptographically-assured end-to-end scheme that requires two mutually distrustful parties to verify that a request was made.
No more can you claim to be the product, you're the customer, bidding against the ad networks to show your own ads to yourself.
Just brilliant.
No thank you, I'll stick to Flattr.
I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And my lack of explicit consent while simply visiting sites limits what they can do with my data - something tells me that this consent will be in the ToS of this product.
I've lost a lot of respect for google in general, going from innovator to me-too copy-cat in everything from social media (G+) to cloud computing (GCE).
I'd love to know the numbers behind this. Anyone have an idea of what Google's Adword visitor LTV is for these sites?
No one seems to have anything nice to say about them. Ever. I can only recall two or maybe three times when I've clicked on an ad, and even then I can't remember what they were for. The only ads that have any real utility for me are television commercials that are particularly funny/quotable or remind me that a tv show is coming back on the air.
Can anyone report a single positive experience with online advertising?
I can imagine someone like Wikipedia making a small fortune off of this if it takes off.
Google would like everyone's donations to be exclusively given to sites that use Google ads and not to sites that forgo advertising like Wikipedia.
Has anybody else here seen Black Mirror, "Fifteen Million Merits"?
Signing up for this system is implicitly endorsing that the harrassment is justified. It feels something like being extorted. (Or, perhaps, negotiating with terrorists)
Also remember the overused line "if you're not paying, you are the product". This could lead to a web that doesn't depend on violating the privacy of its users to make a dime.
That's like saying the problem that exists for my business is the millions of people who don't want to use my product because they meet their needs in other ways. Trying to expand your customer base is fine, but I don't see trying to do it by forcing your customers on to your other products as effective. Look at Google+.
Pragmatically, it may make sense as an individual website operator to buy into Fairblocker, since adblocking is going to happen anyway, but I can definitely see not wanting to legitimize this system ("I'm blocking your ads whether you like it or not--want some money in compensation?"), whereas GC doesn't have that issue. (But it also doesn't block non-participating ads, so as a user, I'd want an additional adblocker, so may as well just use Fairblocker.)
I dunno how I feel about "we hold your money in escrow until you claim it", since you will literally owe this money to millions of websites and very few will ever claim it, but it's better than "we distribute the money just amongst those that have signed up".
I hope Fairblocker gets big among those who aren't satisfied with blocking ads just on GC participants websites. Definitely seems like a really good idea, and it needs to reach a good scale to be worth the time for website owners to sign up. I may give it a try (as a user).
Google starts a lot of cool projects, it'd be neat to see other companies taking the same initiative in certain areas (I'm sure there are, I just am not well versed in that area).
There already are other similar services, like Flattr, but it becomes hard to ensure that you get a steady revenue stream by serving ads to some people and getting donations from others, and being able to turn off the ads for those people who donate.
They already pay for much of the content you see online.
Only they have the ability to say "pay $1-$3 a month, and we'll replace those ads with a thank you", and have it actually affect a significant fraction of what you see.
No one seems to do any kind of pushing. You're free to not use GMail or Google Maps or whatever; people use it because it sucks less than alternatives.
Now if we get very large number of people contributing and site visit increases then both sites and google could loose revenue as they would have been better off with ads.
Its interesting experiment by google to see what alternative model to ad can be built while simultaneously increasing publisher supply. Good move. They are trying set feet on both stones.