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The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as mu
by qbrass 11y ago
The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as much.
- mirimir 11y agoPaying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.
- bobmichael 11y agoThat may be true for countries with online payments that actually work, but keep in mind that for many third-world countries the jump from $0 to $0.001 is hard, since people often do not have any way to perform an online payment.
- mirimir 11y agoYes, there needs to be an alternative.
- yoha 11y agoThe cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.
- mirimir 11y agoConsider the huge ecosystem that has developed for serving ads. Each advertiser need not make arrangements with each site owner.
- thomasahle 11y agoPaywalls also have a negative effect in the linkability of the Web. If I suggest you to go to some page, and you have to pay for it, then independently if the price, I have a much higher responsibility for the content actually being relevant for you.
- mirimir 11y agoAs it is now, whenever you recommend pages that host third-party ads, you may be pointing people at malware.