9 ms·

Webpass

67 points by freitasm 11y ago

freitasm 11y ago
The webpass.io subscription service is a change from the standard consumer - publisher relationship. Instead of having to create and maintain subscriptions with different websites, consumers can subscribe to a single service and affiliated websites can check with the platform to confirm entitlement - thus eliminating friction. Depending on how websites configure the service customers don't need to create local accounts to get benefits - unless of course sites require accounts for things such as posting comments in topics and articles, or using other non-subscriber's related services. I am not involved with the service, except as being a publisher using the platform as an alternative to ad-based revenue/subscription model.
- deprave 11y ago
  What is your website? Did you completely remove ads from it in favor of webpass.io?
  - freitasm 11y ago
    I posted this reply to another question, but will repost here for your benefit: I am the OP. I run a website that uses webpass.io. I am not posting a link to the site to avoid self-promotion but it should be easy enough to find. With that said, here is MY implementation. Other publishers may do it differently. Our site is a discussion forum. People can browse at will but only logged in users can post and reply to topics. We run advertising with Google DFP. A few years back we started offering a subscription where users pay us a recurring fee and they have the option to turn ads on/off in their profile. I myself thought of using a micro-payment service but I wanted something easy. The way webpass works is by their add-on sending a unique token on every page request. If there's a token my code checks with their server if it's a valid token. If yes we then have two options: - if you are not logged in then we completely remove the ad scripts BEFORE sending the page to the browser client. - if you are logged in we treat your session as a subscriber session and will send or not the ad scripts based on your profile preferences. This means you can go to your profile page and turn ads on/off. Using webpass made the experience better for our users because even those people who don't want to create another web profile and pay another subscription can still get to our site ad free.
benbristow 11y ago
But Adblock is free. Wouldn't a simple donate button be just as effective?
- freitasm 11y ago
  Donate buttons are a joke. They don't work for publishers at all.
novium 11y ago
Tried to find the creators that have joined, but found no listing, did I miss it or is there none?
- ytjohn 11y ago
  I believe it's the latter: you already have the list of creators that joined.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - mnx 11y ago
      He is saying there are none.
      - novium 11y ago
        Asked if there's a list, but yeah, that sounds probable.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
imglorp 11y ago
I keep waiting for some serious content creator to try a bitcoin micropayment system. From there it's a small stretch to envision a third party like this one to take care of SSO and varying pay rates per provider.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  Why bitcoin? Why not 'regular money' that more people have?
  - lojack 11y ago
    It's easy to charge 5 cents to read an article using Bitcoin. With processing fees, this isn't super easy using credit cards.
    - computer 11y ago
      Look up the current fees for bitcoin transactions; they're more expensive. Also much slower.
      - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
        Yeah, but I think that largely depends on the degree of security you want to have in your blockchain. For example you could use something of a multi-party signing-scheme for consensus that regularly stamps hashes of it's own table into the bitcoin blockchain - this kind of scheme would be significantly less expensive to implement since you could pack thousands of transactions into a single bitcoin transaction. I'm not really sure micro-payments are the answer to add blocking to begin with though -
        goldenkey 11y ago
        Are you kidding me? You have no idea what you are talking about. The bitcoin transaction has to come from the sender. You are dreaming
cimm 11y ago
I use an ad blocker because I hate the idea being tracked. Hiding ads is simply a plus. I like the idea behind Webpass but they do nothing to prevent the tracking part of the whole ad blocking discussion.
- saward 11y ago
  I'm one of the co-founders of Webpass.io, and a dislike of being tracked is the primary reason why I am inclined towards using an adblocker myself. Before I realised the amount of tracking that went on, I hadn't been motivated enough to use an adblocker. Webpass.io has been designed with this in mind. Webpass.io involves removing the advertiser from the transaction -- partnering sites remove advertisements, which should eliminate tracking by advertisers. When it comes to trackers from other sources (e.g., analytics), you can continue to use plugins like Ghostery or the EasyPrivacy list. Webpass.io is a way for you to support websites, that is compatible with whatever means you use to protect your privacy. You don't need to opt into ads/trackers/third party cookies for our service to work. We track little from our users (check our privacy policy), and we have plans for the future to make our privacy features even stronger by offering (near) anonymous use of our system. As for our own website, we have avoided using any code that could be used to track you by third parties -- no social media buttons that talk back to their original servers, no third-party commenting system, no third-party analytics, and so on.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
yegle 11y ago
I like Google Contributor more: you as a visitor participate in the ad bidding and win the ad space if your bid wins. The website gets exactly what he would get from your visit as before.
