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Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and preve

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or less for most articles, less than 5c for more serious journalism. Maybe 2 cents/day for social media websites. I would guess for most people in the west 30 dollars/month would be the max they are willing to spend and for other countries, ~5 dollars/month. 3. In return for paying for a page there should be 0 off-site advertisements on the page. 4. People are going to say - such a business model will not work because too many decisions. Look at places like South Asia where hundreds of millions of people use prepaid phone services where they get charged for every call/sms at very low rates. And they would not have it any other way. I am sure consumers in the West can be trained similarly.

bhauer 8y ago
If this were sufficiently streamlined, and as you say, part of the browser chrome and not in-page, I feel the same way. I want this, and I know many others do as well. This is essentially what Brave is, as I understand it. But I agree, I'd like an offering from Mozilla in this space because I feel I know and agree with their mission statement and ethics more completely. Other things I'd like: * A small account that is refilled periodically, optionally automatically, like a Starbucks card. * A good UI showing an accounting and summary of my micro payments. * An ability to give more than the asking price, ala Bandcamp and other sites, allowing this to be a mechanism to support content creators one particularly enjoys. * To your first point, an ability to select which information is disclosed by the payment process to the content provider. I should be able to select anything from just the hash/token that proves a payment, to a preferred handle, an email address, a custom message, etc.
dmortin 8y ago
This should be adopted by every browser maker for this to work. If we assume it is adopted then there is the issue that somewhere it is stored what sites I visited. It has to be, because it's needed if there is a payment dispute, for example. ("I was charged for that site, but I never visited it.")
- singularity2001 8y ago
  It seems hard, but maybe there is a way to guarantee privacy. Yes, once you try to redeem your lost $0.02 from conman.com people will get to know you; If you just swallow your loss it should be possible to stay anonymous. (Not with BC, so we need a little invention)
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  None of this needs to be stored off-device. With Brave Rewards (in the Brave browser), the list of sites you visit remains on your device. Each month the ANONIZE2 protocol is leveraged to anonymously report time-spent on each domain (via an ad-hoc VPN connection to mask location) and pay those online-properties accordingly. The entire system remains opt-in, user-controlled, and secure. No private information is stored or shared with anybody else.
manigandham 8y ago
This has already been tried and tested for a decade. Blendle is arguably the best version of it today and Google has the Contributor program. I put together a small team to create an adblocker/payment solution a few years ago that used a flat rate with payments proportional to engagement (combination of time and depth) per domain, similar to systems like Spotify (number of plays vs total). It failed because people fundamentally don't want to pay for website content this way. You can't just wave away things like "too many decisions" when that's a serious blocker, especially for something that the entire world has been trained to consider as free. You need to change behavior first. Until then, ads (putting aside implementation and UX issues) are still the most fair, fast, and scalable payments system around.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  It has to be done by browser vendors, otherwise it will not be adopted.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It's not about browsers or tech, the extensions were universally available with a single click on modern browsers.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      Doesn't matter. It needs to be an integral part of the browser.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        Ok, do you have an argument on why you think it doesn't matter? We actually did the work and these are the results. People are not going to start signing up payments into their browsers without some kind of onboarding. An extension installation was the most trivial part of this process compared to actually explaining and convincing them to pay.
    - majewsky 8y ago
singularity2001 8y ago
Yes for the sake of independent content creators please introduce such a system, Mozilla. People might run to Firefox, the first ad-less browser. Other vendors can adopt it later.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  This is why we created Brave Rewards (formerly Brave Payments) in the Brave browser. Today more than 4 million monthly active users are able to support YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and other content creators via pro-rata contributions of Basic Attention Token. Via the ANONIZE2 protocol and ad-hoc VPN connections, users are able to support online content in a low-friction, anonymous, and private manner. We're working on Brave Ads too, which will be an opt-in component of the browser which leverages client-side machine-learning to match ads, reduce fraud, and pay more to content creators. Further, Brave Ads will pay the user for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue. This study is great, follows years of evidence that the web runs on advertising, and that ad-blocking is becoming the new norm. Brave is looking at the horizon, and working on the long-term sustainability problem. Brave Rewards and Brave Ads is showing promise.
