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I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them. They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe on a

I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them. They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe on a very rare occasion I might) if given a micro-payments solution because it doesn't seem worth paying for. I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. Honestly I don't feel any compulsion to fund any of the media whose links bombard my social media daily. Even some of the good stuff on this site I wouldn't feel compelled to pay for because truly it isn't transformative and I would probably be better off not reading it and doing something productive instead. Stuff I do pay for: educational content (books, courses etc), Spotify, Netflix. You're obviously much more deeply invested in this and have done the maths. I am curious, what percentage of web users do you calculate will use the micro-payments, if it was a seamless perfectly executed experience? How much revenue do you think it will generate and will it be enough to disrupt web-ads?

petercooper 11y ago
Even some of the good stuff on this site I wouldn't feel compelled to pay for because truly it isn't transformative and I would probably be better off not reading it and doing something productive instead. [..] Stuff I do pay for: [..] Spotify, Netflix. OK, so blog posts are of almost no value to you. But a bit of music and some TV shows, that's where the really productive, transformative stuff happens whose creators deserve a few bucks..
teacup50 11y ago
Media got worse as the revenue streams dried up; if you pay for writing, you can expect much better writing. I generally find that I'm better off spending an hour researching books to purchase on a non-programming subject than I am spending that hour Googling for free content on that subject.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  Sure, I buy books all the time. That is very different to the bubblegum content I read online which would fall under the micro-payments model though.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    Bubblegum content appeared in direct response to the death of the traditional revenue streams.
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      I disagree. Newspapers were always terrible and full of heavily biased content. Same for most magazines.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  I have payed nothing for PGs essays or slate star codex epically detailed tear-downs of published studies. They are among the best writing I have read. I have payed nothing to the people on youtube who shown me how to fold a shirt, do my hair, make pasta easily, chop food like a chef or whatever else I needed help with; granted those aren't writing per-say, but a decade ago I would have found that information in a blog. I won't pay for writing, I will pay for a fact-checker, but so far that only seems necessary on highly-technical books.
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    Same here but I've purchased pg'a book and most books of writers I like follow on the web.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    Your quality bar is extraordinarily, painfully low.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    It's a shame folks have downvoted this. It's a very useful and good point. Much of the free content is vastly better than paid content, and most of the free content also does not contain ads. There are remarkably few sources of paid content that justify their cost, even when that cost is as low as simply paying some of my attention to an ad.
munificent 11y ago
> I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off enough to have the free time to do that. I don't have "free" time. I paid for that time by buying a more expensive house close to where I work, spending less time shopping by not chasing the best deal, paying others to do home and car repairs, etc. etc. etc. People who aren't as financially lucky as me don't have that opportunity. I'm not crazy about the idea of living in a world where those people don't get to participate in determining culture.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  You make a very valid point. I think there are other solutions to this problem.... strangely I had already just decided to make it the topic of my next post before reading your comment. Also imho micro-payments won't solve that problem. It is a much deeper structural problem.
- ohthehugemanate 11y ago
  Careful about letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough". Culture has always been determined by people who are well off enough to spend time on it. Even the people who are commissioned creators (Dickens was paid by the word, Mozart had aristocratic sponsors) spent thousands of hours working for free to get to the point where anyone would pay them. Further, it's not like ads have been some democratizing element for cultural creation. They pay a pittance for everyone but the large traffic generators. No one is quitting their job at Denny's to become a full time blogger paid by google adwords. The independent instagram/youtube/blogger "celebrities" all still keep full time jobs until they get enough sponsorship to pay the bills.
  - drumdance 11y ago
    > spent thousands of hours working for free to get to the point where anyone would pay them. That's still true. Writing for the web is generally a low-paying job. It would be even lower if the media properties went out of business.
taurath 11y ago
Isn't it interesting the level of monetary value we put on most written content on the web (nothing) vs the time we spend reading said valueless content? Is it truly so valueless, or is it only valueless because similar content isn't worth anything? I click on the links I click on because I think they'll have more value to me than the rest of them, but I'm still not to the threshold of reaching any monetary value, only my attention. I wonder how well a system like reddit gold would work for webpages - if an article was particularly fascinating or insightful or entertaining I could hit a button to give them a dollar or something else (maybe I set a budget of $20 at each month so I don't over or under-pay what I "think" I value media at). If enough people did this, wouldn't this start driving quality back up? Wouldn't it suddenly be transparent the value people see in an article in dollar terms? Who would make the first Million Dollar article?
- cgag 11y ago
  A lot of value comes from being written our of passion or a desire to share and not a desire to have me click on ads.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  What you are describing is called Flattr. It was launched in 2010 and never went anywhere, like every other micropayment service.
  - taurath 11y ago
    Interesting but not surprising that it existed. Reddit gold works because they have hundreds of millions of users and it probably barely pays the bills. Many smarter people have tried tackling the problem, but I don't think drastic online economic changes can grow organically without some sort of catalyst. Maybe if a browser like the one linked in the OP could get enough of a userbase that it becomes a force.
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      Flattr was a product of the Pirate Bay crew; they had an audience, it just didn't work out.
Certhas 11y ago