- freitasm 11y ago
  Too complicated for people to understand and their funds can get depleted very quickly. Also some websites run Google AdSense as an infill, so Google Contributor doesn't really deal with publishers that have a direct sold inventory first, AdSense second policy.
d0m 11y ago
I'd be curious to know how many people would need to use such a service for the ad maker to make the same amount of money. Basically, what I'm wondering is if it would be similar to Wikipedia where a very few percentage of people need to contribute for the system to work out?
tacos 11y ago
I would happily pay an extra $5 a month to my ISP to have them allocate it to the pages I visit. More if they let me select a subset.
- mtgx 11y ago
  You actually want the ISPs, some of the most hated companies in the country, to "fairly distribute" that money for you?
  - tacos 11y ago
    I have an account with them. And they're already doing it for my TV channels. They're also providing a reliable 100Mbps link 4 miles from the nearest sewer pipe. Seems like they could handle 50 lines of code to parse logs and disburse payments.
andy_ppp 11y ago
This is scary - you mean I pay you to track every website I visit and you transparently pay them to not show Ads? It doesn't say who get's what data, which sites are involved and there is no way I'm installing their browser plugin! Oh dear!
- saward 11y ago
  Check out our privacy policy at https://webpass.io/privacy https://webpass.io/privacy for a detailed explanation of what we do with your data. If there are any scenarios that aren't clearly explained that concern you, please let me know and I can have the policy updated.
  - joosters 11y ago
    Does your service block trackers as well as ads? It's not clear at all what exactly gets blocked. Mind you, since the service acts as a tracker in its own right, people wanting to avoid being tracked are unlikely to use it in the first place...
    - freitasm 11y ago
      I am the OP. I run a website that uses webpass.io. I am not posting a link to the site to avoid self-promotion but it should be easy enough to find. With that said, here is MY implementation. Other publishers may do it differently. Our site is a discussion forum. People can browse at will but only logged in users can post and reply to topics. We run advertising with Google DFP. A few years back we started offering a subscription where users pay us a recurring fee and they have the option to turn ads on/off in their profile. I myself thought of using a micro-payment service but I wanted something easy. The way webpass works is by their add-on sending a unique token on every page request. If there's a token my code checks with their server if it's a valid token. If yes we then have two options: - if you are not logged in then we completely remove the ad scripts BEFORE sending the page to the browser client. - if you are logged in we treat your session as a subscriber session and will send or not the ad scripts based on your profile preferences. This means you can go to your profile page and turn ads on/off. Using webpass made the experience better for our users because even those people who don't want to create another web profile and pay another subscription can still get to our site ad free. Does it make sense now?
LamaOfRuin 11y ago
Until services like this make their list of participating sites available, they strike me as amounting to a scam (regardless of how noble their intentions). If they have no partners, they still collect money, but have no one to give it to at the end of the month, so they'll have to keep it. I also have no desire for the entire subscription to go to a website I visit one time in a month because they're the only one participating. This is not necessarily a deal breaker, but I can't even make an informed decision without a list of participating sites.
- saward 11y ago
  If a subscriber doesn't visit any of our existing partners, then we don't pocket that money which was intended for websites. Instead, it's set aside as a fund for helping new websites to join, with a particular priority on those sites that our subscribers use the most. It may not be so bad if all of a subscriber's money goes towards a single publisher. We measure rates in terms of RPM. In such a circumstance, that single publisher is receiving an excellent RPM, and that gives us a good argument for convincing new websites to join. As you can imagine, there are many things on our to-do list -- but a list of participating sites seems to be frequently requested, so that needs to move up in priority.
  - aluhut 11y ago
    A list of participating sites should be your absolute number 1 priority. Like, a call away. It is what I buy on your page.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  > If they have no partners, they still collect money, but have no one to give it to at the end of the month, so they'll have to keep it. IANAL, but my suspicion is that the law of trusts will make this ugly, unless they write "we get to keep it" into their TOS. My own approach is to levy a fixed percentage and only pay out to participating sites. Readability tried to do the whole accumulate-for-not-participants as a way to try and create dangling carrots for publishers. It didn't work: it just tied up a bunch of cash, because finding out who to contact for a lot of websites is difficult. Add to that the relatively small amounts of cash held for a given website, spread across many sites, and it would've created a helluva mess. Disclaimer: I'm working on a competing product.
cygnus 11y ago
I can't help myself but when I read "pure" somewhere, it smells marketing bullshit scam.
- picrow 11y ago
  Pure bullshit.
jacques_chester 11y ago