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    Wonderful! Sell you tech to Mozilla! (Not to the others) Or become the next Mozilla
user812 8y ago
They really should. The time to do this is now. I don't really know why this did not happen already. The only answer I can think of is lack of people with a vision in the management. Mozilla could leverage a user base of 100 million people. But it's an enourmous challenge to build the bridge between readers and publishers. When you start with the publishers, no one will want to participate because there are no users. When you start with the users, no one will pay because there is no content. So you have to slowly create a momentum. Another problem is that people will probably never pay as much as ads are worth - people don't see that they pay for ads when they buy new shoes for 200 $, but paying only 40$ directly feels like a loss. But the system is extremely inefficient, so middlemen siphon off most of the value (Google, Facebook). Firefox is also in the unique position of being a potential middle man. I think there are enough people who would be happy to support it with a small amount in the beginning, if it feels promising and rewarding. So especially at the beginning users need to get something in return that motivates them. Mozilla could start with creating a welcoming interface which motivates readers to pay small amounts of money. Obviously people are reluctant to pay for something they get for free. So give them something in return directly, even if most publishers are not already on board. Badges and other rewards are possible. It's simply a question of great UI, making it default for everyone, and creating a community vibe around it. What prevents Mozilla from giving paying users some additional features like in-browser Ad-Blocking? It's as simple as forking uBO and letting it run in the background. Then advertize monthly payments with full-fledged privacy, security and browsing improvements thanks to blocking ads. (We are talking about defaults here. So after a new install every new user is greeted with something like "Pay x$ per month and get a completely ad-free web and support your favourite creators and create a new ecosystem for journalism") Then over time when publishers are on board Mozilla could provide the interface that makes communication between both parties possible, similar to what Patreon does. This could for example be done as an experiment in Germany first, where Firefox has 30% market share on Desktop. Reaching 1 Million active users could send a strong signal to publishers to honor paying Firefox users.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  This is happening right now, with Brave and Brave Rewards. You're 100% correct though that this can be a difficult thing to stand-up, if not done correctly. In the Brave Rewards model, much of the revenue is additive. The site itself (or YouTube/Twitch channel) doesn't have to do any heavy lifting to participate. Users of the Brave browser who opt into Brave Rewards are given a monthly grant of BAT (from the 300M User Growth Pool) for the purpose of supporting their favorite content creators. Contributions are based on local data; no opportunity to leak data to Brave or any other party. Settlement takes place via the ANONIZE2 protocol to protect the user's identity. Furthermore, as data comes out of the other end of the ANONIZE2 protocol, it does so over an ad-hoc VPN connection established to protect the user's location information. As was stated earlier though, the web runs on advertising. But advertising has been co-opted to do a great deal of harm. Not only that, but it has been plagued by abuse and fraud, as well as countless middle-men taking undue revenue. Brave is also standing up a consent-based (user must opt-in) advertising model wherein data is stored locally (your browser knows enough about you to do the heavy lifting itself; nobody else needs to know your information). Ads are matched locally as well via machine-learning operating on browser data. Users are compensated for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue goes to the user themselves. Brave currently has more than 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million downloads on Android itself. We have also verified more than 20,000 properties in the Attention Token market. We're growing quickly, and looking forward to a more private and sustainable web in the future.
codetrotter 8y ago
> Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. Brave Browser are doing this, and have integrated support for a cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ Personally I found their browser to be a bit too buggy on iOS though, so on my iPhone I’ve stuck with Safari (Firefox for iOS is buggy too). On my laptops and desktops I am sticking with Firefox because last I checked Brave was either unavailable or didn’t work well enough on FreeBSD. Nonetheless I commend Brave for doing what they do :)
GW150914 8y ago
People will just “pirate” the web. As for no ads, people who want that experience already get it for free. Given the incredibly low quality of most ad supported content, maybe the real solution is for much of it to die.
