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CoinTent: A Sustainable Ad-Free Web

115 points by godot 10y ago

cr3ative 10y ago
Taking 20% on top of 5-10% processor fees seems high compared to Flattr's flat 10%. Something doesn't sit right with me ethically about this concept.
- random28345 10y ago
  This is a problem that badly needs to be solved. Advertising revenue is the incentive for news organizations to provide a conduit for malware onto your computer, and there isn't anyone who thinks that's a good idea. If these guys can solve this problem, get buy-in from publishers, and provide revenue to support good journalism while solving the problem of needing many subscriptions to multiple news sites, perhaps they deserve their 30% vig. But if they are successful, it's more likely that someone will come along, do the same thing, and only charge 2%.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    This is a problem that badly needs to be solved. The problem that needs solving is to make ad networks and advertisers do a better job, not to transfer the payment model of the internet from companies that want to pay for marketing to users who have comparatively very little money. Approximately $70bn is spent on digital advertising in the US alone. That's hundreds of dollars per person. No payment model that relies on direct payment is going to maintain that sort of funding level, so no one who makes money from adverts is going to accept it.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  > Something doesn't sit right with me ethically about this concept. I've watched several schemes collapse because the collected fees were simply too low. There is no ethical system that spits out Platonic percentages. People charge or don't charge and buy or don't buy, as they please.
danhardman 10y ago
I'd happily display ads on websites that aren't incredibly obnoxious. I think ad-blockers need to have some sort of ad-policy or vetting system in place that when websites conform to them, I as a user get prompted with the option to turn ads on to support the website. I'd much rather that than essentially have to pay out money to browse online.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  This is exactly what AdBlock Plus started doing a couple years ago, and it was met with mass outrage and jumping ship to muBlock. [1] https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria
  - danhardman 10y ago
    I was under the impression that AdBlock Plus started selling whitelist places and that's what user's became outraged over. I may be misremembering though, I only ever scanned post titles
walterbell 10y ago
Brave is also testing micropayments, with a 5% cut, https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/ https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/
- athenot 10y ago
  This is a great project and it seems further ahead. Checked it out and was surpised to see that it's headed by Brendan Eich. PS: This is why I like HN: I discover great alternatives in a fraction of the time I would have elsewhere. Thanks for posting this!
- rules4hire 10y ago
  Brave was the first thing that came to my mind when I read this. What are the advantages of this product over Brave? Being an extension and not a new browser seems nice, and not using Bitcoin is probably better for mass adoption as well. What else? What are strengths of Brave over this?
20andup 10y ago
So we are paying to remove ads?
- kazagistar 10y ago
  Paying for the content, instead of ads paying for it.
deleted 10y ago
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amq 10y ago
Like the simplicity. Maybe flattr could create a similar plugin? Their support buttons didn't get enough traction, unfortunately.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Flattr have teamed up with one of the ad blockers to do something similar.
stephanheijl 10y ago
While I support the general idea, it irks me that this concept also includes tracking of my browsing history ("distributes the money from your subscription to the sites you visit based on the time you spend with them"). I would like to see more transparency with regards to how this information is used and how much of it is actually exposed to the developers of this plugin.
- olkid 10y ago
  Valid point. I agree.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  But then how would they sell all that juicy "search history by people who normally avoid ads" that can normally fetch such a nice sum.
- bradcoin 10y ago
  Brad with the CoinTent team here. Glad you believe in the general idea of what we're doing! I understand the concern around the tracking of browsing history, as that's obviously one of the main drivers of ad blockers in the first place! We definitely need to make sure we deliver on transparency around what data is tracked, how it is stored, and how it is used. We will be releasing this in more detail on our site when we launch. One key point for you to be aware of is that we do offer the ability to turn off tracking of browsing history. In that case, we'll give you the option to support sites automatically based on sites everyone else spends time with.
  - irq-1 10y ago
    Here's an idea I'm not sure would work, but I want to put it out there. Browsing history and/or time spent has to be tracked so the money can be distributed to the right sites. To protect the browsing history: 1) (on the client) Take the domain name (or URL, IP or data point) and add a salt 2) Hash it 3) Add it to a bloom filter (or another type of filter) 4) After enough URLs have been added, submit the filter and salt 5) (on the server) Run the list of participating domains through the filter (take the domain, add salt, hash, and filter) Some thoughts about this type of scheme: No exact history data would be submitted. You may need multiple filters for domain, time spent, type of interaction, etc... The selection of filter and optimal number of domains (or encoding of data points) might be problematic. Submission can be done at any time (no schedule). The loss of a few submissions won't matter (no need for every domain or a complete history.) Submissions can be delayed until there is enough obscuring data, and filters provide plausible deny ability (about browsing history.) Submissions could be made to trusted 3rd parties (browser makers, large company networks, non-profits like the EFF, etc..) and only the results sent to a central authority. Some websites that were not visited will benefit, but the salt will stop gaming of the domains. Running the list of participating domains might be to demanding to be practical. Groups of domains could have their own payment/subscription filter (news domains, GNU endorsed domains, etc...) distributed to the clients like blocklists. The biggest problem: Advertisers and ad networks will fight against loosing personally identifiable information and analytics data.
fowlerpower 10y ago
This is a terrible idea. I know I will take a lot of heat for saying this on hacker news. Advertising is something that has existed for at least 100 plus years. TV is supported by it, radio is supported by it and it is no coincidence that the internet is also supported by it. Fact is we as users may not love advertising but it exists because companies want to reach us, it provides revenue to companies that would otherwise need to charge a ton of money for those services. As more and more media and content including TV Shows and Movies move to the internet do you really truly believe they will remain AdFree? Where would companies that want to reach an audience advertise? Where would that 100 billion dollar show, movie, article get its money from? Purely from the user? Do you think we can go back to the ways of charging 300 dollars for a word/google docs app? Fact is things cost money to make and people need to make money to keep making things. Advertising whether you like it or not is here to stay. Edit: I also think adblockers are a terrible idea. All we have done with ad blockers is started an arms race where the ads now come in the form of sponsored content so you have no idea what's an ad and what isn't. We need to just accept that advertising will exist and the premium for non advertising content is just too high to afford by the vast majority of users.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Do you work in advertising?