Oh drat, another competitor. I am losing track of who I am trying to beat. Google Contributor, Kachingle, Webpass, Brave, Flattr, Blendle and I have probably overlooked a bunch. There's also a deadpool with Sprinkepenny, Contenture, Readability and -- again -- I've probably overlooked a few. The core problem is preventing two classes of attack: 1. Visit multiplication by publishers, intended to over-represent them in the monthly scoring. 2. Money-laundering of stolen cards by using bots to sign up and visit an attacker-controlled site. There is also the matter of preventing a publisher in the middle from tracking users by piggybacking on shared identifiers. To my very great shame, I've spent too much of my time solving these problems rather than working on the business side of things. Edit: at least it's another Australian :)
- robl97 11y ago
  Hey don't forget Optimal.com - Americans/South Africans!
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    It's one of those ideas which is about to seize the zeitgeist. Apple and Google have, for different reasons, dramatically accelerated the timetable for microsubscriptions.
- saward 11y ago
  Australian, too? Would you be able to get in touch? There are contact details on our website.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
picrow 11y ago
Essentially is a "legitimate" spam pipeline. How many times have you clicked on some weird looking url only to regret doing so? You'd be paying them for that regret. Every spammer in history will be signing up and the amount of click-bait garbage will increase by orders of magnitude.
mankins 11y ago
Atri (http://www.atri.me http://www.atri.me) does just this, but bypasses the sites and uses the Twitter Handles on the page as the creator of record.
xcopy 11y ago
it easy you can build the same by use Xcopy.co http://xcopy.co/doc/index http://xcopy.co/doc/index
known 11y ago
Interesting concept
dperfect 11y ago
The pricing page is a good example of what not to do. If you're going to list distinguishing features/limits for various plans, please don't put "unlimited" on the free plan, limits on other plans, and force everyone to dig through your terms of service just to understand the real limits. Also, a plan that automatically "upgrades" based on criteria tucked away in the ToS should probably just be called a trial, and the conditions that cause that trial to be converted to a paid plan should be explained somewhere on the pricing page.
- qq66 11y ago
  also the .50 in a really small font, making it $5.50 not $5.00.
aorth 11y ago
> Adblockers deny money for websites without replacing it. I hate the way this frames the debate. Ads invade my privacy, slow down my Internet browsing, and consume my network and device resources—why can't the cost for content writers, servers, etc come from some other business model than invading my privacy?
- freitasm 11y ago
  The current model for alternative revenue sources is... "content". Mainly "sponsored content" where publishers post reviews and whitepapers, some times not disclosing their relationship with the advertisers. I think this is worst than ads.
codezero 11y ago
In their code examples they indicate that this works by: 1) plugin sets header key 2) the site servings ads needs to hit an API endpoint to verify the header keys' value before rendering ads. This seems really oversimplified since ads are spread all over most pages, so it first needs to block rendering to wait for a reply from the API, then each ad needs to be wrapped in a conditional. I wonder how well this works with the ads, since I assume they are not set up for conditional loading.
- homero 11y ago
  The page simply removes the ads before serving
  - freitasm 11y ago
    Correct. In our case we check with the endpoint and if the key is correct and approved we just serve the page WITHOUT the ad scripts. This not only make pages smaller but also reduces the amount of processing on the client browser. Overall it's as fast, if not faster, than an ad blocker.
petercooper 11y ago
So even at the "worst" pricing of 0.15¢ per page ($3/mo for 2000 pages) and assuming a 100% payout, a big, high traffic publisher like Gawker would have made under $2m in 2014 (on 1.3bn pageviews) versus the $45m they actually netted. The numbers would be even more awful for niche, high quality publishers (no offense to Gawker, but they're mass media). This has no chance of replacing anyone's income, and barely a chance at significantly supplementing one, until we're talking cents per page.
- Eridrus 11y ago
  I don't think you're argument is wrong overall, but I think your math is orders of magnitude wrong. 0.15c/page is a $1.50 CPM rate, and that's really is pretty low, for the web and premium publishers in particular, your math puts Gawker at $35 CPM, however I think your math is off by about a factor of by about a factor of 2-3. Some quick googling will show the Gawker advertising revenue number is actually $30m; $15m being from ecommerce/licensing + native advertising/sponsored content. I'm not sure where you pulled 1.3bn/yr from, but at $30m in revenue that would assume Gawker is obtaining CPMs of $23 for all of it's advertising. $23 CPMs are real: in video advertising, but they are totally out of whack for display, even premium display is only commanding about half that: http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates I don't know what CPMs Gawker is actually getting, but I think that it's likely that your traffic estimate is probably off by quite a bit since 3rd party traffic estimates are notorious for undercounting traffic. So, Gawker probably wouldn't be excited about this, but very few people are able to monetize display at that rate, so you may find some publishers that are still interested at this rate, though I do agree that it's particularly low and is only interesting as a last ditch effort of monetizing ad blockers. Though maybe that will be useful in certain communities that heavily favor them.
  - petercooper 11y ago
    BTW they're Quantcast's numbers - Gawker specifically refers you to them for their traffic numbers so I guess they're feeding them their traffic stats.
  - 11y ago

