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402: Payment Required

176 points by nmcfarl 11y ago

draw_down 11y ago
I don't think a law proscribing billboards is particularly analogous to a content-blocking API.
atm0sphere 11y ago
we really don't need an HTTP status code level paywall anywhere.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Filligree 11y ago
Another solution would be Google Contributor. Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? >_>
- Spivak 11y ago
  > Hey, we took this perfectly fine content and made it worse by plastering it with annoying banners and spyware. If you give me $5.99 a month I'll make it not shitty again. This is not a business model I want to support. I'm happy to pay for good content, but if the supposed "value" I would get from giving you money is not being annoyed and tracked then you'll never see a penny from me. There are a few unicorns who have figured out how to have good free content, have no ads, and make money, like the Thrilling Adventure Hour, and Welcome to Nightvale podcasts. They get my money because their model is actually adding value with swag and live shows rather than making their content worse.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Unfortunately this only works if you let Google's javascript run.
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  > Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? Anything that involves moving money and comes out of the valley is always US only for a long time. The problems boil down to tax laws, money laundering laws and the fact that all banking is local. Moving money is just incredibly painful.
melling 11y ago
We don't want ads and we don't want to pay for anything. Unfortunately, I don't think we've worked out the economics for that model.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Who says we don't want to pay? Some of the most profitable newspapers are completely paywalled and have been for years. Someone wants to pay. I will gladly pay myself. But I will only pay for ad-free content. Remember how cable TV used to have that promise? You pay for your TV and you don't have ads. I remember that back in the day my cable provider would broadcast listings of today's programming schedule to cover up ads in the source transmission. Now you pay and you watch ads. If we do pay for websites, I hope we pay for no ads.
  - tempVariable 11y ago
    Exactly. We as people are not inherently predisposed to steal, take for granted or abuse. While these are strong words and they may not be related to all cases uniformly, we want to participate without taking anything away from the other party. Google Ads is the embodiment of leveling that relationship now, and seeing that the conversation has shifted towards supporting creative processes which make the web great.- we need this. We just don't need Google Ads or ads in general to be the medium for transfer.
  - narrowrail 11y ago
    I got cable in 1980 (HBO and all), but I remember ads being shown when I watched cable (except HBO) at that time. Was the ad-free cable before 1980?
    - jordigh 11y ago
      If you are talking about the US, I am not. Cable in Mexico would hide ads.
- VLM 11y ago
  The "independent" food blog in the linked article could be financially motivated to review certain things at a certain result; think of video game publications as a model. The more likely result is the cost of providing a service over the internet continues to constantly implode; if the independent food blogger is motivated enough to spend $5/mo for internet "fame" there are numerous providers today who will take money in exchange for hosting. There may be a revolution in web design; a "cool looking complicated" web page might cost 5 megs of javascript and graphics and that might cost a blogger $5/mo if less than 1000 visit per month, but if the blogger gets famous for actual content (as opposed to web design) then once the blogger hits the 1M visits per month big leagues, shrinking the page from 5M to 5K might save the blogger a factor of a thousand in hosting costs. I don't think web designers will be happy about this; then again they won't be paying the bills. This will lead to something like the ancient "adobe flash" effect where the fancier a web page is designed and appears, the less likely it is to contain useful content, so it can be skipped, and the less complicated a page looks, the better the content it serves. Another way the economics of the model would work is a trivial extension that probes all links at rendering time and if the link comes up as payment required the link is eaten. Currently I have to remember to ignore NYT links; in the future with the new extension I won't even see NYT links. Another model that may develop is content that sellers want, like glowing "independent" reviews of a restaurant, might go away (relatively speaking) in a consumer oriented internet. This works on all levels from very small to very large, the advertisers pay for Gawker no matter if I look at it or not, given supposed levels of click fraud. Without the advertisers, if we don't look at Gawker it simply goes away. Rephrased and simplified, now you can push something no one likes except the advertisers if the advertisers pay for it, but in a future internet economy if you push something no one likes, you'd better be prepared to pay for it by yourself. That might have interesting socioeconomic class issues WRT widening income inequality; all billionaires will have blogs, no poor people will, and a way to filter college applications to make sure the "right" people are let in would be to require blog submission instead of traditional essay submission or the other socioeconomic filters we use now like extracurriculars or disaster tourism, etc.
drivingmenuts 11y ago
We need to also then figure out how to handle a situation where a purchaser is unsatisfied in some way with the paid-for content. How do you refund their money (regardless of the amount)? It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments, but they still have your money.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Exactly. Microtransactions don't have microdisputes. Not to mention that payment with user intervention is annoying if it's on every page and payment without user intervention is wide open to fraud.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Yup. Payment is a decision. Even if it's a small one, it annoys users to stop and think "hmm, is this worth X" every time. That said, cellphones give us the same frustration since many of them have hyper-complex automatic payment schemes. But does anybody like the way cellphone bills work?
    - Retra 11y ago
      My cell phone bill is awesome. $35/mo prepaid, unlimited everything. I don't like the way other cellphone bills work. My previous cell phones were AT&T and Sprint, and they were awful enough for me to permanently swear off of them. Maybe more people should quit trying to bend over backwards to convince their cell carrier to 'allow' them to have an iPhone.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        Bingo this and similar. Not only is it $35/mo, but I can top-up the account for several months at a time, so that I simply don't have to worry about it. My one complaint is that my provider still "warns" me every month that my plan is about to expire, even if there are multiple pre-paid months to go. They really need to fix that.
      - 11y ago
wtbob 11y ago