gdhbcc 8y ago
That will never work because companies will always try to double dip. See cable tv
Animats 8y ago
micro-payment system This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them.
- privong 8y ago
  > This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them. All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. I think it's still a worthwhile discussion. Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences. And since in both cases (ads, micropayments) the side collecting the money is the one pushing them. So discounting micropayments solely on this basis isn't really a good way to discriminate.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    While I agree micropayments should be persued more, personally I've seen many MANY users that love when things are free (as in money).
  - jasode 8y ago
    >All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. Yes, it does seem that way because nobody actually says, "Please please give ads because I love them!" Instead, the correct way to frame what users really want is to separate "stated preferences" from revealed preferences.[1] The stated preference, of course, is for users to complain about ads and loathe them. Another source of stated preferences is marketing surveys and questionnaires. But the revealed preference is different because it's the observation of what really people do instead of what they say they'll do. Most would rather watch youtube for free rather than pay $9.99 for YoutubeRed. Same for Spotify free tier with ads rather than $120 a year Spotify Premium. Most would rather read the 5 free articles with ads from New York Times rather than pay a subscription. Another interesting example was Amazon's Kindle e-reader. They had a version with ads (what they call "with Special Offers") for $114 ... and one without ads for $139. More buyers chose the device with ads.[2] Did Kindle users want ads?!? Of course not. But they valued the $25 savings more than the the ad-free experience. Basically, they "do want ads" -- in a roundabout way. The micropayments enthusiasm doesn't really change the consumers' priority of "free with ads" over "pay for zero ads". People really really like the economics of "free". Unless micropayments is $0.00 -- which would be an oxymoron -- it will always have that economic handicap to widespread adoption. >Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences. One unintended consequence is that authors and creators end up with less revenue if they restrict their output to only subscribers making micropayments. [1] https://www.beyondcostplus.com/blog/stated-vs-revealed-preferences-pricing https://www.beyondcostplus.com/blog/stated-vs-revealed-prefe... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385398,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385398,00.asp
akira2501 8y ago
> less than 5c for more serious journalism. I have always hated this idea. It turns the editorial role into a search engine optimization role and I can only see journalism as a whole suffering for it. I work in broadcast where we still have a sales staff and do manual placement of our advertising in our content. I honestly don't understand what would be wrong with this model. Larger websites are entirely capable of hiring a sales and traffic departments, selling advertisements to clients directly, and then placing and trafficing those advertisements directly from their own website. In my mind, this would net them a larger share of the profits, completely disable ad-blocking on their site, and relieve editors from having to generate populist content to keep their jobs. Also, I wouldn't have to attach some new kind of payment account to my web-browser.
wildfire 8y ago
Are you intentionally unaware that they have been doing this ( C.f. webpayments API)? Or is this work going to be a complete surprise to you? I know https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Web_Payments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Web_Payments only mentions 2017 but this stuff has been in play since 2015.
- danShumway 8y ago
  Web Payments doesn't address micropayments or actual payment authorization. It's just a standard way to collect and submit data.
  - jonathansampson 8y ago
    As great as Web Payments is, there are obvious problems with the system (largely around privacy and anonymity). At Brave we launched a similar system on the BAT (ERC20) token. In Brave Rewards (formerly Brave Payments), users are able to (via ANONIZE2 and ad-hoc VPN connections) anonymously contribute to content creators based on attention distribution. If the browser spent 10% of it's time viewing the content from one particular YouTuber, 10% of the user's monthly BAT budget would go to the content creator. This system leverages the pseudononymous nature of the blockchain to offset the cost of user an ad-blocker. Low friction, privacy, and secure.
camgunz 8y ago
I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropayments in mobile apps were bad, just wait until it's the web and there is no Google or Apple to crack down on it. Low-income people and people in developing countries already experience a dramatically different web than those of us in the US with engineer salaries. I worry that adding micropayments into the mix would just widen the gap. The system I would prefer would be progressive ISP costs based on income. So if you're a DINK household in the US midwest making > $200k a year, your internet costs $400/mo. If you're a single parent in a major US city making < $50k a year, your internet is free. All ISPs then pay money to content providers based on usage -- so if 80% of your traffic went to Breitbart, 40% of your profit earmarked for content providers goes to Breitbart. The other half is distributed evenly across all the content providers loaded by your users. Also ISPs should be regulated like public utilities and all of the "profits" should go either to their communities or content providers, but that feels unattainable in the near future.
