4 ms·

Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me

19 points by saimiam 9y ago

We recently launched an adblocking product which saves you data on your cellular and Wifi plans. As we were working on Datajoy, we also understood that for creative people, adblocking sucks big time. The more people block ads, the less ad revenue websites make. Well, we at Datajoy figured we would try to play fair by paying for content we currently view for free. We are calling it the "F-U, Pay Me" model (FUPM). You can set yourself up to receive payments from users of Datajoy with minimal effort (NO profile creation necessary!) by following the instructions on the FUPM page (https://datajoy.us/fupm.html https://datajoy.us/fupm.html). As our users visit your site, we will PayPal you for every visit at 1c/visit on the 1st of every month. Once you do that, it would be great if you could come back this post and let us know that you have set yourself up for FUPM. Thanks!

quickthrower2 9y ago
That has to be a big chicken and egg problem.
- saimiam 9y ago
  Not sure what you mean. If no one sets themselves up for payments, we don't lose any money while also continuing to block ads. Maybe I'm being dense but I don't see the chicken/egg issue.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Maybe I misunderstood the model. But i would guess you'd need lots of relevant sites offering to sell access to their content to make it worth a reader signing up. But for the sites to use your system they'd want to know there are lots of readers signed up so they'll make a reasonable amount of money.
    - saimiam 9y ago
      Oh, i see what you mean. In some distant future when a lot of people are using Datajoy(DJ) to block ads, content creators will (hopefully) want to let in DJ users despite them blocking ads. The usual solution to a chicken/egg problem is to aggressively solve for one side of the equation and hope the other side is forced to engage. In the case of adblocking, the users of adblockers are actively seeking tools to block ads which means the content creators will be motivated to engage with adblock providers. Does this make sense?
      - quickthrower2 9y ago
        Yes I see. That makes sense. Thanks
timvdalen 9y ago
Sounds interesting, but I don't really get where the money is coming from. I don't see any paid plans for Datajoy.
- saimiam 9y ago
  As of now, we are funding the payouts ourselves. Not scalable for sure so when it starts pinching the pocket, we'll have to figure out how to continue paying content creators.
  - gtardini 9y ago
    i like the concept very much, but what's your idea for a sustainable future revenue model?
    - saimiam 9y ago
      We are looking into a few possibilities 1. Users pay a standard, fixed monthly rate into a pool from which we pay site owners. We hope this works like insurance where sporadic users underwrite power users and everyone wins. 2. Bring in Wall Street and public universities to underwrite the internet. Hitherto, the internet has been the domain of ad companies. For example, the stock market would benefit greatly from knowing the true health of companies but they are currently shut out since ad companies have a lock on raw data. Similarly, imagine the sheer scientific horsepower we can unleash if any Ph.D student could just firehose raw (depersonalized) internet data to identify patterns. 3. Present hype aside, a Coin may actually work to underwrite an ad free internet. Instead of blue skies ideas like replacing http, a browsing based Coin is a real option.
michaelmior 9y ago
It would be nice if there were some prefix or suffix to the file name to avoid collisions. Not that I know of other reasons to create such a file now, but I could see it happening in the future.
- michaelmior 9y ago
  On a related note, I'm confused why the hash is even required. Why not just name this file datajoy.txt or some other static name? It's also a shame that the email has to be the only content in the file. For documentation purposes, it would be nice if subsequent lines would be guaranteed to be ignored so some documentation could be added on why the file exists.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    We just wanted to make sure domain owners were setting up a guaranteed unique file name which was unlikely to be needed by some other service. Also, we wanted to minimize the amount of logic needed to start making payments which is why we ask that the HTML file name be a well known hash function and the content be a single email address. If this content payment protocol gains traction, we would like to use some form of the ACME protocol which Let's Encrypt uses to verify domain ownership.
    - michaelmior 9y ago
      Why would allowing extra content in the file complicate the logic? Either way you're reading the first line of the file for an email. Anyway, I don't want to sound totally down on the idea in general. It's an interesting approach and I'd be happy to see this work!
      - saimiam 9y ago
        Good point @ reading only the first line. Letting people add comments can't derail the parsing too much.
mrguyorama 9y ago
How is Datajoy better than competitors like ublock?
- saimiam 9y ago
  Adblocking is essentially a commodity where companies use community curated blacklists to block ads. Our USP, though it isn't truly unique, is that it is a network level adblocker. No more installing 3-4 apps on each device on your network. Just point your router to our DNS and you're done. In one swoop, can safeguard entire networks - think schools, coffeeshop, airport wifis. We want to bring innovation in a few areas - 1. Technical - Identify and blacklist adservers in near real time 2. Business - become a one-stop subscription service where ad supported websites can make money from DJ(Datajoy) users without forcing them to subscribe to each site. FUPM is an early prototype of where we want to take the internet - don't bother with profile creation and subscriptions. Just tell us where you want to be paid and we'll pay you for every visitor we send to your site. Edit1: forgot to add that we want to do business as a public benefit company. Our vision is to become the Mozilla of adblocking - let others like Adblock distort their original mission by inventing "Acceptable Ads" to make money. We'd like to keep ourselves focused on zero ads along with "Acceptable Use" of the internet.