> Apple’s new content filtering and São Paulo’s Clean City Law both use code — one via the law, the other through software APIs — to enable the creation of ad-free public spaces. Except that content filtering isn't about the creation of ad-free public spaces, but rather ad-free private spaces. There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session. The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want; the server, of course, is free to try to determine whether I'm actually viewing its ads or not, and may refuse to serve my requests if it chooses. As for micropayments, I love the idea but people in general seem to be extremely resistant to them. For one thing, they definitely don't want unbounded monthly charges. That could be solved by having a set amount of money, divided up by the sites one visits—but the service that does that would be a privacy nightmare.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session" The ad is arguably part of the content, as it's what's paying for you to see it in the first place. "The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want" That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself. What if your company decided that you're not worth paying, but still wanted your work?
  - CoryG89 11y ago
    Is disabling Javascript or cookies equally selfish? Because it seems like the same thing from where I'm standing.
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself. Myself, and the server, whose right to refuse to serve me I explicitly recognised.
  - 11y ago
danvesma 11y ago
i don't hate this.
yc1010 11y ago
That is all well and good if you can use Paypal (As per screenshot in article) Some of us can not use Paypal (and are not being told by paypal as to why after being banned) so have to use bitcoin, bank transfers, prepaid cards and cash for day to day transactions.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  Why are you considering rough conceptual mockups to be a finalized list of payment processors? Hell, as-is it already shows non-PayPal options.
  - yc1010 11y ago
    I see Stripe, Paypal, Visa/Mastercard all centralized companies that do restrict access to their systems for all sorts of reasons (often not shared with the person being blocked) all are "pull" methods where your account can be charged in an unauthorized manner bitcoin, prepaid cards (such as paysafecard), cash and bank transfers are "push" methods giving the owner more control and cheaper fees for that manner Not sure how practical paypal would be if you only want to spend a few cents (or more interestingly fractions of a cent!)
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Again, it's clearly a mockup. Complaining about the processors shown is like complaining Mozilla's going to adopt a light-grey-on-dark-grey color scheme because they show that too. You can also get prepaid Visa/MasterCards, incidentally. No trackable information required.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Also, just remembered that Stripe already has Bitcoin support. https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin
larssorenson 11y ago
There is also the situation of security to consider. Although browsers have made great strides in improving security, if we start including our payment information directly in the browser it could lead to potentially interesting situations. If a malicious entity escapes the sandbox or some memory reading vulnerability, they could figure out the payment information. Of course there's also XSS and CSRF which could potentially allow a malicious entity to silently authorize payment by the user for their own website, all of which would have to be considered not only by the websites implementing the 402 API but also the browser. Sure we're already working to fix these problems for all other data and account purposes, but if history is any indicator then I don't think we're ready just yet.
gue5t 11y ago
"I would argue that your browser should be helping you safely, securely, and easily make purchases of content and services across the web." It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient virtual-reality strip mall. We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire. Infrastructure and upkeep costs are why ISPs are actual businesses. The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution, which spreads costs much more evenly while decreasing latency by bringing data closer to edges of the network. You support Wikipedia-over-IPFS by flipping a switch in your settings to help host it, rather than doling out a handful of USD to the incessant baleful banners of Jimmy Wales' face. Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware.
- edanm 11y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but if your plan for dealing with content creation on the web includes overhauling the economic system of the world, then you may have a mismatch between the size of the problem and the size of the solution.
- ised 11y ago
  "Wikipedia-over-IPFS" Interesting example. I have Wikipedia as a local database on my own secondary storage. As long as there are mirrors of the data dumps, I only occasionally need an internetwork. (To download data dumps.)
- fraserharris 11y ago
  It's tragic that the author's highest desire [is to be able to pay for content]. We already pay for [network connectivity]. Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of social welfare].
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of communism]. Indeed, those dirty reds and their communist system of... voluntary patronage. But, then again, maybe you're right on UBI. It has been espoused by known communists like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and F.A. von Hayek.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ck2 11y ago
All the web has to do is figure out why people will spend $1 at a vending machine for tiny terrible snack that is completely unsatisfying but won't spend $1 on a mobile app that they would use every day.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Ha! Yeah, I think the real answer is, food. Food is different - we have a strong urge multiple times a day to get whatever food is in front of us, now. If only apps were that way. "I feel a visceral need for a new app, and if I don't get it somebody is going to get hurt!"
- eddd 11y ago
  Because it used to be "free". People don't value that much their private data nor ads-free web. I always say to my friends that "if the product is free, then you are the product". They understand that fact, they just don't care - and why would they? I would pay .02$ for displaying a news page (it's is still 4 times more than what advertisers give to publishers) and probably everyone would - but disrupting trillion ad business is not that easy.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  There are several highly relevant and clearly apparent reasons: 1. Snack food is very highly consistent. As with other mass-market goods, it's entirely homogeneous. You know precisely what you're getting. Information goods are virtually by definition not homogeneous. Virtually all successful sales models for information goods are based on some level of subscription or branding (frequently by author, venue, or publisher/publication, particularly periodicals). 2. The typical vending-maching payment mechanism has no extended-tail risk. Deposit a few coins or bills, receive your product (yes, I suppose there are debit/credit based vending systems). Every time I make a debit or credit card payment, particularly online, I'm creating a risk of future account fraud. That's something I weigh heavily, have experienced in the past, and quite simply do not consider worth any putative convenience benefit. Paying cash is a very reliable stop-loss risk mitigation strategy. 3. Privacy. Particularly for information goods, leaving a perpetual trail that I specifically paid for specific items of content is ... highly unappealing. I don't pay for my physical books with credit (or use "loyalty", a/k/a Snoop Card programs). It's why I don't and won't use Kindle or similar apps (I do read eBooks, but open, untracked formats, on other devices). Oh, and I really don't buy much from vending machines. Prefer fresh foods or a good street vendor if I can find one.