  - fowlerpower 10y ago
    Some of biggest companies in the world are supported purely by ad revenue and adtech. Google, Facebook are just a few examples.
- yalooze 10y ago
  The current state of online advertising still has a significant impact on loads times, battery life and bandwidth. It's getting better and, I think, will continue to get better, in part because of the huge take-up of adblockers which is, I hope, spurring the industry to improve.
- snerbles 10y ago
nailer 10y ago
Why not just web payments? Chrome can access Google Wallet, Safari can access Apple payments, all from JS. I haven't played with the tech much but I understand it's pretty a solid way for a website to ask you to pay for something and then get a token they can use to see if you have or not.
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  It isn't standardized yet, but yes Chrome and Safari have made huge steps towards making web payments a reality. Luckily, both Google and Apple have expressed strong interest in standardizing web payments making their implementations compatible.
rajadigopula 10y ago
Just got a thought ~ So I got a startup which I am aiming to grow to a million users spending a fortune on paid advertising online, but the cointent solution helps me get a small cashback by not helping me grow my business! Or I pay a high traffic site to display my ad, and they sign-up with cointent to make their site clean, eventually the hits/impressions decrease and no one pays the site for displaying their ads! and they re-think they made a mistake signing up with cointent in the firstplace! Could some-one please explain how this model is going to sustain/ be successful?!
d23 10y ago
Interesting idea. I hope to at least see more like this, even if this fails. What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites. I don't frequent the New York Times enough to justify a subscription, even despite the annoying nagging full-page interstitials. I don't think giving them a percentage of my ad revenue would be worth it, but if I could tip a few quarters when I came across an article that I thought was really well done, I would gladly do so. I think if you gamified a system like this, it could really do well. It'd need to be cross-site, since it'd be cool to compare to my friends and see who they tended to support the most. It wouldn't have to directly show the donation amounts; it could be translated into some arbitrary other point system and include other incentives to get bonus points. Basically, make it a high-score / prestige thing.
- xenobioticants 10y ago
  > What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites. For articles, this already exists (at least in The Netherlands). It's called Blendle and lets you 'buy' separate articles instead of needing to get a full subscription. Works super easy as well.
  - davemel37 10y ago
    I heard about blendle, signed up for it....and than never used it!!! As per my comment on this thread, I think the switching costs of finding other content to occupy my time is to low to cause me to even think about paying for actual content.
illnewsthat 10y ago
This looks about the same as Google Contributor https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ but Google has the advantage of owning the ad network and the ability to communicate with website owners. It will be interesting to see where companies spend more on advertising if they can't reach their whole audience online. Maybe more in the form of product placement and such.
- criddell 10y ago
  Contributor is great for people that just want to avoid ads, but lots of people also object to being tracked.
davidhyde 10y ago
Visiting their website main page consumes 2.2 MB of bandwidth. This is a basically a blank page with some small icons. If these guys can't build a lean website then how are they going to build cross-site tracking technology that will improve my browsing experience?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  It's sort of like asking if you can't raise an objection without invoking fallacious logic, how are you going to make interesting contributions to this community?
  - davidhyde 10y ago
    I don't think it is poor reasoning. I was making an observation about their technology prowess. And where most people were expressing their opinion about whether or not ads are bad which has been discussed at length, I thought I'd make a different point. My argument is that if improving browsing experience is the purpose of their service and removing ads is one of the ways they do it then I hope they pay attention to page bloat. I wanted to point out that they hadn't paid much attention to javascript page bloat in their own web page.
ohstopitu 10y ago
my 2c: I know I'll get a lot of flack for this...but this is definitely not an end all, be all solution for services that depend on ads. That said, this tool does have a place - to be the platform that provides content producers/publishers a way to fairly charge a subset of consumers to experience the product adfree. * publishers/producers decide how much to charge / minute of use * this neutral tool shows that transparently to the user and the user can decide if he/she would prefer an paid ad-free experience or not. - maybe over time, this price fluctuates based on how users across network use the content etc. (to ensure quality does not fall etc.) As for publishers/creators that charge exorbitant rates / minute - the market will take care of them - users would just adblock and they'd just loose $ (basically their loss - either they have a fair compensation or not at all). BUT this tool is NOT the only way for producers to make money. Ads does have a place but this tool just helps those who want to pay and help producers and avoid ads at the same time.
avian 10y ago
Quote from the kickstarter video: "there are adblockers out there, but they make money by selling your data". Citation needed. Which adblockers are selling my data?
- freshhawk 10y ago
  I assumed they were making a reference to Adblock Plus selling ads through their new marketplace and decided to express that in the most dishonest and self-serving way possible.
amelius 10y ago
A "coin tent", is that something you get when you have too many coins in your pocket? :)
nicpottier 10y ago
I'm a bit pessimistic as to whether this will work, because the crux here is getting the publishers to agree to this model and that's going to require a ton of face-to-face deals. That said, I've had this idea myself and this is how I want the web to work. I should just be able to pay to make ads go away if I don't want them and that money should go to the sites I read. I currently use Google contributor, but that only works on some sits, not all. I also kind of like the "threat" that people are adblocking anyways on your site (which CoinTent will know, as their plugin is an adblocker) and you are losing this much revenue because of it. Seems like that could work if they reach enough critical mass. So I supported this, though with skepticism. Godspeed!
45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
Im going to be frank. I block ads, and will not start paying for content. I have had an advertising free web for a long time and will not: a) accept ads b) pay for content What will you do for people like me?
- magic5227 10y ago
  How long do you expect that to be sustainable?
  - 45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
    frankly; dont care. not my problem, i am a consumer. its been sustainable for the last 20 years. the same 'sustainability' arguments were made 10 years ago, yet here we are.
    - paulryanrogers 10y ago
      We are in a different place today; arguably worse. And if everyone ad-blocking is not sustainable then there will be less for you to consume.
      - 45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
        I appreciate that and it makes sense from a business perspective. However, many many people outside SV (which is most of the planet) have the same views as myself and will happily 'steal' content. Attempts like DRM are trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to shoehorn these 'user pays' models as an alternative to 'advertiser pays', we need a totally new paradigm. Invent it pls SV
