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And Google tried that with Google Contributor [1], which they shut down mid-January, promising a replacement. I was on that program, paying $10 a month. They r

And Google tried that with Google Contributor [1], which they shut down mid-January, promising a replacement. I was on that program, paying $10 a month. They refunded anything that was left over. IIRC think they habitually refunded $5+. They also showed stats, and IIRC the websites I frequented the most frequently (Ars Technica, multiple times a day), still received only pennies. That's how cheap ads are. I started being a subscriber to some of those websites after. Despite teasing a Contributor replacement "early 2017", nothing has been announced yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

Filligree 10y ago
I used to work on that project. I'm sad that this happened, but mostly I'm annoyed at the public -- the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. It's definitely coming back, though. Just not in quite the same form.
- Ironchefpython 10y ago
  > the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware. My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges. I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap. Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware. That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too. But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
    - Filligree 10y ago
      > But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site. Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first. It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    In Germany and The Netherlands, there is Blendle, which allows you to pay per article: https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk They also have a 9.99 per month subscription, where you get 20 articles daily (I think they are selected through a recommendation system + curation).
  - icantdrive55 10y ago
    "My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges." 1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea. 2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality. 3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about. It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust? 4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed. Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration; "We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders." You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file. I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now. It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card. What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.
    - jrullman 10y ago
      Checkout Privacy.com, I use it for exactly these kind of scenarios. You can generate card numbers that are locked to a single merchant, and you can set transaction limits and delete the card whenever you want. Or you can set it as a "burner" which will only work for a single transaction.
  - badwolf 10y ago
    This is one of my biggest pet peeves (Looking at you NY Times) If you allow me to subscribe to your site/service online, then you better fkn let me manage my subscription (update payment method, deactivate recurring billing, etc...) online as well. You can't even email them. You have to call them, so they can push you onto their retention specialists. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU
- SFJulie 10y ago
  > people don't want to pay cough rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them. That's the base of the free internet model. With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues. And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who? Every internet users. Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers. For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive. But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap. Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you. It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population. Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled. The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins. So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier. And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.
  - tomc1985 10y ago
    > rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them. Funny, F2P gaming is all about the opposite. The whales pay for everyone.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      Who said the whales are rich ? Something like lotteries being a tax on people who don't get math.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      Some of those whales are the folks who sit at casinos spending their social security and eating cat food for the rest of the month. They're not all rich.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  I was happy to pay, and starting using Contributor the moment I found out about it. Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through. On top of that, it showed me the absolutely paltry amount paid out to the sites running the ads. So back came adblock, and Contributor mostly just helped on my mobile browsing. I bought Contributor to contribute to the sites, and some for Google, not majority Google, dribble for sites.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    > Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through. That was a serious problem, I agree, and not one we could do anything about at the time. The problem was, those more-obnoxious ads were mainly not served by Google in the first place. (There may have been a period when Contributor only worked on a subset of Google's ad products, mostly for technical reasons.)
- reitanqild 10y ago
  people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. (You is to be read as Google, not you personally) You didn't even give me a chance! I was actively looking and you denied me, I think because I was European and didn't want to lie or something. And seriously: I only knew of it through HN. Was there ever any campaigns to inform about it? I can't remember seeing a single ad. Never heard about a single talkshow appearance from any of your bosses.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    If I hadn't seen it mentioned deep in a thread here at HN, I would never have seen a single mention of it, either. As it was, I was the only one of the dozens of other techs/devs I know who heard about it. Most were interested once I told them! There must have been zero advertising.
Ironchefpython 10y ago
> the websites I frequented the most frequently [...] still received only pennies. And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price. And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.
- Twisell 10y ago
  I think we might need to call that the Netflix theorem at some point: "If you just ask for the fucking right price, people will pay and great original content can arise"
  - Ironchefpython 10y ago
    Netflix was massively popular because the price was anchored against the price of cable. Americans were used to paying $100/mo or more for a collection of channels of which the majority were never watched. (because... ESPN? I never understood that) So $10/mo looked like a bargain. Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.
    - Twisell 10y ago
      Yeah but if it was like 1$ a month each or 10$ for all newspaper problem solve customers would pay. They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day. New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites. Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies. It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...
komali2 10y ago
I remember the pirate Bay team pushing something like that way back when.
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Flattr: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/adblock-plus-acquires-flattr/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/adblock-plus-acquires-flat...