67 points by freitasm 11y ago

The webpass.io subscription service is a change from the standard consumer - publisher relationship. Instead of having to create and maintain subscriptions with different websites, consumers can subscribe to a single service and affiliated websites can check with the platform to confirm entitlement - thus eliminating friction. Depending on how websites configure the service customers don't need to create local accounts to get benefits - unless of course sites require accounts for things such as posting comments in topics and articles, or using other non-subscriber's related services. I am not involved with the service, except as being a publisher using the platform as an alternative to ad-based revenue/subscription model.

deprave 11y ago
What is your website? Did you completely remove ads from it in favor of webpass.io?
- freitasm 11y ago
  I posted this reply to another question, but will repost here for your benefit: I am the OP. I run a website that uses webpass.io. I am not posting a link to the site to avoid self-promotion but it should be easy enough to find. With that said, here is MY implementation. Other publishers may do it differently. Our site is a discussion forum. People can browse at will but only logged in users can post and reply to topics. We run advertising with Google DFP. A few years back we started offering a subscription where users pay us a recurring fee and they have the option to turn ads on/off in their profile. I myself thought of using a micro-payment service but I wanted something easy. The way webpass works is by their add-on sending a unique token on every page request. If there's a token my code checks with their server if it's a valid token. If yes we then have two options: - if you are not logged in then we completely remove the ad scripts BEFORE sending the page to the browser client. - if you are logged in we treat your session as a subscriber session and will send or not the ad scripts based on your profile preferences. This means you can go to your profile page and turn ads on/off. Using webpass made the experience better for our users because even those people who don't want to create another web profile and pay another subscription can still get to our site ad free.

benbristow 11y ago

But Adblock is free. Wouldn't a simple donate button be just as effective?

freitasm 11y ago
Donate buttons are a joke. They don't work for publishers at all.

novium 11y ago

Tried to find the creators that have joined, but found no listing, did I miss it or is there none?