hapless 11y ago
No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psychology. Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of $1-$2-$10. These are the models that work. It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel. It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or any other platform. It's what's built into your brain. "Pay as you go" is incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers. I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Agreed, strongly. For one of the best arguments, see "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments", written in 1996 by Nick Szabo. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Amazon's recently come up with $10/mo all-you-can-eat book purchase plan.
- fraserharris 11y ago
  "No micropayment system has ever succeeded" This is wildly incorrect. $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games[1]. The key to their success was bulk purchases of intermediary "currency" that frees players from the mental energy of thinking about actual money (its a sunk cost because the currency can't be redeemed). [1] Distaste for social games and the business model does not invalidate the financial success of their implementation of micropayments. Note: I started a micropayments company.
  - hapless 11y ago
    In-app-purchasing in games relies on conditioning the user across many hours of gameplay. 98% of users never take the bait. Roughly 0.15% of users make up 50% of the revenue. In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model is relevant to web content. I can't set up a pain/pleasure response in readers and condition a tiny fraction of them to pay vast sums after 10 to 50 hours of engagement. That's not an option in journalism. (Not that this has stopped the FT from trying it: $1 for a one-month trial, $480 a year for a subscription. I wonder how good the conversion rates are?)
humble_dev 11y ago
Maybe internet providers should pay fee to the website owners. Same as cable tv providers pays HBO or other channels. We could log the time each user spent on website and then similar to spotify pay proportionally to the website owners. For each internet connection we could pay e.g. $10 that goes to content creators. Ofcourse Facebook and Google would earn most of this money.
hellbanTHIS 11y ago
There is no way people are going to pay for individual articles, what might work though is letting people customize what kind of ads they see. For example I want to see car ads, movie trailers, new gadgets and I want to see what's on sale at grocery and hardware stores with 10 miles of the zip code I give it. No video, no animation, no tracking, no targeting, no fucking Taboola. And if an ad pisses me off I want a "never show me ads from this company again" button.
gorena 11y ago
Why is the "independent web" in all of these articles exclusively referring to people trying to make money with ads? I make software and put it on the web for free. There are millions of Github repositories like this, are they not the "independent web"? I post pictures on various sites, under CC0. In high school, I made games and put them on the web, always for free. It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(
- herge 11y ago
  > millions of Github repositories Every 'free' github repository is an ad/tie-in for their payed services. If you are not paying for something, it's because you are the product.
  - gorena 11y ago
    Oh, for fuck's sake. For one thing, I'm talking about the people that are posting things on Github, and Github itself is just an example. You can replace it with "a personal website on a server in your living room" if you prefer, although I suppose that's just an ad for your ISP's services? Secondly, you are not the product. You are never the product, unless you live in a country where slavery is still legal. "Inclusion of text and image content in HTML sent to you" is the product Facebook et. al. are selling, but that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
    - herge 11y ago
      > "a personal website on a server in your living room" Which you pay for. Otherwise, your information, and activities on the website belong to someone else.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  People like to eat food and pay rent. Not everyone can afford to give away their hard work for free.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
warcode 11y ago
In reality I don't think ads are a problem, as long as they aren't annoying, are hosted by the webpage I am on, have zero trackers and are related to the content on the page. Though the best system will always be free primary content with paid "premium" content. That way if you enjoy the content of the webpage you can support them, but you aren't required to pay to figure out if you do enjoy it.
rubbingalcohol 11y ago
This seems like great advocacy for http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/ http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/ My first concern is the lack of (popular) payment providers that enable microtransactions. If you want to pay $0.15 for a web page, and there's a flat 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee on every transaction, the model doesn't work. Second concern is using primarily commercial payment providers nothing to break the oligopolies created by payment gateways, which is what makes these transaction fees so high in the first place. I would love to see cryptocurrency support baked into any implementation of browser payments, as microtransactions and user freedom are both well supported.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Why are there transaction fees when seemingly all you're doing is updating a value on a ledger? Fraud. Investigating transactions involves humans, which gets expensive. Global-shared-ledger cryptocurrencies aren't suitable for this case: a global record of every web page the world views is far too huge a quantity of data.
- pmuk 11y ago
  To deal with the per-transaction flat rate fees, you could simply group multiple purchases together into a single transaction. For example, a micro-payments provider could operate like a prepaid debit card, whereby you upload funds and then they subtract small amounts from the balance.
- Paul-ish 11y ago
  The cost of a transaction on bitcoin is likely to go up over time, especially if the block size doesn't increase. The micropayments protocol for cryptocurrencies doesn't really cover the use case of using many website, unless you have a trusted 3rd party to accumulate the micropayments.
Kenji 11y ago
"At the point where you want to read one, you are presented with a Buy now with 1-click button. Clicking it does just what it says, and suddenly, instead of being denied access to that book’s content, you can read it." What a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has ever downloaded something knows how confusing and difficult it is to press the right button (instead of some ad or virus or whatever). The idea that one single click could reveal my identity to the site owner AND wire my money to them is truly frightening.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  In the articles' vision of utopia, people pay for downloading things, so putting misleading ads not only becomes unnecessary, but actually harmful for the content provider's bottom line.
NH_2 11y ago