- 43920 8y ago
  Depending on how this is set up, this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites, though. In order to make any money, you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP, and if they decided they didn't like your content, they could prevent you from collecting any revenue, effectively shutting your site down. (In fact, a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization, although that doesn't have quite as much of an effect as blocking ad revenue does).
  - camgunz 8y ago
    A few things: > this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. > you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. > a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.
deevolution 8y ago
You might be describing the Brave browser and BAT tokens...
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  Agreed (Disclaimer: I work on the Brave browser)
Leszek 8y ago
As I understand it, this was the premise of cable TV - pay for your cable, and in return you get no ads. Yet, here we are with ads on cable, because it turned out to be more profitable to both charge and show ads than just do one or the other.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > As I understand it, this was the premise of cable TV - pay for your cable, and in return you get no ads. No, that was never the case, it seems to be a myth that started getting repeated a lot in the last decade; at least, I've never heard of it before it started getting used as a “historical precedent” in discussing online advertising trends, despite is ahistoricity. What you originally paid for with cable was access to channels, largely existing broadcast channels: not everyone was choose enough to the transmitter to get good (or even usable) broadcast reception, even when they were nominally in the media market. From very early on, IIRC, the were (ad-supported) cable-only channels for which cable was the only means of access. Over time those became the main thing you paid for cable for. Commercial-free premium channels were a later development, which you paid for (and still do) on top of cable (though they may be bundled into higher tiers). But commercial free service was never the key value proposition of cable.
  - Leszek 8y ago
    Fair enough, thanks for the correction.
danShumway 8y ago
I've commented a similar question elsewhere, but what is a page view? Is it an HTML request? It would need to be, otherwise sites will just spam AJAX requests in the background. But if we make it an HTML request, will that work with SPA architectures? If you paginate an article between 5 pages, is each of those a separate view? What if the page itself triggers a redirect or a refresh? Does that count? Will this work for video/audio content? If I have two videos on the same page, will they get charged separately, or do I need another HTML request between them? Does the length of the video matter? What if I have auto-play on a playlist? Then as a site operator, I'm triggering the refresh and play myself, same as above, so does that count? If not, how do we allow users to autoplay a playlist of songs/videos while still paying the site? How does this work for games? If someone leaves Cookie Clicker open for 15 hours, should that count as a single page view? You can build different systems that tackle these problems differently. But that's exactly the problem. The problem with standardization is that you need a solution that works for everyone. Micropayments are interesting. I have my doubts about them, but they might be worth experimenting with. Building them directly into a browser is a bad idea. If we're going to standardize anything, we should standardize the payments themselves. The biggest barrier to sites setting up their own micropayment systems is that web payments are still a horrible pain for both site operators and users. Web payments are insecure, come with prohibitive fees that make it difficult to collect <1$ charges, etc... We should embrace the Extensible Web Manifesto and solve that problem, and then allow the community to try out different payment models on its own until we understand the problem better.
naravara 8y ago
>Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. >1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. This is honestly the first and only legitimate use for crypto-currency anyone has ever presented. Unfortunately that whole field is too full-up with investor speculation nonsense and overblown utopian fantasies to come to any use.
8bitsrule 8y ago
I like the idea of micropayments. I also like the idea of the user being able to choose to make a micropayment, and choose the size of that payment, for some piece of content. IMO, letting the reader/user reward individual pieces is much more useful feedback than website-access payments. A site which is mostly crap could then discover what is drawing people, and could reform its editorial choices intelligently. Subscriptions, on the other hand, reward the status quo.