ytjohn 11y ago
I believe it's the latter: you already have the list of creators that joined.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - mnx 11y ago
    He is saying there are none.
    - novium 11y ago
      Asked if there's a list, but yeah, that sounds probable.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

imglorp 11y ago

I keep waiting for some serious content creator to try a bitcoin micropayment system. From there it's a small stretch to envision a third party like this one to take care of SSO and varying pay rates per provider.

madeofpalk 11y ago
Why bitcoin? Why not 'regular money' that more people have?
- lojack 11y ago
  It's easy to charge 5 cents to read an article using Bitcoin. With processing fees, this isn't super easy using credit cards.
  - computer 11y ago
    Look up the current fees for bitcoin transactions; they're more expensive. Also much slower.
    - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
      Yeah, but I think that largely depends on the degree of security you want to have in your blockchain. For example you could use something of a multi-party signing-scheme for consensus that regularly stamps hashes of it's own table into the bitcoin blockchain - this kind of scheme would be significantly less expensive to implement since you could pack thousands of transactions into a single bitcoin transaction. I'm not really sure micro-payments are the answer to add blocking to begin with though -
      - goldenkey 11y ago
        Are you kidding me? You have no idea what you are talking about. The bitcoin transaction has to come from the sender. You are dreaming

cimm 11y ago

I use an ad blocker because I hate the idea being tracked. Hiding ads is simply a plus. I like the idea behind Webpass but they do nothing to prevent the tracking part of the whole ad blocking discussion.

saward 11y ago
I'm one of the co-founders of Webpass.io, and a dislike of being tracked is the primary reason why I am inclined towards using an adblocker myself. Before I realised the amount of tracking that went on, I hadn't been motivated enough to use an adblocker. Webpass.io has been designed with this in mind. Webpass.io involves removing the advertiser from the transaction -- partnering sites remove advertisements, which should eliminate tracking by advertisers. When it comes to trackers from other sources (e.g., analytics), you can continue to use plugins like Ghostery or the EasyPrivacy list. Webpass.io is a way for you to support websites, that is compatible with whatever means you use to protect your privacy. You don't need to opt into ads/trackers/third party cookies for our service to work. We track little from our users (check our privacy policy), and we have plans for the future to make our privacy features even stronger by offering (near) anonymous use of our system. As for our own website, we have avoided using any code that could be used to track you by third parties -- no social media buttons that talk back to their original servers, no third-party commenting system, no third-party analytics, and so on.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

yegle 11y ago

I like Google Contributor more: you as a visitor participate in the ad bidding and win the ad space if your bid wins. The website gets exactly what he would get from your visit as before.

freitasm 11y ago
Too complicated for people to understand and their funds can get depleted very quickly. Also some websites run Google AdSense as an infill, so Google Contributor doesn't really deal with publishers that have a direct sold inventory first, AdSense second policy.

d0m 11y ago

I'd be curious to know how many people would need to use such a service for the ad maker to make the same amount of money. Basically, what I'm wondering is if it would be similar to Wikipedia where a very few percentage of people need to contribute for the system to work out?

tacos 11y ago

I would happily pay an extra $5 a month to my ISP to have them allocate it to the pages I visit. More if they let me select a subset.

mtgx 11y ago
You actually want the ISPs, some of the most hated companies in the country, to "fairly distribute" that money for you?
- tacos 11y ago
  I have an account with them. And they're already doing it for my TV channels. They're also providing a reliable 100Mbps link 4 miles from the nearest sewer pipe. Seems like they could handle 50 lines of code to parse logs and disburse payments.

andy_ppp 11y ago

This is scary - you mean I pay you to track every website I visit and you transparently pay them to not show Ads? It doesn't say who get's what data, which sites are involved and there is no way I'm installing their browser plugin! Oh dear!