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        The only reason it's worse is that we've let advertisers keep winning. There's more money in advertising on the web now than there was 20 years ago. If there was no money in it, they'd have gone away and things would be better.
    - 10y ago
mangeletti 10y ago
I created https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173 last weekend in response to my first experience of CoinTent. At the time, I was mostly offended by the insultingly large (72KB after GZIP) JavaScript file that the system caused me download to facilitate the wrecking of my experience, and felt a little guilty for recommending them for inclusion in uBlock. Now that I realize their entire business strategy is based on creating a problem – reaction – solution scenario for their own benefit, at the expense of publishers and readers. The concept is basically, "We don't like ads and you shouldn't either, so here's an ad to tell you that while ruining your web experience. Now give us money."
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  Isn't any non-free, non-subscription service going to have to either put that barrier up or show ads? I may be misunderstanding your complaint, but it sounds really bizarre to me, akin to: "Jesus every time I want to go watch a movie at the theatre there's this obnoxious guy blocking my way asking to see my 'ticket'. I don't have to deal with this bullshit when I watch TV at home, I just turn it on and start watching content"/
  - mangeletti 10y ago
    I think you need to go read the whole article. These guys are offering an ad blocker that ruins the ad revenue of websites and then offers the solution by also being a paywall.
    - wutbrodo 10y ago
      I assume from your condescension that you read the article (or at least think you did), so the problem is presumably with your reading comprehension. As I said, some sort of wall is inherent to the solution (seamless micro transactions would have people, perhaps unfairly, claiming that they didn't realize they were spending money). The whole premise behind this project is to replace ads for people who don't like ads. It's laughable to claim that the banner informing people of that is an ad. Your complaint about ruining the web experience seems to be that it puts barriers in front of your browsing, and my point was that almost any solution that compensates content creators is going to suffer from this.
Animats 10y ago
Micropayments, again. Someone tried a broad "pay for all the good sites" scheme around 15 years ago, in the first dot-com boom. Anyone remember that?
godshatter 10y ago
I've been fighting ads since the "punch the monkey" days of the web. Advertisers have progressively gotten worse over time. I have seen very few attempts to self-moderate their aggressiveness. Instead, they track us around the web and sell our data, and sometimes infect our machines with malware. Because of this, I aggressively block ads. They had their chance and they dropped the ball, and have no intentions of picking it back up again. I don't want a service that blocks ads for a price. I want a service without ads. If websites can't find a way to sustain themselves without ads, then they can die off for all I care. I can live without the content harvesters and the news reposters and all the other extraneous fluff out there. There will still be companies that sell services and advertise their own stuff on their websites, and there will still be people that pay for their own web hosting to put up content they are interested in. If the pushback against ads becomes extreme, there will still be a web after natural selection has finished running amok. I stopped using free web email, as one example, because of the ads. I now pay for email services from a company that does not run ads and does not track me around the web. There is no free version with ads. This is what I'm after. I wouldn't mind something like CoinTent after the die-off though. Paying money in one place that would be distributed as I see fit adds value for me. I don't want to be followed around the web though, that's a deal-breaker. Let me select the websites my revenue goes to and with what weightings. Sites that impress me will get added, sites that disappoint me won't. Also, let me determine how much I wish to give. Do this for websites that don't post ads, and you've got a winner for me. I will gladly pay for a useful web, and advertisers can go extinct for all I care.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  If I'm understanding correctly, you're not happy with being able to pay for content and not be shown ads; you also want nobody be else to have the option of free content paid for with ad views? Why?
  - godshatter 10y ago
    Mainly because I don't want to miss something and wind up in yet another database. Or get malware. And because I wish the ad companies in their current form would just die off. I think there would be traction for an ad-free network you could subscribe to and direct the flow of your funds. I would be more inclined to subscribe to the service in that form rather than what CoinTent is currently proposing. But I doubt I'm in the majority.
mankash666 10y ago
Cut out the middle-men. This is the perfect use-case for a cryptocurrency based micro-payment model.
idanb 10y ago
I really like this idea. Ads are some of the most distracting elements on the web, but at the same time we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web. Said as such, since content is not free to produce. When Hulu, for example, came around offering a higher subscription cost for ad-less shows I was eager to use it since I value my time, and as such I value my attention on the web. Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well - especially in the realm of music, a way for musicians to monetize passive plays would be terrific.
- initram 10y ago
  >we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web. This just isn't true. There are plenty of other monetization schemes on the web that work for different types of content. (Subscriptions, donations, subsidies (both corporate and governmental), patrons, etc.) >Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well It pretty much already exists in the form of Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
  - idanb 10y ago
    Content creators get effectively zero income / revenues from any of the services you listed. Patreon is attempting to do some cool things there and I think are getting some great results, as are crowdfunding approaches. However, people I know who have gotten syndication of content on any given video platform don't really get much in the way of return unless it's a huge hit - so it's hard to get quality content which is why a lot of those guys are producing exclusive content, or funding it. In terms of music, yeah - artists are making nothing, and the services are making nothing too, but that's a whole different story. There has been a failure, in my opinion, of successful monetization of valuable content on the net. I don't disagree with you that there are a plethora of monetization schemes that are very effective on the web. However, given the cost of content creation usually content is a loss leader for a separate business model / or business entirely. I think it just leads to crappy content, since now pretty much every article has some kind of agenda and there's little journalism actually taking place. I actually really like Vice for this reason - I think they've found a niche where people are willing to pay for quality content. Same for the Information, which produces terrific journalism and great long form stuff.
godmodus 10y ago
a great idea
robl97 10y ago
we did a consumer survey in April (adblocksurvey.com) that suggested a range of 10-15% of people would pay for a subscription for content. Based on that we think that adblocking should be monetized by a subscription/tip combo (optimal.com is kind of a hybrid + we also have a really good iOS 10 ad blocker that uses DNS) AND we need to fix ads. there are several companies in this space and we all talk to each other about how to solve some of these problems - I hope to speak to Brad at CoinTent soon and share some of our ideas. I think there are many of us that want a sustainable solution (and obviously feel we can play a part in building that, but I'm also realistic that none of us can do it by ourselves, this includes getting publishers on board!) that is less prone to abuse than some of the 'whitelisting' schemes we see out there today.
