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> Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require compensating all of these companies I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contrib

> Any payments to avoid ads served by these companies would require compensating all of these companies I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work; the publisher integrates Google's contributor code in such a way that if you pay them, they don't show you any ads, no need to worry about the ad ecosystem. > People want to maintain their privacy I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US. > It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser Brave is really killing it with their user numbers, right?

cptskippy 9y ago
> I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work No, I understand perfectly well how it works. If you pay Google, then Google doesn't show you ads and it gives the Content Creator a cut. Google is part of the Ad ecosystem. Contributor not only excludes other Ad providers from participating, it also requires the Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem. And Google is still gathering metadata about you. So who benefits? Google has compelled Content Creators to join it's Ad Network, Google has compelled you to disable your Ad Blocker under the guise of compensating Content Creators, Google gets paid whether it serves an ad or not, and Google gets to track you in ways it couldn't with your Ad Blocker up. You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I'm sure it will work just fine with whatever Google Ships in Chrome though.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  > Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem I don't think there has been any indication of this one way or another, and I'd be sort of surprised if this is the tack they're taking. We'll see how it turns out, but it doesn't sound (to me) like they are compelling companies to show Google ads, merely providing the paywall technology. > You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, so I have no idea where you're getting this idea from.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    > I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, It is not an either or situation. Google wants to track you and get paid for doing so. They don't care if the money comes from you or advertisers. They do however care if they can't track you. A contribution system could be setup completely independent of the ad serving system. That however has not been the case. With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      > With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all. "This time is different", or at least I think this time it will be different, since the whole point is to reach users who have ad blockers enabled, I guess we'll see how it goes.
- fragmede 9y ago
  Which, architecturally, is a reasonable objection. But Google runs one of the largest ad networks in the world, so even if a given content creator doesn't run Google's ads, they've probably considered it, and have definitely heard of them. Unless you're deeply involved with online advertising, clicks, impressions, CTR, CPI, cost-per-action, cost-per-click are just noise; content creators want to create content, and be compensated for it. It's a different market to chase money from people that actually read their content instead of companies who want to sell their products, and outside of a few large paywalled sites like Bloomberg or WSJ, many attempts to charge for content online have failed - but the conundrum is they don't fail for lack of readers, just lack of readers willing to pay. As far as privacy issues, compared to 2 billion active chrome installs[1], the 611 million people that use ad-blockers[2] is only 30%, assuming they're all using Chrome (which I doubt), and even then, privacy tracking blocklists aren't turned on by default, so the percentage of Internet users that know about the privacy aspect, and care deeply enough about it to do something, is surely smaller still. Google, then, is one of few parties with enough clout to create such a system and possibly prevail. Content creators have already explored a relationship with Google, many end-users already have logins for Gmail, and many have already paid Google directly in some fashion (Google Play store on Android). [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-2-billion-active-chrome-installs/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-... [2] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
ElijahLynn 9y ago
Brave isn't fully launched yet. They are still working on making extensions work via API compatibility. Once they nail extensions, I and a ton of others will switch from Chrome.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  More accurately a subset of super-nerds who care about extensions and privacy will switch from Chrome. For regular people, if Brave somehow started eating meaningful chunks of Google's market share they'd just integrate contributor into Chrome and get roughly the same effect.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Not to mention Brave is written in Electron/JS so it'll perform worse than Chrome does.
    - placeybordeaux 9y ago
      Yeah I gave up on Brave and switched to Opera, it feels about as snappy as chrome to me.
eevilspock 9y ago
>> People want to maintain their privacy > I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US. That's like saying, "I will start believing people don't want viruses when they stop opening attachments, start carefully examining every URL before clicking on it, and verify MD5 checksums before installing any downloads. We don't blame the spread of computer viruses on untechnical users. The creators of operating systems and browsers have the vantage point and the expertise, and are in the best position to do the right thing. But of course profits always come first. The same goes with privacy.
- thxaoe7oiu 9y ago
  Thank you for saying this. I sometimes feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people bring up arguments about how users don't care about privacy, yet when polled, polls tend to show that they care very much about it but are just helpless to do anything about it. [1] [1] http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-thei.html http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-t...
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I guess I should restate my comments to be clearer: I don't think people are willing to sacrifice anything when it comes to privacy, specifically I do not think consumers will pay money to avoid tracking. The study you linked to asked people "whether they would take discounts in exchange for allowing their supermarket to collect information about their grocery purchases" and found 43% of people said yes, but I believe that the conclusion you would draw if you asked people "would they pay more to stop their supermarket from collecting information about their grocery purchases", you would get different data. In the same way that people dislike price discrimination more when it is framed as raising prices on some people rather than giving some people discounts. And I'm sure this behavior will change further when you actually ask people for money and not just whether they would hypothetically pay money.

cptskippy 9y ago

> I think you misunderstood how this iteration of Contributor would work No, I understand perfectly well how it works. If you pay Google, then Google doesn't show you ads and it gives the Content Creator a cut. Google is part of the Ad ecosystem. Contributor not only excludes other Ad providers from participating, it also requires the Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem. And Google is still gathering metadata about you. So who benefits? Google has compelled Content Creators to join it's Ad Network, Google has compelled you to disable your Ad Blocker under the guise of compensating Content Creators, Google gets paid whether it serves an ad or not, and Google gets to track you in ways it couldn't with your Ad Blocker up. You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I'm sure it will work just fine with whatever Google Ships in Chrome though.