saward 11y ago
Check out our privacy policy at https://webpass.io/privacy https://webpass.io/privacy for a detailed explanation of what we do with your data. If there are any scenarios that aren't clearly explained that concern you, please let me know and I can have the policy updated.
- joosters 11y ago
  Does your service block trackers as well as ads? It's not clear at all what exactly gets blocked. Mind you, since the service acts as a tracker in its own right, people wanting to avoid being tracked are unlikely to use it in the first place...
  - freitasm 11y ago
    I am the OP. I run a website that uses webpass.io. I am not posting a link to the site to avoid self-promotion but it should be easy enough to find. With that said, here is MY implementation. Other publishers may do it differently. Our site is a discussion forum. People can browse at will but only logged in users can post and reply to topics. We run advertising with Google DFP. A few years back we started offering a subscription where users pay us a recurring fee and they have the option to turn ads on/off in their profile. I myself thought of using a micro-payment service but I wanted something easy. The way webpass works is by their add-on sending a unique token on every page request. If there's a token my code checks with their server if it's a valid token. If yes we then have two options: - if you are not logged in then we completely remove the ad scripts BEFORE sending the page to the browser client. - if you are logged in we treat your session as a subscriber session and will send or not the ad scripts based on your profile preferences. This means you can go to your profile page and turn ads on/off. Using webpass made the experience better for our users because even those people who don't want to create another web profile and pay another subscription can still get to our site ad free. Does it make sense now?

LamaOfRuin 11y ago

Until services like this make their list of participating sites available, they strike me as amounting to a scam (regardless of how noble their intentions). If they have no partners, they still collect money, but have no one to give it to at the end of the month, so they'll have to keep it. I also have no desire for the entire subscription to go to a website I visit one time in a month because they're the only one participating. This is not necessarily a deal breaker, but I can't even make an informed decision without a list of participating sites.

saward 11y ago
If a subscriber doesn't visit any of our existing partners, then we don't pocket that money which was intended for websites. Instead, it's set aside as a fund for helping new websites to join, with a particular priority on those sites that our subscribers use the most. It may not be so bad if all of a subscriber's money goes towards a single publisher. We measure rates in terms of RPM. In such a circumstance, that single publisher is receiving an excellent RPM, and that gives us a good argument for convincing new websites to join. As you can imagine, there are many things on our to-do list -- but a list of participating sites seems to be frequently requested, so that needs to move up in priority.
- aluhut 11y ago
  A list of participating sites should be your absolute number 1 priority. Like, a call away. It is what I buy on your page.
jacques_chester 11y ago
> If they have no partners, they still collect money, but have no one to give it to at the end of the month, so they'll have to keep it. IANAL, but my suspicion is that the law of trusts will make this ugly, unless they write "we get to keep it" into their TOS. My own approach is to levy a fixed percentage and only pay out to participating sites. Readability tried to do the whole accumulate-for-not-participants as a way to try and create dangling carrots for publishers. It didn't work: it just tied up a bunch of cash, because finding out who to contact for a lot of websites is difficult. Add to that the relatively small amounts of cash held for a given website, spread across many sites, and it would've created a helluva mess. Disclaimer: I'm working on a competing product.

cygnus 11y ago

I can't help myself but when I read "pure" somewhere, it smells marketing bullshit scam.

picrow 11y ago
Pure bullshit.

jacques_chester 11y ago

Oh drat, another competitor. I am losing track of who I am trying to beat. Google Contributor, Kachingle, Webpass, Brave, Flattr, Blendle and I have probably overlooked a bunch. There's also a deadpool with Sprinkepenny, Contenture, Readability and -- again -- I've probably overlooked a few. The core problem is preventing two classes of attack: 1. Visit multiplication by publishers, intended to over-represent them in the monthly scoring. 2. Money-laundering of stolen cards by using bots to sign up and visit an attacker-controlled site. There is also the matter of preventing a publisher in the middle from tracking users by piggybacking on shared identifiers. To my very great shame, I've spent too much of my time solving these problems rather than working on the business side of things. Edit: at least it's another Australian :)

robl97 11y ago
Hey don't forget Optimal.com - Americans/South Africans!
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  It's one of those ideas which is about to seize the zeitgeist. Apple and Google have, for different reasons, dramatically accelerated the timetable for microsubscriptions.
saward 11y ago
Australian, too? Would you be able to get in touch? There are contact details on our website.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

picrow 11y ago

Essentially is a "legitimate" spam pipeline. How many times have you clicked on some weird looking url only to regret doing so? You'd be paying them for that regret. Every spammer in history will be signing up and the amount of click-bait garbage will increase by orders of magnitude.

