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Comment by reader5000 | Hacker News Reader

I disabled ad blocking recently and websites that normally load lightning quick would not even load or would lag tremendously.

I don't know why nobody can figure out a workable, voluntary microtransactions model. If you like a piece of content instead of (or in addition to) upvoting or "liking" or retweeting, you send a few pennies to the content creator.

The model now is simply people not savvy enough to install ad blocking subsidizing content consumption of everybody else. That is probably not stable.

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The overwhelming population wants things for free. Ads have allowed that to happen by monetizing attention to pay for the content.

Every time a site has tried a paywall approach, it's met with backlash and a huge decrease in users. Only some of the top publishers have been able to monetize this way.

Micropayments have been tried and even Google is on it's second run with the Contributor program but it's still proven hard to get anyone to sign up.

When the alternative is to just install adblock, why try harder or pay money? Users are just as greedy as anyone else, free will always be the biggest draw.

It's an interesting situation, no?

So many people want quite a few things for free while at the same time so many also immediately agree the creators of those things should be appreciated/respected/supported.

Take a random well respected journalist: people will often want to read his/her stories for free at the very moment they are released, while those same people overwhelmingly want the journalist to have all possible opportunities to continue their work (financial backing being a large part of that).

I have absolutely no experience in sociology/psychology, but I think it is fascinating.

Unfortunately the issues with micropayments is that even if a service comes out that manages to solve the rather substantial technical hurdles, nobody will be willing to trade the free+ads model they can just abuse with adblock for voluntary payment.

Cost has time and again been proven to be an extreme obstacle vs free and people will go to great lengths to acquire stuff without paying (ie: piracy). When it's as easy as a browser extension, then it's tough to see a way out.

Spotify already handles micro payments to artists. They could offer digital magazines and send payments back to the author when a reader clicks on it.

Micropayments for web/editorial content is a much harder problem. There's no central egress point for this content, it's spread over all the sites and a tracking system needs to be in place (but people hate that) as well as massive scale to touch all those sites and check the usage.

This is something that would need massive cooperation and integration between websites, ad networks and even ISPs to get right. If it was that easy, the industry would've already done it. The fact that Google is on it's second approach with their Contributor program and still not finding any luck is telling. (And Google owns a ridiculous amount of the layers in the modern web so they're probably in the best place to pull this off).

"people not savvy enough"

Or people who are plenty savvy, but simply don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...

Watching ads isn't contributing to content creators. That ad money didn't materialize from nowhere, that's a percentage of revenue being diverted to the ad company. Bought Product X? See that Product X ad? You helped pay for it. You could make a strong argument that ad networks are parasitic drag on the economy, but that would probably be dismissed as crazy talk.

"Destroy your Internet economy with this one weird old tip..."

>don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...

The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content.

Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.

I wouldn't mind ads so much if I had an easy way to pay $0.05 to get rid of them for a day, or $0.50 to get rid of them for a month.

As far as I can tell, that's way more money on a per user basis than companies are making on selling ads.

For the last decade or so, I have used a cookie marked on bidmanager that buys myself at a high enough bid CPM that I basically always win.

I serve myself a blank ad.

This is brilliant. Roughly how much does it cost?

It's generally less than ten dollars a month.

While I would like something like this too, the $0.05 per day or $0.50 per month is the real problem. Would you be willing to pay $1.00-2.00 per day? $30-60 per month? These are the typical subscription prices sites need in order to stay in business.

There seems to be no midpoint where the sites get the money they want or need that is also going to be acceptable to the consumer. Advertising, for some reason, does pay enough.

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