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davemel37 10y ago
The more I think about services like this, the more I think everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way. People are thinking about the problem, as a)it costs money to produce great content, b) great content should be supported by people who enjoy that content, and c) ads and other current monetization efforts are annoying/bad/potentially dangerous for users. So, the obvious solution, which from my perspective (has not and will not work at scale) is, "have people pay to block ads and give the money to publishers, or have publishers offer premium ad-free content. The thing that all of these ideas are missing is the switching cost to find other interesting content is next to nothing. There is already too much content bombarding us, and I have no problem reading someone elses content for free. Even if it means missing out on a headline that caught my attention. All I need to do is go back to my facebook newsfeed, or HN, and find 50 other articles I am interested in reading. I do think there is a solution out there, but I don't think it will come from paying to block ads (which feels like an exortion racket) or paying for article you like. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I think a great solution for everyone involved would be to charge money to share the content. Charging for distribution and licensing content has always been a money maker for publishers, why not charge for social distribution. My idea: Donate between $0.05 and $100 to share an article. Your post would say, "I just paid $1.25 to share this article, it's that good!" This solves multiple problems. a)the quality of what gets shared will go up, which in turn would make the shares much more valuable in terms of building an engaged audience and your own social cred and validation that you are seeking when you share. b)the amount you pay to share would reflect how much you liked the content. (i.e. an incredibly funny video that I want all my friends to see would be worth a few bucks to share, whereas a semi interesting one would be only $0.05...and in turn, my friends will learn to only watch my large donation shares... and the ratings of the content can be quantified by the audience. (i.e. this article generated $3450 in shares tells me much more than 34,500 people shared it.) Making this frictionless would be difficult and getting publishers to risk their "virality" would be hard to sell...but, it's a crazy enough idea it just might work. After all, the switching costs of not sharing an article you really want to share is much greater than paying to see content in the first place or paying a monthly fee when the problem is not gnawing at you in the moment.
- notahacker 10y ago
rayalez 10y ago
Excellent idea, I've been waiting for something like this to happen for months! It is clearly obvious that the system like this needs to exist, and I'm sure that the company that succeeds at implementing it will be huge. I really love how you are going about doing it, and I wish you luck! The big challenge of a system like that that I see, is getting users on board. To me it seems that the best solution is to allow publishers to "reward" subscribers with additional premium content. Are you planning to implement something like this?
- bradcoin 10y ago
  Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad to hear you believe in the idea and want to see it be successful. I agree that getting users on board is the biggest challenge. Premium content is certainly one additional way to get more users on board (and we've actually built a product that let's websites gate access / sell premium content, too!). I think there are actually a few ways we can give users more value by connecting them with the sites they love even more, so we're definitely thinking about how to bridge that connection! Let us know if you have other ideas or specific things you'd want to see.
jacques_chester 10y ago
Ah, another competitor. There's Google Contributor, that thing that Flattr launched, Webpass.io and forget the rest. I've been working on the same model: take a subscription, divvy it out according to usage. The problem is that, apart from Google (who can just block their own ads), there is no easy way to prevent falsified visits intended to inflate revenues of bad actors. Most schemes have either relied on wishful thinking or working within walled gardens (Contributor is closer to the latter). It so happens that I patented a protocol for preventing exactly this problem. It can show that a user made a request for a resource without either of the user or the publisher being able to forge the record. My mechanism requires a browser extension, simply because there needs to be a secure environment. By design, the publisher is unable to track you based on the protocol. Also by design, the protocol allows access through paywalls without needing to reveal user identity. Interested folks are invited to email me: jacques@robojar.com
- HaloZero 10y ago
  Can you clarify what bad actors you're talking about? The $5/month goes to whoever I visit the most (I am assuming this is not collective across all their users). Are you're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by redirecting my traffic?
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    > Are you're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by redirecting my traffic? By pretending to be you. Capturing your visit and replaying it. Tweaking details. Redirecting. Performing unseen requests in the background. Most notably, trying to override the tracking code by side-injecting their own to capture your identifying tokens (which is why you need an extension). There are countermeasures to all the attacks and to some as yet unanticipated, but it takes a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds in each step from the request to the response. And that's what I did.
    - criddell 10y ago
      > a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds in each step from the request to the response Sounds expensive. Does it scale?
criddell 10y ago
Advertisers have been building profiles of users for 20 years now with the promise that relevant ads aren't annoying and can be valuable. I think it's time to give up. Billboard companies and People magazine are able to sell ads without knowing who saw the ad. Why do advertisers online suddenly need to know everything about me? Billions have been spent building crappy ad-tech and to assemble profiles and I'd be surprised if it's been a net gain overall when you factor in the externalities of it all (tracking, power consumption, bandwidth usage, malware, etc...). I feel no ethical issues with using my DVR to skip ads, u-block to stop tracking in my browser, or changing the radio station in my car when an ad starts playing. /rant
- pigpigs 10y ago
  Advertising in my experience as an end user has been very ineffective. The ads that I see on Facebook are very obviously based on my browsing history/cookies - I look at a mechanical keyboard on Lazada and decide to not buy it. Next I go to Facebook and get ads about a keyboard on Lazada - no discounts, exact same model. It could've shown me similar keyboards, gave me a lower price, or anything that adds value than just showing me the exact same thing I just decided not to buy. Advertising for the sake of letting people know something exists is not particularly valuable to the end user, and most of the time they are not even able to predict correctly what people are interested in. Has anyone actually bought something because of an advertisement?
  - glandium 10y ago
    There's the worse (and very common) case: you decide to buy it, and still see ads about that keyboard you just bought, in case, you know, you'd want another (and even if you did, isn't having it in front of you and liking it more efficient than an ad?).
slester 10y ago
You can't get me to enable ads unless I'm assured they are not delivering malware. If you can't do that, count me out.