Quality technical content is written by people who enjoy it for free. This is not generally true for other quality content. Quality content that requires you to go to Afghanistan to actually understand and report the situation on the ground is not written by people who write as a hobby. In depth political analysis generally isn't either. That's because going to Afghanistan, or understanding the internal structure of politics are full time jobs. Unless we find a way to pay people to do these jobs, we'll be eating the writings of people hired by those with money and vested interests. The PR agencies hired to sell us war, or political talking points.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  Generally all 'in-depth' political analysis is terrible propaganda. The best Afghanistan content I've seen has been documentaries such as Armadillo. I'll pay to watch that (through Netflix for example). "Unless we find a way to pay people to do these jobs, we'll be eating the writings of people hired by those with money and vested interests." I suspect it may have been the point of your comment but that's exactly what we are already doing. I have another example. The Irish Times (one of Ireland's leading broadsheet newspapers) bought myhome.ie for €50m euros in 2007. The Irish Times had a huge daily property section at the time and was profiting greatly, riding on the crest of the wave of the property bubble. They also received uncountable millions from the banks to advertise the ridiculous 110% mortgages etc within the pages of their daily paper. I'll let you guess how much content that was critical of the property boom was published within their pages and how long it took for them to do any investigative journalism into the fraudulent behaviour of the banks whose ad budgets were sustaining them. Capitalism and the truth are not compatible. Too many vested interests everywhere. War journalists can't be critical because they will lose access. Everyone is tip-toeing about scared to set a foot wrong incase it dries up their income supply (or at least removes the circumstances which allows them to earn a living). We've hit saturation point and all this disruption through internet and automation is a godsend in the long run but will cause much suffering in the short term.
tripzilch 11y ago
If ads on the web are to be considered "payment" for all the "content" we're consuming on the web, like everybody seems to keep repeating--yes, I disagree--have a look all this "content" that it's supposedly buying us. Where are most of these ads? What "content" is making all that money? You've seen it. 95% (or more) is nearly spam. Or actual spam in some way or another. It's all those listicles ("The 10 best X"), or these photo image traps (there was a name for them, the "You won't believe bla this celebrity something embarrassing mistake"). I didn't consent to buying that. And I most definitely will not spend my precious currency of attention on it. Do we all recall the bad old days of blackhat SEO, linkfarms and all that crap? It's still going on but I call it the bad old days because it used to be you couldn't research stuff on the Internet without bumping into those things all the time. Do we remember how a lot of these things worked? I've always had a morbid fascination for those things, some were such weird places. Initially it just started with endless algorithmically generated pages linking to pages in ways that exploited Google's classic PageRank algorithms. Google got wise to that, so the blackhat SEOs sprinkled in some content. Google got wiser, and at some point (this was still when About.com was a serious "competitor" to Wikipedia) there were actual humans churning out tiny "content" articles, 300 words, really about almost anything, just a few paragraphs, puke a few words on any topic you could possibly imagine and people would get a tiny pay for writing it and into another SEO-machine they went, extracted keywords linked to all the things and back to spam. That's not the type of content industry we want to support, right? But THIS is what happened. Of course Google Ads got wise-ish to that as well, and over time this content-farming industry kept incrementing the content quality of their spam just enough until the listicles that nobody ever asked for are just barely good enough that the public will actually swallow it. And that is what we have today, and there is no real economic incentive to get any better. Maybe a tiny bit better, but remember this trash grew organically from the economic incentives of spam. It's never going to grow into the awesome well-researched high quality articles everybody is furiously imagining when they talk about an ad-supported content web or micropayments or whatever. It's a mistake. Ads never really significantly supported high quality content publishers, most of the really great content on the Internet has always been on free websites. If you don't believe me it's because the ad-networks never linked you there or you never thought to look. The vast majority of these ad-networks, all what they ever gave us was spam and economic incentives for more spam. And micropayments are not going to be any different. You're imagining growth the wrong way. The only thing that will grow is the spam, and it'll get a bit "better quality" if it makes more money maybe but there's no reason for it to grow until it reaches the actually good quality. You get a pretty mushroom growing from the fungus. All of the higher quality content websites with nice chewy articles, that figured out a way to be financially supported by their audience, none of them do it with ads. It doesn't make them nearly enough money to account for the readers put off by it. And that's not an "oh eww! this otherwise-quality-article has an ad on it, I'll just go read something else", no that's of course silly. It's the image of the thing. Having a big, ugly, ad-network operated ad right next (or inside) your otherwise-quality-article diminishes the value of it. Having to cut up that article into multiple pages for no reason other than boosting pageviews, diminishes the value. Write a great article, inject it with ads, becomes a mediocre article. If you don't believe me, imagine you found a cool programming tutorial on some topic you find interesting. The tutorial is split into multiple small pages, content making up less than 33% of the screen, and browsing back and forth between pages is slow because of all the 3rd party components and ubiquitous JS frameworks. Then imagine the same tutorial on one page, written in markdown, on github pages or whatever, and that's it. Value? To me it's an order of magnitude difference. So much difference that I've occasionally taken that content, copypasted and reformatted into a nice quiet format, strictly for personal use, as alternative to bookmarking. The value of the time it cost me to do that is actually worth several orders of magnitude more than what I would ever pay for an article. Maybe the publisher doesn't even care, ultimately the writers do. Sure, from a rational economical financial free-marketable point of view it just makes business sense to trash high-quality articles with ads until the costs and benefits line up sufficiently that any more trashing would just be done out of sadistic glee. But writing is a creative process. It's not all about money. And if you keep that up, you're gonna kill the creativity regardless, because all you end up with is regurgitated contentfarm poop, the worst of both worlds, no actual quality content and a world of ads. I'm a creative person, I create content just for the heck of it. I never needed to rationalize why I hate ads. I know why they are bad and what happens when I let them near my creative processes. Sorry this post got a bit long :-)