> Of course not everything on the web needs to cost something, and I’m not arguing that every site charge for its content, and go behind paywalls. I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100% of the 402 payment?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cognivore 11y ago
Sorry, I have to say it. If someone isn't willing to pay money for your content or service then you probably aren't offering anything of value. Instead you're surviving off of ad based revenue that you're generating while people are figuring out you are offering nothing of value.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
This is fine as far as it goes, but RPM on a blog post is what $1.50? $3.00? So to replace your ad revenue you need to charge 1/3 of cent, not the "15 cents" that was shown in the mock. That would be $150 RPMs which would make Google blush. There is a fundamental disconnect in how writers value their writing, and how readers value their writing. Trying to understand the economic forces that drive information value will really help writers understand what is, and isn't, valuable prose to readers. Too many people are stuck in the mindset of "buy a book/article" etc, but the web is 99.99% one and done. So nobody wants to pay 15 cents for something they will never read again, and may not even like the first time. But have them pay a third of a cent? Sure, if they go back an re-read it 100 time's they will have paid you 30 cents for it. The value would be emergent rather than demanded. Until journalists can internalize that, this conversation will remain unresolved.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I agree on the pricing aspect. Mills (1/10th of a US Cent) work for property taxes. I wonder if they would work for micropayments for the web?
- JacobJans 11y ago
  This comment is wrong on many levels. 1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate. 2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back. 3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.
  - Namrog84 11y ago
    30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though. There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or mirror the content somewhere else for cheap. I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else
oneJob 11y ago
Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to a new form factor because it has been succesful in the past or because there is a sulerficial similarity rarely ends up being a good design decision. Often when it works it is not at all for the reasons one initially presumed. UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to proceeding with the use case? To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry. Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists, that’s another story. The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its physically parts. It will have many solutions. I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet at the moment.
SolarUpNote 11y ago
Couldn't ad networks move from javascript to server-side?
pbnjay 11y ago
I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a number of years (even coded a micropayment solution which was terrible). But this article reminded me of that and just gave me a thought: What if you flipped the burden to online commerce providers? For example, stripe provides a small toggle so that your integration can add an extra 0.1% to all transactions (so your $49 SaaS offering pays an extra $0.049). In exchange you get a small JS code to embed on your marketing blog. I'm not crazy about the bitcoin bandwagon, but this seems like a good entry point for distribution. Multiple providers other than stripe can deposit to the same bitcoin address stored in your browser, and then that bitcoin address is paid out according to the sites you visited that had "opted in" to the revenue sharing.
IgorPartola 11y ago
There are not many sites I would pay for that are purely content. I think HN is one of the few that could get away with charging $5/month and not lose me as a reader. The biggest problem is that most sites can't transition from free to subscription without losing most of their customers. Even a site that proves to be extremely useful could not do that without a competitor popping up that'll offer the same service for free.
tempVariable 11y ago
I like it, and I would like to be the first meta comment about the topic. Please reference my proposition from 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226 I actually have been thinking about this for some time and while there are many things to consider, this is a problem Mozilla could get behind. My assumption about them is still unsubstantiated, but given enough research, it is a solution that is in serious need. I might do a write up on my detailed thoughts on the subject.
Mz 11y ago
I don't see this flying because putting this info into my web browser means that lending someone my smartphone or tablet empowers them to spend my money, practically without thinking about it. Yeah, no. I think things like Patreon and tip jars just make more sense.
- yakult 11y ago
  It's worse than that: considering that browsers are never completely secure, especially against user stupidity, it means it empowers random websites to spend my money.
nmcfarl 11y ago
Here's an old hacker news discussion about the 402 code's slot in the spec which is fairly interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236
JoshMnem 11y ago
The real story should be: why don't consumers have full root access on their mobile computers so they can do whatever they want? It shouldn't be controversial for Apple to let consumers have a little more access, it should be controversial that no major mobile OS allows full access.
fredgrott 11y ago
I submit that subscriptions at the level of micro payments work..at least on mobile devices..$36 Billion in 2016. Do it the same way first month is the free trial..want to keep reading each month than pay the month subscription
jlarocco 11y ago
Good luck with that. When web advertisements finally die off, I imagine subscribing to one or two news websites, maybe the NY Times and a local site. Other than that, I'm not interested in paying for web content. The funny thing is, the sites I'd be most likely to pay for don't have ads in the first place. I really miss the days when people made websites and posted things on the web because they enjoyed it and were trying to be helpful, and not because they were out to make a buck on ad clicks. Quality has plummeted so far it's not even funny.
PretzelFisch 11y ago
Any way the solution to this problem will be the same as streaming movies and music. There will be an aggregator or curator you pay money to for access, and they will pay pennies to the content creators per view.
mankins 11y ago
Working within the existing HTTP spec is an idea worth pursuing. Of course I'm biased because my startup is in the process of doing just this by implementing a 402 server. http://www.fairtread.com/ http://www.fairtread.com/ While the status code is a good place to start, you really need Accept-Monetization and the corresponding Content-Monetization headers to fill out the picture. We propose these to work the same way that Accept-Language and Content-Language headers work. Essentially the user passes along the monetization methods they allow, and when there's a mismatch on the server, a 402 error occurs...along with instructions on how to fix that. The ideal system would allow multiple ways to pay for content, and would include advertising as a "free" option.
- throwaway4421 11y ago
  Building on HTTP 402 looks like a good path forward, but some tough love: the name fairtread.com looks like "fart read" or "fair read". The 't' gets lost in the middle because "read" makes more sense than "tread" in the context of paying to read web content.