115 points by godot 10y ago

Taking 20% on top of 5-10% processor fees seems high compared to Flattr's flat 10%. Something doesn't sit right with me ethically about this concept.

random28345 10y ago
This is a problem that badly needs to be solved. Advertising revenue is the incentive for news organizations to provide a conduit for malware onto your computer, and there isn't anyone who thinks that's a good idea. If these guys can solve this problem, get buy-in from publishers, and provide revenue to support good journalism while solving the problem of needing many subscriptions to multiple news sites, perhaps they deserve their 30% vig. But if they are successful, it's more likely that someone will come along, do the same thing, and only charge 2%.
- onion2k 10y ago
  This is a problem that badly needs to be solved. The problem that needs solving is to make ad networks and advertisers do a better job, not to transfer the payment model of the internet from companies that want to pay for marketing to users who have comparatively very little money. Approximately $70bn is spent on digital advertising in the US alone. That's hundreds of dollars per person. No payment model that relies on direct payment is going to maintain that sort of funding level, so no one who makes money from adverts is going to accept it.
jacques_chester 10y ago
> Something doesn't sit right with me ethically about this concept. I've watched several schemes collapse because the collected fees were simply too low. There is no ethical system that spits out Platonic percentages. People charge or don't charge and buy or don't buy, as they please.

danhardman 10y ago

I'd happily display ads on websites that aren't incredibly obnoxious. I think ad-blockers need to have some sort of ad-policy or vetting system in place that when websites conform to them, I as a user get prompted with the option to turn ads on to support the website. I'd much rather that than essentially have to pay out money to browse online.

ghostly_s 10y ago
This is exactly what AdBlock Plus started doing a couple years ago, and it was met with mass outrage and jumping ship to muBlock. [1] https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria
- danhardman 10y ago
  I was under the impression that AdBlock Plus started selling whitelist places and that's what user's became outraged over. I may be misremembering though, I only ever scanned post titles

walterbell 10y ago

Brave is also testing micropayments, with a 5% cut, https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/ https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/

athenot 10y ago
This is a great project and it seems further ahead. Checked it out and was surpised to see that it's headed by Brendan Eich. PS: This is why I like HN: I discover great alternatives in a fraction of the time I would have elsewhere. Thanks for posting this!
rules4hire 10y ago
Brave was the first thing that came to my mind when I read this. What are the advantages of this product over Brave? Being an extension and not a new browser seems nice, and not using Bitcoin is probably better for mass adoption as well. What else? What are strengths of Brave over this?

20andup 10y ago

So we are paying to remove ads?

kazagistar 10y ago
Paying for the content, instead of ads paying for it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

amq 10y ago

Like the simplicity. Maybe flattr could create a similar plugin? Their support buttons didn't get enough traction, unfortunately.

jacques_chester 10y ago
Flattr have teamed up with one of the ad blockers to do something similar.

stephanheijl 10y ago

While I support the general idea, it irks me that this concept also includes tracking of my browsing history ("distributes the money from your subscription to the sites you visit based on the time you spend with them"). I would like to see more transparency with regards to how this information is used and how much of it is actually exposed to the developers of this plugin.

olkid 10y ago
Valid point. I agree.
kazagistar 10y ago
But then how would they sell all that juicy "search history by people who normally avoid ads" that can normally fetch such a nice sum.
bradcoin 10y ago
Brad with the CoinTent team here. Glad you believe in the general idea of what we're doing! I understand the concern around the tracking of browsing history, as that's obviously one of the main drivers of ad blockers in the first place! We definitely need to make sure we deliver on transparency around what data is tracked, how it is stored, and how it is used. We will be releasing this in more detail on our site when we launch. One key point for you to be aware of is that we do offer the ability to turn off tracking of browsing history. In that case, we'll give you the option to support sites automatically based on sites everyone else spends time with.
- irq-1 10y ago
  Here's an idea I'm not sure would work, but I want to put it out there. Browsing history and/or time spent has to be tracked so the money can be distributed to the right sites. To protect the browsing history: 1) (on the client) Take the domain name (or URL, IP or data point) and add a salt 2) Hash it 3) Add it to a bloom filter (or another type of filter) 4) After enough URLs have been added, submit the filter and salt 5) (on the server) Run the list of participating domains through the filter (take the domain, add salt, hash, and filter) Some thoughts about this type of scheme: No exact history data would be submitted. You may need multiple filters for domain, time spent, type of interaction, etc... The selection of filter and optimal number of domains (or encoding of data points) might be problematic. Submission can be done at any time (no schedule). The loss of a few submissions won't matter (no need for every domain or a complete history.) Submissions can be delayed until there is enough obscuring data, and filters provide plausible deny ability (about browsing history.) Submissions could be made to trusted 3rd parties (browser makers, large company networks, non-profits like the EFF, etc..) and only the results sent to a central authority. Some websites that were not visited will benefit, but the salt will stop gaming of the domains. Running the list of participating domains might be to demanding to be practical. Groups of domains could have their own payment/subscription filter (news domains, GNU endorsed domains, etc...) distributed to the clients like blocklists. The biggest problem: Advertisers and ad networks will fight against loosing personally identifiable information and analytics data.

fowlerpower 10y ago

This is a terrible idea. I know I will take a lot of heat for saying this on hacker news. Advertising is something that has existed for at least 100 plus years. TV is supported by it, radio is supported by it and it is no coincidence that the internet is also supported by it. Fact is we as users may not love advertising but it exists because companies want to reach us, it provides revenue to companies that would otherwise need to charge a ton of money for those services. As more and more media and content including TV Shows and Movies move to the internet do you really truly believe they will remain AdFree? Where would companies that want to reach an audience advertise? Where would that 100 billion dollar show, movie, article get its money from? Purely from the user? Do you think we can go back to the ways of charging 300 dollars for a word/google docs app? Fact is things cost money to make and people need to make money to keep making things. Advertising whether you like it or not is here to stay. Edit: I also think adblockers are a terrible idea. All we have done with ad blockers is started an arms race where the ads now come in the form of sponsored content so you have no idea what's an ad and what isn't. We need to just accept that advertising will exist and the premium for non advertising content is just too high to afford by the vast majority of users.