petercooper 11y ago

Even some of the good stuff on this site I wouldn't feel compelled to pay for because truly it isn't transformative and I would probably be better off not reading it and doing something productive instead. [..] Stuff I do pay for: [..] Spotify, Netflix. OK, so blog posts are of almost no value to you. But a bit of music and some TV shows, that's where the really productive, transformative stuff happens whose creators deserve a few bucks..

teacup50 11y ago

Media got worse as the revenue streams dried up; if you pay for writing, you can expect much better writing. I generally find that I'm better off spending an hour researching books to purchase on a non-programming subject than I am spending that hour Googling for free content on that subject.

rorykoehler 11y ago
Sure, I buy books all the time. That is very different to the bubblegum content I read online which would fall under the micro-payments model though.
- teacup50 11y ago
  Bubblegum content appeared in direct response to the death of the traditional revenue streams.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    I disagree. Newspapers were always terrible and full of heavily biased content. Same for most magazines.
tomjen3 11y ago
I have payed nothing for PGs essays or slate star codex epically detailed tear-downs of published studies. They are among the best writing I have read. I have payed nothing to the people on youtube who shown me how to fold a shirt, do my hair, make pasta easily, chop food like a chef or whatever else I needed help with; granted those aren't writing per-say, but a decade ago I would have found that information in a blog. I won't pay for writing, I will pay for a fact-checker, but so far that only seems necessary on highly-technical books.
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  Same here but I've purchased pg'a book and most books of writers I like follow on the web.
- teacup50 11y ago
  Your quality bar is extraordinarily, painfully low.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  It's a shame folks have downvoted this. It's a very useful and good point. Much of the free content is vastly better than paid content, and most of the free content also does not contain ads. There are remarkably few sources of paid content that justify their cost, even when that cost is as low as simply paying some of my attention to an ad.

