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I'd rather someone implement a tipping API where I can allocate money per website per minute (or hour spent). When the money runs out, depending on the configur
by tabeth 9y ago
I'd rather someone implement a tipping API where I can allocate money per website per minute (or hour spent). When the money runs out, depending on the configuration, the website can choose to serve me the page or ask me to reload (on money for the website)
They get small amounts of micro transactions (I'm talking less than a cent) and I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.
everyone wins!
personally, I believe ads are a disease. if your website isn't worth paying a penny to go to for an hour, then just shut down. a penny an hour could be very sustainable for plenty of sites. take some random forum: 15,000 thousand users per month, let's say the average user goes on for an hour a day, or 30 hours a month. 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. not too shabby. if your website is that awesome up the price to 10 cents and increase your money an order of magnitude.
the problem is the culture of "free", unfortunately.
- ShannonAlther 9y agoThe internet wasn't designed with a mechanism to force clients to pay hosts for server time, unfortunately.
- igobyterry 9y agoNew browser Brave does something similar. https://brave.com/publishers.html https://brave.com/publishers.html
- bastawhiz 9y agoIsn't this essentially the concept behind Brave?
- yohui 9y agoSomething like Google Contributor, which was just relaunched today? https://contributor.google.com https://contributor.google.com Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467702
- Sephr 9y agoThat is "pay to block ads" and doesn't cover the OP's use case of "pay to use this site" (afaik, I could be wrong). That use case is important for sites that don't want to use ads in the first place.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoThis is pay the site to replace what they would get from an advertiser.
- hedora 9y agoIt goes through Google, and the whole point of ad blockers (for me) is to block Google's tracking/surveillance crap. So, it is dead on arrival for me and all the other privacy-minded people that run ad blockers, which is a large and increasing percentage of the population.
- sawmurai 9y agoWow ... first you build a massive ad network to create a pain point and than you have users pay for not using it. Brilliant!
- dredmorbius 9y agoTreat information as the public good it is. Pay those who create it. Allow free access to public information. The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.) Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity). Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible. Piecework is actually a tremendous distraction. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
- tabeth 9y agoi'm interested to know why you think information is a public good (implying free to access and consume). surely you can't actually believe that.
- dredmorbius 9y agohttp://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.html#SECTION00060000000000000000 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h... http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf#page=346 http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... J. Stiglitz's essay on p. 308.
- smichel17 9y ago> surely you can't actually believe that Not the grandparent poster, but I would have preferred if you'd either ommitted this part or provided some justification for why you feel it isn't a ~~public~~ non-rivalrous good.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI am the GP poster. Quite this.
- tabeth 9y ago
- kakarot 9y agoWhat about an addon that participates in a BTC mining pool and expends dividends to websites you visit?
- 659087 9y agoCPU/GPU mining of Bitcoin is a thing of the distant past.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoWe prototyped a JS version of that during a hack day, with the intent being that people could elect to donate some mining time to charity while using a client's website. It worked, technically, but the return was basically zero.
- kakarot 9y agoThat's too bad. It was always something I wanted to prototype but I had a feeling it just wouldn't be worth it. Do you have any statistics like average BTC produced per 8 hours of browsing or something?
- duncan_bayne 9y agoI don't remember off-hand; it wasn't my team. I can dig them up if you'd like though, fire me an email at duncan@bayne.id.au. IIRC it worked out something like a few cents for our entire (sizable) user base.
- Safety1stClyde 9y ago> 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. Assume that one person works full time on it. $5,000 a month is $60,000 a year. Subtract hosting costs and it's a relatively low income for one person who has the skills necessary to build and administer such a web site. > not too shabby It is actually a little shabby.
- thelittleone 9y ago>It is actually a little shabby. Perhaps in many parts of the US, but plenty of places elsewhere in the world, this is a really attractive salary.
- tabeth 9y agohosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done). I think 5K a month is more than appropriate. you're greatly overestimating the difficulty of setting up a forum and the costs to have 15,000 active accounts with 1 hour viewing time.
- Safety1stClyde 9y ago> hosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done). Given the above is true, I have a proposition for you: I will pay you whatever you consider fair payment for fifteen minutes of your time to set me up a web site with an income of $5,000 dollars a month.
- aus8aeouns 9y agoWhat an idiotic response. He didn't say if you spend 15 minutes setting up the site you will make $5,000 per month. He said if you have content that 15,000 people a month find valuable, and if you could charge them 1 cent per hour on the site, you could make $5,000/month and that the setup costs were negligible. You're actively being ignorant. Just stop it.
- usaphp 9y ago> I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites. But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? So you will be paying to view a site that you have never seen before, this will limit discoverability of new sites imo
- tabeth 9y agounder this scheme any smart website owner would allow certain amounts of usage to be for free, and optimize discoverability for things that are of high value, a win for both them and the viewer.
- SturgeonsLaw 9y agoWhich isn't really all that different from the paper magazine model. Yeah, you might risk your five bucks on that first purchase of Time, but you'll know soon enough if you ever want to spend it again.
- usaphp 9y agoI don't want to pay money to read a website that I have never seen before.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago> But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.
- Sephr 9y agoCharging money isn't a great solution as it's too complicated and fee-ridden to be of value to low income users. P2P CDNs are one solution, but they aren't perfect either. They may be a lot easier to adopt than monetary roadblocks though. In the future, a combination of mandatory P2P CDN participation and a monetary P2P CDN opt-out fee may be the best compromise. No ads, and everyone is actually helping host the website (be it through their own personal bandwidth and storage or through monetary means).
- tabeth 9y agoI don't see how charging money is any more complicated than serving ads. Couldn't you trivially implement this with a NEED_TIP header and some javascript on the website that makes sure the user has paid (there are plenty of ways to implement that).
- JediWing 9y agoHttp status code 402 - payment required
- kbenson 9y agoFor some types of site, hosting is a big portion of the cost. For others, content production is. For example, I doubt hosting fees are the real cost for most news organizations. It's likely a huge percentage of the cost for something like imgur.
- visarga 9y agoIf you pay a small amount for each page load, then you start censoring many of your clicks. Also, websites would do any shady thing to keep you longer. Money are a large influence on everyone's behavior.