RodericDay 10y ago
Do you work in advertising?
- fowlerpower 10y ago
  Some of biggest companies in the world are supported purely by ad revenue and adtech. Google, Facebook are just a few examples.
yalooze 10y ago
The current state of online advertising still has a significant impact on loads times, battery life and bandwidth. It's getting better and, I think, will continue to get better, in part because of the huge take-up of adblockers which is, I hope, spurring the industry to improve.
snerbles 10y ago

nailer 10y ago

Why not just web payments? Chrome can access Google Wallet, Safari can access Apple payments, all from JS. I haven't played with the tech much but I understand it's pretty a solid way for a website to ask you to pay for something and then get a token they can use to see if you have or not.

BillinghamJ 10y ago
It isn't standardized yet, but yes Chrome and Safari have made huge steps towards making web payments a reality. Luckily, both Google and Apple have expressed strong interest in standardizing web payments making their implementations compatible.

rajadigopula 10y ago

Just got a thought ~ So I got a startup which I am aiming to grow to a million users spending a fortune on paid advertising online, but the cointent solution helps me get a small cashback by not helping me grow my business! Or I pay a high traffic site to display my ad, and they sign-up with cointent to make their site clean, eventually the hits/impressions decrease and no one pays the site for displaying their ads! and they re-think they made a mistake signing up with cointent in the firstplace! Could some-one please explain how this model is going to sustain/ be successful?!

d23 10y ago

Interesting idea. I hope to at least see more like this, even if this fails. What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites. I don't frequent the New York Times enough to justify a subscription, even despite the annoying nagging full-page interstitials. I don't think giving them a percentage of my ad revenue would be worth it, but if I could tip a few quarters when I came across an article that I thought was really well done, I would gladly do so. I think if you gamified a system like this, it could really do well. It'd need to be cross-site, since it'd be cool to compare to my friends and see who they tended to support the most. It wouldn't have to directly show the donation amounts; it could be translated into some arbitrary other point system and include other incentives to get bonus points. Basically, make it a high-score / prestige thing.

xenobioticants 10y ago
> What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites. For articles, this already exists (at least in The Netherlands). It's called Blendle and lets you 'buy' separate articles instead of needing to get a full subscription. Works super easy as well.
- davemel37 10y ago
  I heard about blendle, signed up for it....and than never used it!!! As per my comment on this thread, I think the switching costs of finding other content to occupy my time is to low to cause me to even think about paying for actual content.

illnewsthat 10y ago

This looks about the same as Google Contributor https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ but Google has the advantage of owning the ad network and the ability to communicate with website owners. It will be interesting to see where companies spend more on advertising if they can't reach their whole audience online. Maybe more in the form of product placement and such.

criddell 10y ago
Contributor is great for people that just want to avoid ads, but lots of people also object to being tracked.

davidhyde 10y ago

Visiting their website main page consumes 2.2 MB of bandwidth. This is a basically a blank page with some small icons. If these guys can't build a lean website then how are they going to build cross-site tracking technology that will improve my browsing experience?

oldmanjay 10y ago
It's sort of like asking if you can't raise an objection without invoking fallacious logic, how are you going to make interesting contributions to this community?
- davidhyde 10y ago
  I don't think it is poor reasoning. I was making an observation about their technology prowess. And where most people were expressing their opinion about whether or not ads are bad which has been discussed at length, I thought I'd make a different point. My argument is that if improving browsing experience is the purpose of their service and removing ads is one of the ways they do it then I hope they pay attention to page bloat. I wanted to point out that they hadn't paid much attention to javascript page bloat in their own web page.

ohstopitu 10y ago

my 2c: I know I'll get a lot of flack for this...but this is definitely not an end all, be all solution for services that depend on ads. That said, this tool does have a place - to be the platform that provides content producers/publishers a way to fairly charge a subset of consumers to experience the product adfree. * publishers/producers decide how much to charge / minute of use * this neutral tool shows that transparently to the user and the user can decide if he/she would prefer an paid ad-free experience or not. - maybe over time, this price fluctuates based on how users across network use the content etc. (to ensure quality does not fall etc.) As for publishers/creators that charge exorbitant rates / minute - the market will take care of them - users would just adblock and they'd just loose $ (basically their loss - either they have a fair compensation or not at all). BUT this tool is NOT the only way for producers to make money. Ads does have a place but this tool just helps those who want to pay and help producers and avoid ads at the same time.

avian 10y ago

Quote from the kickstarter video: "there are adblockers out there, but they make money by selling your data". Citation needed. Which adblockers are selling my data?

freshhawk 10y ago
I assumed they were making a reference to Adblock Plus selling ads through their new marketplace and decided to express that in the most dishonest and self-serving way possible.

amelius 10y ago

A "coin tent", is that something you get when you have too many coins in your pocket? :)

nicpottier 10y ago

I'm a bit pessimistic as to whether this will work, because the crux here is getting the publishers to agree to this model and that's going to require a ton of face-to-face deals. That said, I've had this idea myself and this is how I want the web to work. I should just be able to pay to make ads go away if I don't want them and that money should go to the sites I read. I currently use Google contributor, but that only works on some sits, not all. I also kind of like the "threat" that people are adblocking anyways on your site (which CoinTent will know, as their plugin is an adblocker) and you are losing this much revenue because of it. Seems like that could work if they reach enough critical mass. So I supported this, though with skepticism. Godspeed!