bhauer 8y ago

If this were sufficiently streamlined, and as you say, part of the browser chrome and not in-page, I feel the same way. I want this, and I know many others do as well. This is essentially what Brave is, as I understand it. But I agree, I'd like an offering from Mozilla in this space because I feel I know and agree with their mission statement and ethics more completely. Other things I'd like: * A small account that is refilled periodically, optionally automatically, like a Starbucks card. * A good UI showing an accounting and summary of my micro payments. * An ability to give more than the asking price, ala Bandcamp and other sites, allowing this to be a mechanism to support content creators one particularly enjoys. * To your first point, an ability to select which information is disclosed by the payment process to the content provider. I should be able to select anything from just the hash/token that proves a payment, to a preferred handle, an email address, a custom message, etc.

dmortin 8y ago

This should be adopted by every browser maker for this to work. If we assume it is adopted then there is the issue that somewhere it is stored what sites I visited. It has to be, because it's needed if there is a payment dispute, for example. ("I was charged for that site, but I never visited it.")

singularity2001 8y ago
It seems hard, but maybe there is a way to guarantee privacy. Yes, once you try to redeem your lost $0.02 from conman.com people will get to know you; If you just swallow your loss it should be possible to stay anonymous. (Not with BC, so we need a little invention)
jonathansampson 8y ago
None of this needs to be stored off-device. With Brave Rewards (in the Brave browser), the list of sites you visit remains on your device. Each month the ANONIZE2 protocol is leveraged to anonymously report time-spent on each domain (via an ad-hoc VPN connection to mask location) and pay those online-properties accordingly. The entire system remains opt-in, user-controlled, and secure. No private information is stored or shared with anybody else.

manigandham 8y ago

This has already been tried and tested for a decade. Blendle is arguably the best version of it today and Google has the Contributor program. I put together a small team to create an adblocker/payment solution a few years ago that used a flat rate with payments proportional to engagement (combination of time and depth) per domain, similar to systems like Spotify (number of plays vs total). It failed because people fundamentally don't want to pay for website content this way. You can't just wave away things like "too many decisions" when that's a serious blocker, especially for something that the entire world has been trained to consider as free. You need to change behavior first. Until then, ads (putting aside implementation and UX issues) are still the most fair, fast, and scalable payments system around.

singularity2001 8y ago
It has to be done by browser vendors, otherwise it will not be adopted.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It's not about browsers or tech, the extensions were universally available with a single click on modern browsers.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Doesn't matter. It needs to be an integral part of the browser.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Ok, do you have an argument on why you think it doesn't matter? We actually did the work and these are the results. People are not going to start signing up payments into their browsers without some kind of onboarding. An extension installation was the most trivial part of this process compared to actually explaining and convincing them to pay.
  - majewsky 8y ago

singularity2001 8y ago

Yes for the sake of independent content creators please introduce such a system, Mozilla. People might run to Firefox, the first ad-less browser. Other vendors can adopt it later.

jonathansampson 8y ago
This is why we created Brave Rewards (formerly Brave Payments) in the Brave browser. Today more than 4 million monthly active users are able to support YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and other content creators via pro-rata contributions of Basic Attention Token. Via the ANONIZE2 protocol and ad-hoc VPN connections, users are able to support online content in a low-friction, anonymous, and private manner. We're working on Brave Ads too, which will be an opt-in component of the browser which leverages client-side machine-learning to match ads, reduce fraud, and pay more to content creators. Further, Brave Ads will pay the user for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue. This study is great, follows years of evidence that the web runs on advertising, and that ad-blocking is becoming the new norm. Brave is looking at the horizon, and working on the long-term sustainability problem. Brave Rewards and Brave Ads is showing promise.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  Wonderful! Sell you tech to Mozilla! (Not to the others) Or become the next Mozilla