176 points by nmcfarl 11y ago

draw_down 11y ago

I don't think a law proscribing billboards is particularly analogous to a content-blocking API.

atm0sphere 11y ago

we really don't need an HTTP status code level paywall anywhere.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Filligree 11y ago

Another solution would be Google Contributor. Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? >_>

Spivak 11y ago
> Hey, we took this perfectly fine content and made it worse by plastering it with annoying banners and spyware. If you give me $5.99 a month I'll make it not shitty again. This is not a business model I want to support. I'm happy to pay for good content, but if the supposed "value" I would get from giving you money is not being annoyed and tracked then you'll never see a penny from me. There are a few unicorns who have figured out how to have good free content, have no ads, and make money, like the Thrilling Adventure Hour, and Welcome to Nightvale podcasts. They get my money because their model is actually adding value with swag and live shows rather than making their content worse.
coldpie 11y ago
Unfortunately this only works if you let Google's javascript run.
mike_hearn 11y ago
> Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? Anything that involves moving money and comes out of the valley is always US only for a long time. The problems boil down to tax laws, money laundering laws and the fact that all banking is local. Moving money is just incredibly painful.

melling 11y ago

We don't want ads and we don't want to pay for anything. Unfortunately, I don't think we've worked out the economics for that model.

jordigh 11y ago
Who says we don't want to pay? Some of the most profitable newspapers are completely paywalled and have been for years. Someone wants to pay. I will gladly pay myself. But I will only pay for ad-free content. Remember how cable TV used to have that promise? You pay for your TV and you don't have ads. I remember that back in the day my cable provider would broadcast listings of today's programming schedule to cover up ads in the source transmission. Now you pay and you watch ads. If we do pay for websites, I hope we pay for no ads.
- tempVariable 11y ago
  Exactly. We as people are not inherently predisposed to steal, take for granted or abuse. While these are strong words and they may not be related to all cases uniformly, we want to participate without taking anything away from the other party. Google Ads is the embodiment of leveling that relationship now, and seeing that the conversation has shifted towards supporting creative processes which make the web great.- we need this. We just don't need Google Ads or ads in general to be the medium for transfer.
- narrowrail 11y ago
  I got cable in 1980 (HBO and all), but I remember ads being shown when I watched cable (except HBO) at that time. Was the ad-free cable before 1980?
  - jordigh 11y ago
    If you are talking about the US, I am not. Cable in Mexico would hide ads.
VLM 11y ago
The "independent" food blog in the linked article could be financially motivated to review certain things at a certain result; think of video game publications as a model. The more likely result is the cost of providing a service over the internet continues to constantly implode; if the independent food blogger is motivated enough to spend $5/mo for internet "fame" there are numerous providers today who will take money in exchange for hosting. There may be a revolution in web design; a "cool looking complicated" web page might cost 5 megs of javascript and graphics and that might cost a blogger $5/mo if less than 1000 visit per month, but if the blogger gets famous for actual content (as opposed to web design) then once the blogger hits the 1M visits per month big leagues, shrinking the page from 5M to 5K might save the blogger a factor of a thousand in hosting costs. I don't think web designers will be happy about this; then again they won't be paying the bills. This will lead to something like the ancient "adobe flash" effect where the fancier a web page is designed and appears, the less likely it is to contain useful content, so it can be skipped, and the less complicated a page looks, the better the content it serves. Another way the economics of the model would work is a trivial extension that probes all links at rendering time and if the link comes up as payment required the link is eaten. Currently I have to remember to ignore NYT links; in the future with the new extension I won't even see NYT links. Another model that may develop is content that sellers want, like glowing "independent" reviews of a restaurant, might go away (relatively speaking) in a consumer oriented internet. This works on all levels from very small to very large, the advertisers pay for Gawker no matter if I look at it or not, given supposed levels of click fraud. Without the advertisers, if we don't look at Gawker it simply goes away. Rephrased and simplified, now you can push something no one likes except the advertisers if the advertisers pay for it, but in a future internet economy if you push something no one likes, you'd better be prepared to pay for it by yourself. That might have interesting socioeconomic class issues WRT widening income inequality; all billionaires will have blogs, no poor people will, and a way to filter college applications to make sure the "right" people are let in would be to require blog submission instead of traditional essay submission or the other socioeconomic filters we use now like extracurriculars or disaster tourism, etc.

drivingmenuts 11y ago

We need to also then figure out how to handle a situation where a purchaser is unsatisfied in some way with the paid-for content. How do you refund their money (regardless of the amount)? It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments, but they still have your money.

pjc50 11y ago
Exactly. Microtransactions don't have microdisputes. Not to mention that payment with user intervention is annoying if it's on every page and payment without user intervention is wide open to fraud.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Yup. Payment is a decision. Even if it's a small one, it annoys users to stop and think "hmm, is this worth X" every time. That said, cellphones give us the same frustration since many of them have hyper-complex automatic payment schemes. But does anybody like the way cellphone bills work?
  - Retra 11y ago
    My cell phone bill is awesome. $35/mo prepaid, unlimited everything. I don't like the way other cellphone bills work. My previous cell phones were AT&T and Sprint, and they were awful enough for me to permanently swear off of them. Maybe more people should quit trying to bend over backwards to convince their cell carrier to 'allow' them to have an iPhone.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Bingo this and similar. Not only is it $35/mo, but I can top-up the account for several months at a time, so that I simply don't have to worry about it. My one complaint is that my provider still "warns" me every month that my plan is about to expire, even if there are multiple pre-paid months to go. They really need to fix that.
    - 11y ago

wtbob 11y ago

> Apple’s new content filtering and São Paulo’s Clean City Law both use code — one via the law, the other through software APIs — to enable the creation of ad-free public spaces. Except that content filtering isn't about the creation of ad-free public spaces, but rather ad-free private spaces. There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session. The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want; the server, of course, is free to try to determine whether I'm actually viewing its ads or not, and may refuse to serve my requests if it chooses. As for micropayments, I love the idea but people in general seem to be extremely resistant to them. For one thing, they definitely don't want unbounded monthly charges. That could be solved by having a set amount of money, divided up by the sites one visits—but the service that does that would be a privacy nightmare.