45h34jh53k4j 10y ago

Im going to be frank. I block ads, and will not start paying for content. I have had an advertising free web for a long time and will not: a) accept ads b) pay for content What will you do for people like me?

magic5227 10y ago
How long do you expect that to be sustainable?
- 45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
  frankly; dont care. not my problem, i am a consumer. its been sustainable for the last 20 years. the same 'sustainability' arguments were made 10 years ago, yet here we are.
  - paulryanrogers 10y ago
    We are in a different place today; arguably worse. And if everyone ad-blocking is not sustainable then there will be less for you to consume.
    - 45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
      I appreciate that and it makes sense from a business perspective. However, many many people outside SV (which is most of the planet) have the same views as myself and will happily 'steal' content. Attempts like DRM are trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to shoehorn these 'user pays' models as an alternative to 'advertiser pays', we need a totally new paradigm. Invent it pls SV
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      The only reason it's worse is that we've let advertisers keep winning. There's more money in advertising on the web now than there was 20 years ago. If there was no money in it, they'd have gone away and things would be better.
  - 10y ago

mangeletti 10y ago

I created https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173 last weekend in response to my first experience of CoinTent. At the time, I was mostly offended by the insultingly large (72KB after GZIP) JavaScript file that the system caused me download to facilitate the wrecking of my experience, and felt a little guilty for recommending them for inclusion in uBlock. Now that I realize their entire business strategy is based on creating a problem – reaction – solution scenario for their own benefit, at the expense of publishers and readers. The concept is basically, "We don't like ads and you shouldn't either, so here's an ad to tell you that while ruining your web experience. Now give us money."

wutbrodo 10y ago
Isn't any non-free, non-subscription service going to have to either put that barrier up or show ads? I may be misunderstanding your complaint, but it sounds really bizarre to me, akin to: "Jesus every time I want to go watch a movie at the theatre there's this obnoxious guy blocking my way asking to see my 'ticket'. I don't have to deal with this bullshit when I watch TV at home, I just turn it on and start watching content"/
- mangeletti 10y ago
  I think you need to go read the whole article. These guys are offering an ad blocker that ruins the ad revenue of websites and then offers the solution by also being a paywall.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    I assume from your condescension that you read the article (or at least think you did), so the problem is presumably with your reading comprehension. As I said, some sort of wall is inherent to the solution (seamless micro transactions would have people, perhaps unfairly, claiming that they didn't realize they were spending money). The whole premise behind this project is to replace ads for people who don't like ads. It's laughable to claim that the banner informing people of that is an ad. Your complaint about ruining the web experience seems to be that it puts barriers in front of your browsing, and my point was that almost any solution that compensates content creators is going to suffer from this.

Animats 10y ago

Micropayments, again. Someone tried a broad "pay for all the good sites" scheme around 15 years ago, in the first dot-com boom. Anyone remember that?

godshatter 10y ago

I've been fighting ads since the "punch the monkey" days of the web. Advertisers have progressively gotten worse over time. I have seen very few attempts to self-moderate their aggressiveness. Instead, they track us around the web and sell our data, and sometimes infect our machines with malware. Because of this, I aggressively block ads. They had their chance and they dropped the ball, and have no intentions of picking it back up again. I don't want a service that blocks ads for a price. I want a service without ads. If websites can't find a way to sustain themselves without ads, then they can die off for all I care. I can live without the content harvesters and the news reposters and all the other extraneous fluff out there. There will still be companies that sell services and advertise their own stuff on their websites, and there will still be people that pay for their own web hosting to put up content they are interested in. If the pushback against ads becomes extreme, there will still be a web after natural selection has finished running amok. I stopped using free web email, as one example, because of the ads. I now pay for email services from a company that does not run ads and does not track me around the web. There is no free version with ads. This is what I'm after. I wouldn't mind something like CoinTent after the die-off though. Paying money in one place that would be distributed as I see fit adds value for me. I don't want to be followed around the web though, that's a deal-breaker. Let me select the websites my revenue goes to and with what weightings. Sites that impress me will get added, sites that disappoint me won't. Also, let me determine how much I wish to give. Do this for websites that don't post ads, and you've got a winner for me. I will gladly pay for a useful web, and advertisers can go extinct for all I care.

wutbrodo 10y ago
If I'm understanding correctly, you're not happy with being able to pay for content and not be shown ads; you also want nobody be else to have the option of free content paid for with ad views? Why?
- godshatter 10y ago
  Mainly because I don't want to miss something and wind up in yet another database. Or get malware. And because I wish the ad companies in their current form would just die off. I think there would be traction for an ad-free network you could subscribe to and direct the flow of your funds. I would be more inclined to subscribe to the service in that form rather than what CoinTent is currently proposing. But I doubt I'm in the majority.

mankash666 10y ago

Cut out the middle-men. This is the perfect use-case for a cryptocurrency based micro-payment model.

idanb 10y ago

I really like this idea. Ads are some of the most distracting elements on the web, but at the same time we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web. Said as such, since content is not free to produce. When Hulu, for example, came around offering a higher subscription cost for ad-less shows I was eager to use it since I value my time, and as such I value my attention on the web. Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well - especially in the realm of music, a way for musicians to monetize passive plays would be terrific.

initram 10y ago
>we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web. This just isn't true. There are plenty of other monetization schemes on the web that work for different types of content. (Subscriptions, donations, subsidies (both corporate and governmental), patrons, etc.) >Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well It pretty much already exists in the form of Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
- idanb 10y ago
  Content creators get effectively zero income / revenues from any of the services you listed. Patreon is attempting to do some cool things there and I think are getting some great results, as are crowdfunding approaches. However, people I know who have gotten syndication of content on any given video platform don't really get much in the way of return unless it's a huge hit - so it's hard to get quality content which is why a lot of those guys are producing exclusive content, or funding it. In terms of music, yeah - artists are making nothing, and the services are making nothing too, but that's a whole different story. There has been a failure, in my opinion, of successful monetization of valuable content on the net. I don't disagree with you that there are a plethora of monetization schemes that are very effective on the web. However, given the cost of content creation usually content is a loss leader for a separate business model / or business entirely. I think it just leads to crappy content, since now pretty much every article has some kind of agenda and there's little journalism actually taking place. I actually really like Vice for this reason - I think they've found a niche where people are willing to pay for quality content. Same for the Information, which produces terrific journalism and great long form stuff.

godmodus 10y ago

a great idea

robl97 10y ago

we did a consumer survey in April (adblocksurvey.com) that suggested a range of 10-15% of people would pay for a subscription for content. Based on that we think that adblocking should be monetized by a subscription/tip combo (optimal.com is kind of a hybrid + we also have a really good iOS 10 ad blocker that uses DNS) AND we need to fix ads. there are several companies in this space and we all talk to each other about how to solve some of these problems - I hope to speak to Brad at CoinTent soon and share some of our ideas. I think there are many of us that want a sustainable solution (and obviously feel we can play a part in building that, but I'm also realistic that none of us can do it by ourselves, this includes getting publishers on board!) that is less prone to abuse than some of the 'whitelisting' schemes we see out there today.