munificent 11y ago

> I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off enough to have the free time to do that. I don't have "free" time. I paid for that time by buying a more expensive house close to where I work, spending less time shopping by not chasing the best deal, paying others to do home and car repairs, etc. etc. etc. People who aren't as financially lucky as me don't have that opportunity. I'm not crazy about the idea of living in a world where those people don't get to participate in determining culture.

rorykoehler 11y ago
You make a very valid point. I think there are other solutions to this problem.... strangely I had already just decided to make it the topic of my next post before reading your comment. Also imho micro-payments won't solve that problem. It is a much deeper structural problem.
ohthehugemanate 11y ago
Careful about letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough". Culture has always been determined by people who are well off enough to spend time on it. Even the people who are commissioned creators (Dickens was paid by the word, Mozart had aristocratic sponsors) spent thousands of hours working for free to get to the point where anyone would pay them. Further, it's not like ads have been some democratizing element for cultural creation. They pay a pittance for everyone but the large traffic generators. No one is quitting their job at Denny's to become a full time blogger paid by google adwords. The independent instagram/youtube/blogger "celebrities" all still keep full time jobs until they get enough sponsorship to pay the bills.
- drumdance 11y ago
  > spent thousands of hours working for free to get to the point where anyone would pay them. That's still true. Writing for the web is generally a low-paying job. It would be even lower if the media properties went out of business.

taurath 11y ago

Isn't it interesting the level of monetary value we put on most written content on the web (nothing) vs the time we spend reading said valueless content? Is it truly so valueless, or is it only valueless because similar content isn't worth anything? I click on the links I click on because I think they'll have more value to me than the rest of them, but I'm still not to the threshold of reaching any monetary value, only my attention. I wonder how well a system like reddit gold would work for webpages - if an article was particularly fascinating or insightful or entertaining I could hit a button to give them a dollar or something else (maybe I set a budget of $20 at each month so I don't over or under-pay what I "think" I value media at). If enough people did this, wouldn't this start driving quality back up? Wouldn't it suddenly be transparent the value people see in an article in dollar terms? Who would make the first Million Dollar article?

cgag 11y ago
A lot of value comes from being written our of passion or a desire to share and not a desire to have me click on ads.
amazon_not 11y ago
What you are describing is called Flattr. It was launched in 2010 and never went anywhere, like every other micropayment service.
- taurath 11y ago
  Interesting but not surprising that it existed. Reddit gold works because they have hundreds of millions of users and it probably barely pays the bills. Many smarter people have tried tackling the problem, but I don't think drastic online economic changes can grow organically without some sort of catalyst. Maybe if a browser like the one linked in the OP could get enough of a userbase that it becomes a force.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    Flattr was a product of the Pirate Bay crew; they had an audience, it just didn't work out.

Certhas 11y ago

Quality technical content is written by people who enjoy it for free. This is not generally true for other quality content. Quality content that requires you to go to Afghanistan to actually understand and report the situation on the ground is not written by people who write as a hobby. In depth political analysis generally isn't either. That's because going to Afghanistan, or understanding the internal structure of politics are full time jobs. Unless we find a way to pay people to do these jobs, we'll be eating the writings of people hired by those with money and vested interests. The PR agencies hired to sell us war, or political talking points.

rorykoehler 11y ago
Generally all 'in-depth' political analysis is terrible propaganda. The best Afghanistan content I've seen has been documentaries such as Armadillo. I'll pay to watch that (through Netflix for example). "Unless we find a way to pay people to do these jobs, we'll be eating the writings of people hired by those with money and vested interests." I suspect it may have been the point of your comment but that's exactly what we are already doing. I have another example. The Irish Times (one of Ireland's leading broadsheet newspapers) bought myhome.ie for €50m euros in 2007. The Irish Times had a huge daily property section at the time and was profiting greatly, riding on the crest of the wave of the property bubble. They also received uncountable millions from the banks to advertise the ridiculous 110% mortgages etc within the pages of their daily paper. I'll let you guess how much content that was critical of the property boom was published within their pages and how long it took for them to do any investigative journalism into the fraudulent behaviour of the banks whose ad budgets were sustaining them. Capitalism and the truth are not compatible. Too many vested interests everywhere. War journalists can't be critical because they will lose access. Everyone is tip-toeing about scared to set a foot wrong incase it dries up their income supply (or at least removes the circumstances which allows them to earn a living). We've hit saturation point and all this disruption through internet and automation is a godsend in the long run but will cause much suffering in the short term.