s73v3r 11y ago
"There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session" The ad is arguably part of the content, as it's what's paying for you to see it in the first place. "The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want" That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself. What if your company decided that you're not worth paying, but still wanted your work?
- CoryG89 11y ago
  Is disabling Javascript or cookies equally selfish? Because it seems like the same thing from where I'm standing.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself. Myself, and the server, whose right to refuse to serve me I explicitly recognised.
- 11y ago

danvesma 11y ago

i don't hate this.

yc1010 11y ago

That is all well and good if you can use Paypal (As per screenshot in article) Some of us can not use Paypal (and are not being told by paypal as to why after being banned) so have to use bitcoin, bank transfers, prepaid cards and cash for day to day transactions.

ceejayoz 11y ago
Why are you considering rough conceptual mockups to be a finalized list of payment processors? Hell, as-is it already shows non-PayPal options.
- yc1010 11y ago
  I see Stripe, Paypal, Visa/Mastercard all centralized companies that do restrict access to their systems for all sorts of reasons (often not shared with the person being blocked) all are "pull" methods where your account can be charged in an unauthorized manner bitcoin, prepaid cards (such as paysafecard), cash and bank transfers are "push" methods giving the owner more control and cheaper fees for that manner Not sure how practical paypal would be if you only want to spend a few cents (or more interestingly fractions of a cent!)
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Again, it's clearly a mockup. Complaining about the processors shown is like complaining Mozilla's going to adopt a light-grey-on-dark-grey color scheme because they show that too. You can also get prepaid Visa/MasterCards, incidentally. No trackable information required.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Also, just remembered that Stripe already has Bitcoin support. https://stripe.com/bitcoin https://stripe.com/bitcoin

larssorenson 11y ago

There is also the situation of security to consider. Although browsers have made great strides in improving security, if we start including our payment information directly in the browser it could lead to potentially interesting situations. If a malicious entity escapes the sandbox or some memory reading vulnerability, they could figure out the payment information. Of course there's also XSS and CSRF which could potentially allow a malicious entity to silently authorize payment by the user for their own website, all of which would have to be considered not only by the websites implementing the 402 API but also the browser. Sure we're already working to fix these problems for all other data and account purposes, but if history is any indicator then I don't think we're ready just yet.

gue5t 11y ago

"I would argue that your browser should be helping you safely, securely, and easily make purchases of content and services across the web." It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient virtual-reality strip mall. We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire. Infrastructure and upkeep costs are why ISPs are actual businesses. The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution, which spreads costs much more evenly while decreasing latency by bringing data closer to edges of the network. You support Wikipedia-over-IPFS by flipping a switch in your settings to help host it, rather than doling out a handful of USD to the incessant baleful banners of Jimmy Wales' face. Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware.

edanm 11y ago
I'm not saying you're wrong, but if your plan for dealing with content creation on the web includes overhauling the economic system of the world, then you may have a mismatch between the size of the problem and the size of the solution.
ised 11y ago
"Wikipedia-over-IPFS" Interesting example. I have Wikipedia as a local database on my own secondary storage. As long as there are mirrors of the data dumps, I only occasionally need an internetwork. (To download data dumps.)
fraserharris 11y ago
It's tragic that the author's highest desire [is to be able to pay for content]. We already pay for [network connectivity]. Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of social welfare].
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of communism]. Indeed, those dirty reds and their communist system of... voluntary patronage. But, then again, maybe you're right on UBI. It has been espoused by known communists like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and F.A. von Hayek.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ck2 11y ago

All the web has to do is figure out why people will spend $1 at a vending machine for tiny terrible snack that is completely unsatisfying but won't spend $1 on a mobile app that they would use every day.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Ha! Yeah, I think the real answer is, food. Food is different - we have a strong urge multiple times a day to get whatever food is in front of us, now. If only apps were that way. "I feel a visceral need for a new app, and if I don't get it somebody is going to get hurt!"
eddd 11y ago
Because it used to be "free". People don't value that much their private data nor ads-free web. I always say to my friends that "if the product is free, then you are the product". They understand that fact, they just don't care - and why would they? I would pay .02$ for displaying a news page (it's is still 4 times more than what advertisers give to publishers) and probably everyone would - but disrupting trillion ad business is not that easy.
dredmorbius 11y ago
There are several highly relevant and clearly apparent reasons: 1. Snack food is very highly consistent. As with other mass-market goods, it's entirely homogeneous. You know precisely what you're getting. Information goods are virtually by definition not homogeneous. Virtually all successful sales models for information goods are based on some level of subscription or branding (frequently by author, venue, or publisher/publication, particularly periodicals). 2. The typical vending-maching payment mechanism has no extended-tail risk. Deposit a few coins or bills, receive your product (yes, I suppose there are debit/credit based vending systems). Every time I make a debit or credit card payment, particularly online, I'm creating a risk of future account fraud. That's something I weigh heavily, have experienced in the past, and quite simply do not consider worth any putative convenience benefit. Paying cash is a very reliable stop-loss risk mitigation strategy. 3. Privacy. Particularly for information goods, leaving a perpetual trail that I specifically paid for specific items of content is ... highly unappealing. I don't pay for my physical books with credit (or use "loyalty", a/k/a Snoop Card programs). It's why I don't and won't use Kindle or similar apps (I do read eBooks, but open, untracked formats, on other devices). Oh, and I really don't buy much from vending machines. Prefer fresh foods or a good street vendor if I can find one.