user812 8y ago

They really should. The time to do this is now. I don't really know why this did not happen already. The only answer I can think of is lack of people with a vision in the management. Mozilla could leverage a user base of 100 million people. But it's an enourmous challenge to build the bridge between readers and publishers. When you start with the publishers, no one will want to participate because there are no users. When you start with the users, no one will pay because there is no content. So you have to slowly create a momentum. Another problem is that people will probably never pay as much as ads are worth - people don't see that they pay for ads when they buy new shoes for 200 $, but paying only 40$ directly feels like a loss. But the system is extremely inefficient, so middlemen siphon off most of the value (Google, Facebook). Firefox is also in the unique position of being a potential middle man. I think there are enough people who would be happy to support it with a small amount in the beginning, if it feels promising and rewarding. So especially at the beginning users need to get something in return that motivates them. Mozilla could start with creating a welcoming interface which motivates readers to pay small amounts of money. Obviously people are reluctant to pay for something they get for free. So give them something in return directly, even if most publishers are not already on board. Badges and other rewards are possible. It's simply a question of great UI, making it default for everyone, and creating a community vibe around it. What prevents Mozilla from giving paying users some additional features like in-browser Ad-Blocking? It's as simple as forking uBO and letting it run in the background. Then advertize monthly payments with full-fledged privacy, security and browsing improvements thanks to blocking ads. (We are talking about defaults here. So after a new install every new user is greeted with something like "Pay x$ per month and get a completely ad-free web and support your favourite creators and create a new ecosystem for journalism") Then over time when publishers are on board Mozilla could provide the interface that makes communication between both parties possible, similar to what Patreon does. This could for example be done as an experiment in Germany first, where Firefox has 30% market share on Desktop. Reaching 1 Million active users could send a strong signal to publishers to honor paying Firefox users.

jonathansampson 8y ago
This is happening right now, with Brave and Brave Rewards. You're 100% correct though that this can be a difficult thing to stand-up, if not done correctly. In the Brave Rewards model, much of the revenue is additive. The site itself (or YouTube/Twitch channel) doesn't have to do any heavy lifting to participate. Users of the Brave browser who opt into Brave Rewards are given a monthly grant of BAT (from the 300M User Growth Pool) for the purpose of supporting their favorite content creators. Contributions are based on local data; no opportunity to leak data to Brave or any other party. Settlement takes place via the ANONIZE2 protocol to protect the user's identity. Furthermore, as data comes out of the other end of the ANONIZE2 protocol, it does so over an ad-hoc VPN connection established to protect the user's location information. As was stated earlier though, the web runs on advertising. But advertising has been co-opted to do a great deal of harm. Not only that, but it has been plagued by abuse and fraud, as well as countless middle-men taking undue revenue. Brave is also standing up a consent-based (user must opt-in) advertising model wherein data is stored locally (your browser knows enough about you to do the heavy lifting itself; nobody else needs to know your information). Ads are matched locally as well via machine-learning operating on browser data. Users are compensated for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue goes to the user themselves. Brave currently has more than 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million downloads on Android itself. We have also verified more than 20,000 properties in the Attention Token market. We're growing quickly, and looking forward to a more private and sustainable web in the future.

codetrotter 8y ago

> Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. Brave Browser are doing this, and have integrated support for a cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ Personally I found their browser to be a bit too buggy on iOS though, so on my iPhone I’ve stuck with Safari (Firefox for iOS is buggy too). On my laptops and desktops I am sticking with Firefox because last I checked Brave was either unavailable or didn’t work well enough on FreeBSD. Nonetheless I commend Brave for doing what they do :)

GW150914 8y ago

People will just “pirate” the web. As for no ads, people who want that experience already get it for free. Given the incredibly low quality of most ad supported content, maybe the real solution is for much of it to die.

gdhbcc 8y ago

That will never work because companies will always try to double dip. See cable tv