tripzilch 11y ago

If ads on the web are to be considered "payment" for all the "content" we're consuming on the web, like everybody seems to keep repeating--yes, I disagree--have a look all this "content" that it's supposedly buying us. Where are most of these ads? What "content" is making all that money? You've seen it. 95% (or more) is nearly spam. Or actual spam in some way or another. It's all those listicles ("The 10 best X"), or these photo image traps (there was a name for them, the "You won't believe bla this celebrity something embarrassing mistake"). I didn't consent to buying that. And I most definitely will not spend my precious currency of attention on it. Do we all recall the bad old days of blackhat SEO, linkfarms and all that crap? It's still going on but I call it the bad old days because it used to be you couldn't research stuff on the Internet without bumping into those things all the time. Do we remember how a lot of these things worked? I've always had a morbid fascination for those things, some were such weird places. Initially it just started with endless algorithmically generated pages linking to pages in ways that exploited Google's classic PageRank algorithms. Google got wise to that, so the blackhat SEOs sprinkled in some content. Google got wiser, and at some point (this was still when About.com was a serious "competitor" to Wikipedia) there were actual humans churning out tiny "content" articles, 300 words, really about almost anything, just a few paragraphs, puke a few words on any topic you could possibly imagine and people would get a tiny pay for writing it and into another SEO-machine they went, extracted keywords linked to all the things and back to spam. That's not the type of content industry we want to support, right? But THIS is what happened. Of course Google Ads got wise-ish to that as well, and over time this content-farming industry kept incrementing the content quality of their spam just enough until the listicles that nobody ever asked for are just barely good enough that the public will actually swallow it. And that is what we have today, and there is no real economic incentive to get any better. Maybe a tiny bit better, but remember this trash grew organically from the economic incentives of spam. It's never going to grow into the awesome well-researched high quality articles everybody is furiously imagining when they talk about an ad-supported content web or micropayments or whatever. It's a mistake. Ads never really significantly supported high quality content publishers, most of the really great content on the Internet has always been on free websites. If you don't believe me it's because the ad-networks never linked you there or you never thought to look. The vast majority of these ad-networks, all what they ever gave us was spam and economic incentives for more spam. And micropayments are not going to be any different. You're imagining growth the wrong way. The only thing that will grow is the spam, and it'll get a bit "better quality" if it makes more money maybe but there's no reason for it to grow until it reaches the actually good quality. You get a pretty mushroom growing from the fungus. All of the higher quality content websites with nice chewy articles, that figured out a way to be financially supported by their audience, none of them do it with ads. It doesn't make them nearly enough money to account for the readers put off by it. And that's not an "oh eww! this otherwise-quality-article has an ad on it, I'll just go read something else", no that's of course silly. It's the image of the thing. Having a big, ugly, ad-network operated ad right next (or inside) your otherwise-quality-article diminishes the value of it. Having to cut up that article into multiple pages for no reason other than boosting pageviews, diminishes the value. Write a great article, inject it with ads, becomes a mediocre article. If you don't believe me, imagine you found a cool programming tutorial on some topic you find interesting. The tutorial is split into multiple small pages, content making up less than 33% of the screen, and browsing back and forth between pages is slow because of all the 3rd party components and ubiquitous JS frameworks. Then imagine the same tutorial on one page, written in markdown, on github pages or whatever, and that's it. Value? To me it's an order of magnitude difference. So much difference that I've occasionally taken that content, copypasted and reformatted into a nice quiet format, strictly for personal use, as alternative to bookmarking. The value of the time it cost me to do that is actually worth several orders of magnitude more than what I would ever pay for an article. Maybe the publisher doesn't even care, ultimately the writers do. Sure, from a rational economical financial free-marketable point of view it just makes business sense to trash high-quality articles with ads until the costs and benefits line up sufficiently that any more trashing would just be done out of sadistic glee. But writing is a creative process. It's not all about money. And if you keep that up, you're gonna kill the creativity regardless, because all you end up with is regurgitated contentfarm poop, the worst of both worlds, no actual quality content and a world of ads. I'm a creative person, I create content just for the heck of it. I never needed to rationalize why I hate ads. I know why they are bad and what happens when I let them near my creative processes. Sorry this post got a bit long :-)