deleted 10y ago

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davemel37 10y ago

The more I think about services like this, the more I think everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way. People are thinking about the problem, as a)it costs money to produce great content, b) great content should be supported by people who enjoy that content, and c) ads and other current monetization efforts are annoying/bad/potentially dangerous for users. So, the obvious solution, which from my perspective (has not and will not work at scale) is, "have people pay to block ads and give the money to publishers, or have publishers offer premium ad-free content. The thing that all of these ideas are missing is the switching cost to find other interesting content is next to nothing. There is already too much content bombarding us, and I have no problem reading someone elses content for free. Even if it means missing out on a headline that caught my attention. All I need to do is go back to my facebook newsfeed, or HN, and find 50 other articles I am interested in reading. I do think there is a solution out there, but I don't think it will come from paying to block ads (which feels like an exortion racket) or paying for article you like. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I think a great solution for everyone involved would be to charge money to share the content. Charging for distribution and licensing content has always been a money maker for publishers, why not charge for social distribution. My idea: Donate between $0.05 and $100 to share an article. Your post would say, "I just paid $1.25 to share this article, it's that good!" This solves multiple problems. a)the quality of what gets shared will go up, which in turn would make the shares much more valuable in terms of building an engaged audience and your own social cred and validation that you are seeking when you share. b)the amount you pay to share would reflect how much you liked the content. (i.e. an incredibly funny video that I want all my friends to see would be worth a few bucks to share, whereas a semi interesting one would be only $0.05...and in turn, my friends will learn to only watch my large donation shares... and the ratings of the content can be quantified by the audience. (i.e. this article generated $3450 in shares tells me much more than 34,500 people shared it.) Making this frictionless would be difficult and getting publishers to risk their "virality" would be hard to sell...but, it's a crazy enough idea it just might work. After all, the switching costs of not sharing an article you really want to share is much greater than paying to see content in the first place or paying a monthly fee when the problem is not gnawing at you in the moment.

notahacker 10y ago

rayalez 10y ago

Excellent idea, I've been waiting for something like this to happen for months! It is clearly obvious that the system like this needs to exist, and I'm sure that the company that succeeds at implementing it will be huge. I really love how you are going about doing it, and I wish you luck! The big challenge of a system like that that I see, is getting users on board. To me it seems that the best solution is to allow publishers to "reward" subscribers with additional premium content. Are you planning to implement something like this?

bradcoin 10y ago
Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad to hear you believe in the idea and want to see it be successful. I agree that getting users on board is the biggest challenge. Premium content is certainly one additional way to get more users on board (and we've actually built a product that let's websites gate access / sell premium content, too!). I think there are actually a few ways we can give users more value by connecting them with the sites they love even more, so we're definitely thinking about how to bridge that connection! Let us know if you have other ideas or specific things you'd want to see.

jacques_chester 10y ago

Ah, another competitor. There's Google Contributor, that thing that Flattr launched, Webpass.io and forget the rest. I've been working on the same model: take a subscription, divvy it out according to usage. The problem is that, apart from Google (who can just block their own ads), there is no easy way to prevent falsified visits intended to inflate revenues of bad actors. Most schemes have either relied on wishful thinking or working within walled gardens (Contributor is closer to the latter). It so happens that I patented a protocol for preventing exactly this problem. It can show that a user made a request for a resource without either of the user or the publisher being able to forge the record. My mechanism requires a browser extension, simply because there needs to be a secure environment. By design, the publisher is unable to track you based on the protocol. Also by design, the protocol allows access through paywalls without needing to reveal user identity. Interested folks are invited to email me: jacques@robojar.com

HaloZero 10y ago
Can you clarify what bad actors you're talking about? The $5/month goes to whoever I visit the most (I am assuming this is not collective across all their users). Are you're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by redirecting my traffic?
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  > Are you're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by redirecting my traffic? By pretending to be you. Capturing your visit and replaying it. Tweaking details. Redirecting. Performing unseen requests in the background. Most notably, trying to override the tracking code by side-injecting their own to capture your identifying tokens (which is why you need an extension). There are countermeasures to all the attacks and to some as yet unanticipated, but it takes a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds in each step from the request to the response. And that's what I did.
  - criddell 10y ago
    > a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds in each step from the request to the response Sounds expensive. Does it scale?

criddell 10y ago

Advertisers have been building profiles of users for 20 years now with the promise that relevant ads aren't annoying and can be valuable. I think it's time to give up. Billboard companies and People magazine are able to sell ads without knowing who saw the ad. Why do advertisers online suddenly need to know everything about me? Billions have been spent building crappy ad-tech and to assemble profiles and I'd be surprised if it's been a net gain overall when you factor in the externalities of it all (tracking, power consumption, bandwidth usage, malware, etc...). I feel no ethical issues with using my DVR to skip ads, u-block to stop tracking in my browser, or changing the radio station in my car when an ad starts playing. /rant

pigpigs 10y ago
Advertising in my experience as an end user has been very ineffective. The ads that I see on Facebook are very obviously based on my browsing history/cookies - I look at a mechanical keyboard on Lazada and decide to not buy it. Next I go to Facebook and get ads about a keyboard on Lazada - no discounts, exact same model. It could've shown me similar keyboards, gave me a lower price, or anything that adds value than just showing me the exact same thing I just decided not to buy. Advertising for the sake of letting people know something exists is not particularly valuable to the end user, and most of the time they are not even able to predict correctly what people are interested in. Has anyone actually bought something because of an advertisement?
- glandium 10y ago
  There's the worse (and very common) case: you decide to buy it, and still see ads about that keyboard you just bought, in case, you know, you'd want another (and even if you did, isn't having it in front of you and liking it more efficient than an ad?).

slester 10y ago

You can't get me to enable ads unless I'm assured they are not delivering malware. If you can't do that, count me out.