hapless 11y ago

No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psychology. Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of $1-$2-$10. These are the models that work. It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel. It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or any other platform. It's what's built into your brain. "Pay as you go" is incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers. I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Agreed, strongly. For one of the best arguments, see "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments", written in 1996 by Nick Szabo. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Amazon's recently come up with $10/mo all-you-can-eat book purchase plan.
fraserharris 11y ago
"No micropayment system has ever succeeded" This is wildly incorrect. $ billions have been transacted as micropayments in social games[1]. The key to their success was bulk purchases of intermediary "currency" that frees players from the mental energy of thinking about actual money (its a sunk cost because the currency can't be redeemed). [1] Distaste for social games and the business model does not invalidate the financial success of their implementation of micropayments. Note: I started a micropayments company.
- hapless 11y ago
  In-app-purchasing in games relies on conditioning the user across many hours of gameplay. 98% of users never take the bait. Roughly 0.15% of users make up 50% of the revenue. In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model is relevant to web content. I can't set up a pain/pleasure response in readers and condition a tiny fraction of them to pay vast sums after 10 to 50 hours of engagement. That's not an option in journalism. (Not that this has stopped the FT from trying it: $1 for a one-month trial, $480 a year for a subscription. I wonder how good the conversion rates are?)

humble_dev 11y ago

Maybe internet providers should pay fee to the website owners. Same as cable tv providers pays HBO or other channels. We could log the time each user spent on website and then similar to spotify pay proportionally to the website owners. For each internet connection we could pay e.g. $10 that goes to content creators. Ofcourse Facebook and Google would earn most of this money.

hellbanTHIS 11y ago

There is no way people are going to pay for individual articles, what might work though is letting people customize what kind of ads they see. For example I want to see car ads, movie trailers, new gadgets and I want to see what's on sale at grocery and hardware stores with 10 miles of the zip code I give it. No video, no animation, no tracking, no targeting, no fucking Taboola. And if an ad pisses me off I want a "never show me ads from this company again" button.

gorena 11y ago

Why is the "independent web" in all of these articles exclusively referring to people trying to make money with ads? I make software and put it on the web for free. There are millions of Github repositories like this, are they not the "independent web"? I post pictures on various sites, under CC0. In high school, I made games and put them on the web, always for free. It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(

herge 11y ago
> millions of Github repositories Every 'free' github repository is an ad/tie-in for their payed services. If you are not paying for something, it's because you are the product.
- gorena 11y ago
  Oh, for fuck's sake. For one thing, I'm talking about the people that are posting things on Github, and Github itself is just an example. You can replace it with "a personal website on a server in your living room" if you prefer, although I suppose that's just an ad for your ISP's services? Secondly, you are not the product. You are never the product, unless you live in a country where slavery is still legal. "Inclusion of text and image content in HTML sent to you" is the product Facebook et. al. are selling, but that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
  - herge 11y ago
    > "a personal website on a server in your living room" Which you pay for. Otherwise, your information, and activities on the website belong to someone else.
s73v3r 11y ago
People like to eat food and pay rent. Not everyone can afford to give away their hard work for free.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago

warcode 11y ago

In reality I don't think ads are a problem, as long as they aren't annoying, are hosted by the webpage I am on, have zero trackers and are related to the content on the page. Though the best system will always be free primary content with paid "premium" content. That way if you enjoy the content of the webpage you can support them, but you aren't required to pay to figure out if you do enjoy it.

rubbingalcohol 11y ago

This seems like great advocacy for http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/ http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/ My first concern is the lack of (popular) payment providers that enable microtransactions. If you want to pay $0.15 for a web page, and there's a flat 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee on every transaction, the model doesn't work. Second concern is using primarily commercial payment providers nothing to break the oligopolies created by payment gateways, which is what makes these transaction fees so high in the first place. I would love to see cryptocurrency support baked into any implementation of browser payments, as microtransactions and user freedom are both well supported.

pjc50 11y ago
Why are there transaction fees when seemingly all you're doing is updating a value on a ledger? Fraud. Investigating transactions involves humans, which gets expensive. Global-shared-ledger cryptocurrencies aren't suitable for this case: a global record of every web page the world views is far too huge a quantity of data.
pmuk 11y ago
To deal with the per-transaction flat rate fees, you could simply group multiple purchases together into a single transaction. For example, a micro-payments provider could operate like a prepaid debit card, whereby you upload funds and then they subtract small amounts from the balance.
Paul-ish 11y ago
The cost of a transaction on bitcoin is likely to go up over time, especially if the block size doesn't increase. The micropayments protocol for cryptocurrencies doesn't really cover the use case of using many website, unless you have a trusted 3rd party to accumulate the micropayments.

Kenji 11y ago

"At the point where you want to read one, you are presented with a Buy now with 1-click button. Clicking it does just what it says, and suddenly, instead of being denied access to that book’s content, you can read it." What a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has ever downloaded something knows how confusing and difficult it is to press the right button (instead of some ad or virus or whatever). The idea that one single click could reveal my identity to the site owner AND wire my money to them is truly frightening.

saint_fiasco 11y ago
In the articles' vision of utopia, people pay for downloading things, so putting misleading ads not only becomes unnecessary, but actually harmful for the content provider's bottom line.