mankins 11y ago

Atri (http://www.atri.me http://www.atri.me) does just this, but bypasses the sites and uses the Twitter Handles on the page as the creator of record.

xcopy 11y ago

it easy you can build the same by use Xcopy.co http://xcopy.co/doc/index http://xcopy.co/doc/index

known 11y ago

Interesting concept

dperfect 11y ago

The pricing page is a good example of what not to do. If you're going to list distinguishing features/limits for various plans, please don't put "unlimited" on the free plan, limits on other plans, and force everyone to dig through your terms of service just to understand the real limits. Also, a plan that automatically "upgrades" based on criteria tucked away in the ToS should probably just be called a trial, and the conditions that cause that trial to be converted to a paid plan should be explained somewhere on the pricing page.

qq66 11y ago
also the .50 in a really small font, making it $5.50 not $5.00.

aorth 11y ago

> Adblockers deny money for websites without replacing it. I hate the way this frames the debate. Ads invade my privacy, slow down my Internet browsing, and consume my network and device resources—why can't the cost for content writers, servers, etc come from some other business model than invading my privacy?

freitasm 11y ago
The current model for alternative revenue sources is... "content". Mainly "sponsored content" where publishers post reviews and whitepapers, some times not disclosing their relationship with the advertisers. I think this is worst than ads.

codezero 11y ago

In their code examples they indicate that this works by: 1) plugin sets header key 2) the site servings ads needs to hit an API endpoint to verify the header keys' value before rendering ads. This seems really oversimplified since ads are spread all over most pages, so it first needs to block rendering to wait for a reply from the API, then each ad needs to be wrapped in a conditional. I wonder how well this works with the ads, since I assume they are not set up for conditional loading.

homero 11y ago
The page simply removes the ads before serving
- freitasm 11y ago
  Correct. In our case we check with the endpoint and if the key is correct and approved we just serve the page WITHOUT the ad scripts. This not only make pages smaller but also reduces the amount of processing on the client browser. Overall it's as fast, if not faster, than an ad blocker.

petercooper 11y ago

So even at the "worst" pricing of 0.15¢ per page ($3/mo for 2000 pages) and assuming a 100% payout, a big, high traffic publisher like Gawker would have made under $2m in 2014 (on 1.3bn pageviews) versus the $45m they actually netted. The numbers would be even more awful for niche, high quality publishers (no offense to Gawker, but they're mass media). This has no chance of replacing anyone's income, and barely a chance at significantly supplementing one, until we're talking cents per page.

Eridrus 11y ago
I don't think you're argument is wrong overall, but I think your math is orders of magnitude wrong. 0.15c/page is a $1.50 CPM rate, and that's really is pretty low, for the web and premium publishers in particular, your math puts Gawker at $35 CPM, however I think your math is off by about a factor of by about a factor of 2-3. Some quick googling will show the Gawker advertising revenue number is actually $30m; $15m being from ecommerce/licensing + native advertising/sponsored content. I'm not sure where you pulled 1.3bn/yr from, but at $30m in revenue that would assume Gawker is obtaining CPMs of $23 for all of it's advertising. $23 CPMs are real: in video advertising, but they are totally out of whack for display, even premium display is only commanding about half that: http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates I don't know what CPMs Gawker is actually getting, but I think that it's likely that your traffic estimate is probably off by quite a bit since 3rd party traffic estimates are notorious for undercounting traffic. So, Gawker probably wouldn't be excited about this, but very few people are able to monetize display at that rate, so you may find some publishers that are still interested at this rate, though I do agree that it's particularly low and is only interesting as a last ditch effort of monetizing ad blockers. Though maybe that will be useful in certain communities that heavily favor them.
- petercooper 11y ago
  BTW they're Quantcast's numbers - Gawker specifically refers you to them for their traffic numbers so I guess they're feeding them their traffic stats.
- 11y ago