Filligree 10y ago

I used to work on that project. I'm sad that this happened, but mostly I'm annoyed at the public -- the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. It's definitely coming back, though. Just not in quite the same form.

Ironchefpython 10y ago
> the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware. My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges. I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap. Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  > No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware. That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too. But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    > But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site. Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first. It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.
- danieldk 10y ago
  In Germany and The Netherlands, there is Blendle, which allows you to pay per article: https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk They also have a 9.99 per month subscription, where you get 20 articles daily (I think they are selected through a recommendation system + curation).
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  "My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges." 1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea. 2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality. 3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about. It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust? 4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed. Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration; "We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders." You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file. I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now. It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card. What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.
  - jrullman 10y ago
    Checkout Privacy.com, I use it for exactly these kind of scenarios. You can generate card numbers that are locked to a single merchant, and you can set transaction limits and delete the card whenever you want. Or you can set it as a "burner" which will only work for a single transaction.
- badwolf 10y ago
  This is one of my biggest pet peeves (Looking at you NY Times) If you allow me to subscribe to your site/service online, then you better fkn let me manage my subscription (update payment method, deactivate recurring billing, etc...) online as well. You can't even email them. You have to call them, so they can push you onto their retention specialists. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU
SFJulie 10y ago
> people don't want to pay cough rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them. That's the base of the free internet model. With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues. And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who? Every internet users. Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers. For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive. But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap. Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you. It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population. Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled. The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins. So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier. And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  > rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them. Funny, F2P gaming is all about the opposite. The whales pay for everyone.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Who said the whales are rich ? Something like lotteries being a tax on people who don't get math.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Some of those whales are the folks who sit at casinos spending their social security and eating cat food for the rest of the month. They're not all rich.
Baeocystin 10y ago
I was happy to pay, and starting using Contributor the moment I found out about it. Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through. On top of that, it showed me the absolutely paltry amount paid out to the sites running the ads. So back came adblock, and Contributor mostly just helped on my mobile browsing. I bought Contributor to contribute to the sites, and some for Google, not majority Google, dribble for sites.
- Filligree 10y ago
  > Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through. That was a serious problem, I agree, and not one we could do anything about at the time. The problem was, those more-obnoxious ads were mainly not served by Google in the first place. (There may have been a period when Contributor only worked on a subset of Google's ad products, mostly for technical reasons.)
reitanqild 10y ago
people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount. (You is to be read as Google, not you personally) You didn't even give me a chance! I was actively looking and you denied me, I think because I was European and didn't want to lie or something. And seriously: I only knew of it through HN. Was there ever any campaigns to inform about it? I can't remember seeing a single ad. Never heard about a single talkshow appearance from any of your bosses.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  If I hadn't seen it mentioned deep in a thread here at HN, I would never have seen a single mention of it, either. As it was, I was the only one of the dozens of other techs/devs I know who heard about it. Most were interested once I told them! There must have been zero advertising.

Ironchefpython 10y ago

> the websites I frequented the most frequently [...] still received only pennies. And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price. And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.

Twisell 10y ago
I think we might need to call that the Netflix theorem at some point: "If you just ask for the fucking right price, people will pay and great original content can arise"
- Ironchefpython 10y ago
  Netflix was massively popular because the price was anchored against the price of cable. Americans were used to paying $100/mo or more for a collection of channels of which the majority were never watched. (because... ESPN? I never understood that) So $10/mo looked like a bargain. Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.
  - Twisell 10y ago
    Yeah but if it was like 1$ a month each or 10$ for all newspaper problem solve customers would pay. They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day. New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites. Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies. It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...

komali2 10y ago

I remember the pirate Bay team pushing something like that way back when.

AceJohnny2 10y ago
Flattr: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/adblock-plus-acquires-flattr/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/adblock-plus-acquires-flat...