Animats 8y ago

micro-payment system This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them.

privong 8y ago
> This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them. All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. I think it's still a worthwhile discussion. Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences. And since in both cases (ads, micropayments) the side collecting the money is the one pushing them. So discounting micropayments solely on this basis isn't really a good way to discriminate.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  While I agree micropayments should be persued more, personally I've seen many MANY users that love when things are free (as in money).
- jasode 8y ago
  >All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. Yes, it does seem that way because nobody actually says, "Please please give ads because I love them!" Instead, the correct way to frame what users really want is to separate "stated preferences" from revealed preferences.[1] The stated preference, of course, is for users to complain about ads and loathe them. Another source of stated preferences is marketing surveys and questionnaires. But the revealed preference is different because it's the observation of what really people do instead of what they say they'll do. Most would rather watch youtube for free rather than pay $9.99 for YoutubeRed. Same for Spotify free tier with ads rather than $120 a year Spotify Premium. Most would rather read the 5 free articles with ads from New York Times rather than pay a subscription. Another interesting example was Amazon's Kindle e-reader. They had a version with ads (what they call "with Special Offers") for $114 ... and one without ads for $139. More buyers chose the device with ads.[2] Did Kindle users want ads?!? Of course not. But they valued the $25 savings more than the the ad-free experience. Basically, they "do want ads" -- in a roundabout way. The micropayments enthusiasm doesn't really change the consumers' priority of "free with ads" over "pay for zero ads". People really really like the economics of "free". Unless micropayments is $0.00 -- which would be an oxymoron -- it will always have that economic handicap to widespread adoption. >Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended consequences. One unintended consequence is that authors and creators end up with less revenue if they restrict their output to only subscribers making micropayments. [1] https://www.beyondcostplus.com/blog/stated-vs-revealed-preferences-pricing https://www.beyondcostplus.com/blog/stated-vs-revealed-prefe... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385398,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385398,00.asp

akira2501 8y ago

> less than 5c for more serious journalism. I have always hated this idea. It turns the editorial role into a search engine optimization role and I can only see journalism as a whole suffering for it. I work in broadcast where we still have a sales staff and do manual placement of our advertising in our content. I honestly don't understand what would be wrong with this model. Larger websites are entirely capable of hiring a sales and traffic departments, selling advertisements to clients directly, and then placing and trafficing those advertisements directly from their own website. In my mind, this would net them a larger share of the profits, completely disable ad-blocking on their site, and relieve editors from having to generate populist content to keep their jobs. Also, I wouldn't have to attach some new kind of payment account to my web-browser.

wildfire 8y ago

Are you intentionally unaware that they have been doing this ( C.f. webpayments API)? Or is this work going to be a complete surprise to you? I know https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Web_Payments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Web_Payments only mentions 2017 but this stuff has been in play since 2015.

danShumway 8y ago
Web Payments doesn't address micropayments or actual payment authorization. It's just a standard way to collect and submit data.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  As great as Web Payments is, there are obvious problems with the system (largely around privacy and anonymity). At Brave we launched a similar system on the BAT (ERC20) token. In Brave Rewards (formerly Brave Payments), users are able to (via ANONIZE2 and ad-hoc VPN connections) anonymously contribute to content creators based on attention distribution. If the browser spent 10% of it's time viewing the content from one particular YouTuber, 10% of the user's monthly BAT budget would go to the content creator. This system leverages the pseudononymous nature of the blockchain to offset the cost of user an ad-blocker. Low friction, privacy, and secure.

camgunz 8y ago

I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropayments in mobile apps were bad, just wait until it's the web and there is no Google or Apple to crack down on it. Low-income people and people in developing countries already experience a dramatically different web than those of us in the US with engineer salaries. I worry that adding micropayments into the mix would just widen the gap. The system I would prefer would be progressive ISP costs based on income. So if you're a DINK household in the US midwest making > $200k a year, your internet costs $400/mo. If you're a single parent in a major US city making < $50k a year, your internet is free. All ISPs then pay money to content providers based on usage -- so if 80% of your traffic went to Breitbart, 40% of your profit earmarked for content providers goes to Breitbart. The other half is distributed evenly across all the content providers loaded by your users. Also ISPs should be regulated like public utilities and all of the "profits" should go either to their communities or content providers, but that feels unattainable in the near future.