19 points by saimiam 9y ago

quickthrower2 9y ago

That has to be a big chicken and egg problem.

saimiam 9y ago
Not sure what you mean. If no one sets themselves up for payments, we don't lose any money while also continuing to block ads. Maybe I'm being dense but I don't see the chicken/egg issue.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Maybe I misunderstood the model. But i would guess you'd need lots of relevant sites offering to sell access to their content to make it worth a reader signing up. But for the sites to use your system they'd want to know there are lots of readers signed up so they'll make a reasonable amount of money.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    Oh, i see what you mean. In some distant future when a lot of people are using Datajoy(DJ) to block ads, content creators will (hopefully) want to let in DJ users despite them blocking ads. The usual solution to a chicken/egg problem is to aggressively solve for one side of the equation and hope the other side is forced to engage. In the case of adblocking, the users of adblockers are actively seeking tools to block ads which means the content creators will be motivated to engage with adblock providers. Does this make sense?
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      Yes I see. That makes sense. Thanks

timvdalen 9y ago

Sounds interesting, but I don't really get where the money is coming from. I don't see any paid plans for Datajoy.

saimiam 9y ago
As of now, we are funding the payouts ourselves. Not scalable for sure so when it starts pinching the pocket, we'll have to figure out how to continue paying content creators.
- gtardini 9y ago
  i like the concept very much, but what's your idea for a sustainable future revenue model?
  - saimiam 9y ago
    We are looking into a few possibilities 1. Users pay a standard, fixed monthly rate into a pool from which we pay site owners. We hope this works like insurance where sporadic users underwrite power users and everyone wins. 2. Bring in Wall Street and public universities to underwrite the internet. Hitherto, the internet has been the domain of ad companies. For example, the stock market would benefit greatly from knowing the true health of companies but they are currently shut out since ad companies have a lock on raw data. Similarly, imagine the sheer scientific horsepower we can unleash if any Ph.D student could just firehose raw (depersonalized) internet data to identify patterns. 3. Present hype aside, a Coin may actually work to underwrite an ad free internet. Instead of blue skies ideas like replacing http, a browsing based Coin is a real option.

michaelmior 9y ago

It would be nice if there were some prefix or suffix to the file name to avoid collisions. Not that I know of other reasons to create such a file now, but I could see it happening in the future.

michaelmior 9y ago
On a related note, I'm confused why the hash is even required. Why not just name this file datajoy.txt or some other static name? It's also a shame that the email has to be the only content in the file. For documentation purposes, it would be nice if subsequent lines would be guaranteed to be ignored so some documentation could be added on why the file exists.
- saimiam 9y ago
  We just wanted to make sure domain owners were setting up a guaranteed unique file name which was unlikely to be needed by some other service. Also, we wanted to minimize the amount of logic needed to start making payments which is why we ask that the HTML file name be a well known hash function and the content be a single email address. If this content payment protocol gains traction, we would like to use some form of the ACME protocol which Let's Encrypt uses to verify domain ownership.
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    Why would allowing extra content in the file complicate the logic? Either way you're reading the first line of the file for an email. Anyway, I don't want to sound totally down on the idea in general. It's an interesting approach and I'd be happy to see this work!
    - saimiam 9y ago
      Good point @ reading only the first line. Letting people add comments can't derail the parsing too much.

mrguyorama 9y ago

How is Datajoy better than competitors like ublock?

saimiam 9y ago
Adblocking is essentially a commodity where companies use community curated blacklists to block ads. Our USP, though it isn't truly unique, is that it is a network level adblocker. No more installing 3-4 apps on each device on your network. Just point your router to our DNS and you're done. In one swoop, can safeguard entire networks - think schools, coffeeshop, airport wifis. We want to bring innovation in a few areas - 1. Technical - Identify and blacklist adservers in near real time 2. Business - become a one-stop subscription service where ad supported websites can make money from DJ(Datajoy) users without forcing them to subscribe to each site. FUPM is an early prototype of where we want to take the internet - don't bother with profile creation and subscriptions. Just tell us where you want to be paid and we'll pay you for every visitor we send to your site. Edit1: forgot to add that we want to do business as a public benefit company. Our vision is to become the Mozilla of adblocking - let others like Adblock distort their original mission by inventing "Acceptable Ads" to make money. We'd like to keep ourselves focused on zero ads along with "Acceptable Use" of the internet.