NH_2 11y ago

> Of course not everything on the web needs to cost something, and I’m not arguing that every site charge for its content, and go behind paywalls. I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100% of the 402 payment?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cognivore 11y ago

Sorry, I have to say it. If someone isn't willing to pay money for your content or service then you probably aren't offering anything of value. Instead you're surviving off of ad based revenue that you're generating while people are figuring out you are offering nothing of value.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

This is fine as far as it goes, but RPM on a blog post is what $1.50? $3.00? So to replace your ad revenue you need to charge 1/3 of cent, not the "15 cents" that was shown in the mock. That would be $150 RPMs which would make Google blush. There is a fundamental disconnect in how writers value their writing, and how readers value their writing. Trying to understand the economic forces that drive information value will really help writers understand what is, and isn't, valuable prose to readers. Too many people are stuck in the mindset of "buy a book/article" etc, but the web is 99.99% one and done. So nobody wants to pay 15 cents for something they will never read again, and may not even like the first time. But have them pay a third of a cent? Sure, if they go back an re-read it 100 time's they will have paid you 30 cents for it. The value would be emergent rather than demanded. Until journalists can internalize that, this conversation will remain unresolved.

protomyth 11y ago
I agree on the pricing aspect. Mills (1/10th of a US Cent) work for property taxes. I wonder if they would work for micropayments for the web?
JacobJans 11y ago
This comment is wrong on many levels. 1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate. 2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back. 3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.
- Namrog84 11y ago
  30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though. There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or mirror the content somewhere else for cheap. I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else

oneJob 11y ago

Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to a new form factor because it has been succesful in the past or because there is a sulerficial similarity rarely ends up being a good design decision. Often when it works it is not at all for the reasons one initially presumed. UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to proceeding with the use case? To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry. Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists, that’s another story. The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its physically parts. It will have many solutions. I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet at the moment.

SolarUpNote 11y ago

Couldn't ad networks move from javascript to server-side?

pbnjay 11y ago

I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a number of years (even coded a micropayment solution which was terrible). But this article reminded me of that and just gave me a thought: What if you flipped the burden to online commerce providers? For example, stripe provides a small toggle so that your integration can add an extra 0.1% to all transactions (so your $49 SaaS offering pays an extra $0.049). In exchange you get a small JS code to embed on your marketing blog. I'm not crazy about the bitcoin bandwagon, but this seems like a good entry point for distribution. Multiple providers other than stripe can deposit to the same bitcoin address stored in your browser, and then that bitcoin address is paid out according to the sites you visited that had "opted in" to the revenue sharing.

IgorPartola 11y ago

There are not many sites I would pay for that are purely content. I think HN is one of the few that could get away with charging $5/month and not lose me as a reader. The biggest problem is that most sites can't transition from free to subscription without losing most of their customers. Even a site that proves to be extremely useful could not do that without a competitor popping up that'll offer the same service for free.

tempVariable 11y ago

I like it, and I would like to be the first meta comment about the topic. Please reference my proposition from 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226 I actually have been thinking about this for some time and while there are many things to consider, this is a problem Mozilla could get behind. My assumption about them is still unsubstantiated, but given enough research, it is a solution that is in serious need. I might do a write up on my detailed thoughts on the subject.

Mz 11y ago

I don't see this flying because putting this info into my web browser means that lending someone my smartphone or tablet empowers them to spend my money, practically without thinking about it. Yeah, no. I think things like Patreon and tip jars just make more sense.

yakult 11y ago
It's worse than that: considering that browsers are never completely secure, especially against user stupidity, it means it empowers random websites to spend my money.

nmcfarl 11y ago

Here's an old hacker news discussion about the 402 code's slot in the spec which is fairly interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236

JoshMnem 11y ago

The real story should be: why don't consumers have full root access on their mobile computers so they can do whatever they want? It shouldn't be controversial for Apple to let consumers have a little more access, it should be controversial that no major mobile OS allows full access.

fredgrott 11y ago

I submit that subscriptions at the level of micro payments work..at least on mobile devices..$36 Billion in 2016. Do it the same way first month is the free trial..want to keep reading each month than pay the month subscription

jlarocco 11y ago

Good luck with that. When web advertisements finally die off, I imagine subscribing to one or two news websites, maybe the NY Times and a local site. Other than that, I'm not interested in paying for web content. The funny thing is, the sites I'd be most likely to pay for don't have ads in the first place. I really miss the days when people made websites and posted things on the web because they enjoyed it and were trying to be helpful, and not because they were out to make a buck on ad clicks. Quality has plummeted so far it's not even funny.

PretzelFisch 11y ago

Any way the solution to this problem will be the same as streaming movies and music. There will be an aggregator or curator you pay money to for access, and they will pay pennies to the content creators per view.

mankins 11y ago

Working within the existing HTTP spec is an idea worth pursuing. Of course I'm biased because my startup is in the process of doing just this by implementing a 402 server. http://www.fairtread.com/ http://www.fairtread.com/ While the status code is a good place to start, you really need Accept-Monetization and the corresponding Content-Monetization headers to fill out the picture. We propose these to work the same way that Accept-Language and Content-Language headers work. Essentially the user passes along the monetization methods they allow, and when there's a mismatch on the server, a 402 error occurs...along with instructions on how to fix that. The ideal system would allow multiple ways to pay for content, and would include advertising as a "free" option.

throwaway4421 11y ago
Building on HTTP 402 looks like a good path forward, but some tough love: the name fairtread.com looks like "fart read" or "fair read". The 't' gets lost in the middle because "read" makes more sense than "tread" in the context of paying to read web content.