Eridrus 9y ago
> Content Creator to sign up to Google's Ad ecosystem I don't think there has been any indication of this one way or another, and I'd be sort of surprised if this is the tack they're taking. We'll see how it turns out, but it doesn't sound (to me) like they are compelling companies to show Google ads, merely providing the paywall technology. > You know god damn well this system won't work with uBlock or any other 3rd Party Ad Blocker. I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, so I have no idea where you're getting this idea from.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  > I think the entire point is to get people using uBlock etc to either turn it off or to pay, It is not an either or situation. Google wants to track you and get paid for doing so. They don't care if the money comes from you or advertisers. They do however care if they can't track you. A contribution system could be setup completely independent of the ad serving system. That however has not been the case. With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    > With all iterations of Contributor before this, if you had Ad Blocker enabled then Contributor did not work at all. "This time is different", or at least I think this time it will be different, since the whole point is to reach users who have ad blockers enabled, I guess we'll see how it goes.
fragmede 9y ago
Which, architecturally, is a reasonable objection. But Google runs one of the largest ad networks in the world, so even if a given content creator doesn't run Google's ads, they've probably considered it, and have definitely heard of them. Unless you're deeply involved with online advertising, clicks, impressions, CTR, CPI, cost-per-action, cost-per-click are just noise; content creators want to create content, and be compensated for it. It's a different market to chase money from people that actually read their content instead of companies who want to sell their products, and outside of a few large paywalled sites like Bloomberg or WSJ, many attempts to charge for content online have failed - but the conundrum is they don't fail for lack of readers, just lack of readers willing to pay. As far as privacy issues, compared to 2 billion active chrome installs[1], the 611 million people that use ad-blockers[2] is only 30%, assuming they're all using Chrome (which I doubt), and even then, privacy tracking blocklists aren't turned on by default, so the percentage of Internet users that know about the privacy aspect, and care deeply enough about it to do something, is surely smaller still. Google, then, is one of few parties with enough clout to create such a system and possibly prevail. Content creators have already explored a relationship with Google, many end-users already have logins for Gmail, and many have already paid Google directly in some fashion (Google Play store on Android). [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-2-billion-active-chrome-installs/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/google-says-there-are-now-... [2] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/

ElijahLynn 9y ago

Brave isn't fully launched yet. They are still working on making extensions work via API compatibility. Once they nail extensions, I and a ton of others will switch from Chrome.

scottLobster 9y ago
More accurately a subset of super-nerds who care about extensions and privacy will switch from Chrome. For regular people, if Brave somehow started eating meaningful chunks of Google's market share they'd just integrate contributor into Chrome and get roughly the same effect.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Not to mention Brave is written in Electron/JS so it'll perform worse than Chrome does.
  - placeybordeaux 9y ago
    Yeah I gave up on Brave and switched to Opera, it feels about as snappy as chrome to me.

eevilspock 9y ago

>> People want to maintain their privacy > I will start believing this when people start acting like it rather than just saying it. I would be surprised if the group of people who care enough about their privacy to do anything about it is above 1% of internet users in the US. That's like saying, "I will start believing people don't want viruses when they stop opening attachments, start carefully examining every URL before clicking on it, and verify MD5 checksums before installing any downloads. We don't blame the spread of computer viruses on untechnical users. The creators of operating systems and browsers have the vantage point and the expertise, and are in the best position to do the right thing. But of course profits always come first. The same goes with privacy.

thxaoe7oiu 9y ago
Thank you for saying this. I sometimes feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people bring up arguments about how users don't care about privacy, yet when polled, polls tend to show that they care very much about it but are just helpless to do anything about it. [1] [1] http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-thei.html http://boingboing.net/2015/06/08/internet-users-care-about-t...
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I guess I should restate my comments to be clearer: I don't think people are willing to sacrifice anything when it comes to privacy, specifically I do not think consumers will pay money to avoid tracking. The study you linked to asked people "whether they would take discounts in exchange for allowing their supermarket to collect information about their grocery purchases" and found 43% of people said yes, but I believe that the conclusion you would draw if you asked people "would they pay more to stop their supermarket from collecting information about their grocery purchases", you would get different data. In the same way that people dislike price discrimination more when it is framed as raising prices on some people rather than giving some people discounts. And I'm sure this behavior will change further when you actually ask people for money and not just whether they would hypothetically pay money.