43920 8y ago
Depending on how this is set up, this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites, though. In order to make any money, you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP, and if they decided they didn't like your content, they could prevent you from collecting any revenue, effectively shutting your site down. (In fact, a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization, although that doesn't have quite as much of an effect as blocking ad revenue does).
- camgunz 8y ago
  A few things: > this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. > you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. > a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.

deevolution 8y ago

You might be describing the Brave browser and BAT tokens...

jonathansampson 8y ago
Agreed (Disclaimer: I work on the Brave browser)

Leszek 8y ago

As I understand it, this was the premise of cable TV - pay for your cable, and in return you get no ads. Yet, here we are with ads on cable, because it turned out to be more profitable to both charge and show ads than just do one or the other.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> As I understand it, this was the premise of cable TV - pay for your cable, and in return you get no ads. No, that was never the case, it seems to be a myth that started getting repeated a lot in the last decade; at least, I've never heard of it before it started getting used as a “historical precedent” in discussing online advertising trends, despite is ahistoricity. What you originally paid for with cable was access to channels, largely existing broadcast channels: not everyone was choose enough to the transmitter to get good (or even usable) broadcast reception, even when they were nominally in the media market. From very early on, IIRC, the were (ad-supported) cable-only channels for which cable was the only means of access. Over time those became the main thing you paid for cable for. Commercial-free premium channels were a later development, which you paid for (and still do) on top of cable (though they may be bundled into higher tiers). But commercial free service was never the key value proposition of cable.
- Leszek 8y ago
  Fair enough, thanks for the correction.

danShumway 8y ago

I've commented a similar question elsewhere, but what is a page view? Is it an HTML request? It would need to be, otherwise sites will just spam AJAX requests in the background. But if we make it an HTML request, will that work with SPA architectures? If you paginate an article between 5 pages, is each of those a separate view? What if the page itself triggers a redirect or a refresh? Does that count? Will this work for video/audio content? If I have two videos on the same page, will they get charged separately, or do I need another HTML request between them? Does the length of the video matter? What if I have auto-play on a playlist? Then as a site operator, I'm triggering the refresh and play myself, same as above, so does that count? If not, how do we allow users to autoplay a playlist of songs/videos while still paying the site? How does this work for games? If someone leaves Cookie Clicker open for 15 hours, should that count as a single page view? You can build different systems that tackle these problems differently. But that's exactly the problem. The problem with standardization is that you need a solution that works for everyone. Micropayments are interesting. I have my doubts about them, but they might be worth experimenting with. Building them directly into a browser is a bad idea. If we're going to standardize anything, we should standardize the payments themselves. The biggest barrier to sites setting up their own micropayment systems is that web payments are still a horrible pain for both site operators and users. Web payments are insecure, come with prohibitive fees that make it difficult to collect <1$ charges, etc... We should embrace the Extensible Web Manifesto and solve that problem, and then allow the community to try out different payment models on its own until we understand the problem better.

naravara 8y ago

>Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. >1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. This is honestly the first and only legitimate use for crypto-currency anyone has ever presented. Unfortunately that whole field is too full-up with investor speculation nonsense and overblown utopian fantasies to come to any use.

8bitsrule 8y ago

I like the idea of micropayments. I also like the idea of the user being able to choose to make a micropayment, and choose the size of that payment, for some piece of content. IMO, letting the reader/user reward individual pieces is much more useful feedback than website-access payments. A site which is mostly crap could then discover what is drawing people, and could reform its editorial choices intelligently. Subscriptions, on the other hand, reward the status quo.