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Google's original post is super gross. It dismisses the idea that there could be alternate ways to fund content (i.e. micropayments). I get why they promote "fr

• lancesells 7y ago
  I don't see ads being replaced or killed anytime soon. I think regulation and laws are needed where if I'm not using a Google or Facebook product they aren't building and tracking my profile everywhere I go both online and offline. I mean these are massive spyware businesses and they should be called out as such.
• INTPenis 7y ago
  You mentioning micropayments made me think, I would probably pay more than 100 EUR/year for using a Google without ads and tracking (except what I opt-in to). I mean seriously I would probably pay more. I hope regulations from governments help bring google down in size instead of breaking it up for a monopoly. IT has been extremely lucrative.
  • TACIXAT 7y ago
    Yea, I would probably pay on that order of magnitude (hundreds) to get all my internet content per year from trustworthy sources. News articles, videos, community sites (HN, reddit), email (with strong blocking to not waste money), chat apps. I wish I could pay them all some fraction of a cent per page load. I'm sure it would add up to be viable.
• manigandham 7y ago
  The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. This has been the subject of endless discussions over decades and just yesterday there was a large HN conversation over too many video subscriptions causing people to turn to piracy again. Not to mention it negatively affects the vast majority of people who can't afford to pay for everything they consume. It's possible to enable advertising while maintaining privacy and security. What was missing was legal and regulatory forces to push advertisers and adtech into it. Now it's here.
  • d1zzy 7y ago
    I would say it's a combination of: - convenience: do not underestimate it, lots of supporting evidence that people want maximum convenience. Notice how a small UI change as "one click purchase" increased Amazon sales significantly or why they even make/sell those buttons to put around the house to press and refill periodic stuff - access: like I was saying in another reply, it's simply the case that in a lot of situations, users (because of age, location and economic status) simply have no good means to pay electronically - affordability: 10 cent/view pay seem like nothing to us but in many places that can add up to a few USD per month that may be the cost of food of a family for a week. So now you'd have to do geographical location based pricing, dealing with all the crap that comes with it (people using proxies to avoid it, etc)
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Convenience and access have been tried by several startups (including a project that we did a few years back). It's being attempted yet again by the Brave browser with blockchain tech. With micropayments, there's a big problem with decision fatigue. Affordability is the largest factor by far though because most people just cant pay for everything they consume for free today. When you look at video content especially, it can easily add up to several dollars per day in spend.
    • mirimir 7y ago
      > - convenience ... Just run something like a Radius server, which any website could query, and which could log usage. > access: ... Provide a wide variety of payment options. As many VPN services and VPS hosts do. > - affordability: ... I don't know specifics, but I can't imagine how users in places so poor generate the same ad income as users in wealthier places. So just adjust cost/view to generate the same income that the current system does.
• d1zzy 7y ago
  > Google's original post is super gross. It dismisses the idea that there could be alternate ways to fund content (i.e. micropayments). I get why they promote "free content" but it is not free at all when you are trading your attention and privacy. That's probably because they actually have tried it: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta It may seem frustrating for some of us living in nice places, having our own money and access to easily accessible electronic payment systems but for a lot of the world (geographical, age and economic status) that's not available. So while I support being able to have the option to pay to not see ads I also support being able to just see pages (with ads) without having to configure billing, etc. Otherwise a lot of the high value Internet would be only accessible to the group of people I mentioned above and that would be sad (and going against why Internet has penetrated so much of the world). PS: If you think it's hard to stay anonymous in an Internet of ads, I cannot see how you'd be anonymous in one where you have to configure billing which is traceable (by design) to your physical person.
  • TACIXAT 7y ago
    The CPM on ads is a good way to look at this. On YouTube you get anywhere from 25 cents CPM to 4 dollars, usually dependent on where your customers are from. Let's put that on the high side since I'm in the US. Would I rather pay 0.4 cents per video view or see ads? You bet I'll choose to pay that instead. Now that covers the creator costs, Google needs to take a portion of that to run their platform, so let's round it up to 1 whole cent per video. I'm still game. Now, you have to imagine the CPM is directly related to the value of the goods being sold. That scales per country. It's probably not the perfect proxy, but in the same sense that your viewers from other countries pay out different CPMs, they can probably afford different amounts per video. It isn't about anonymity. It's about abuse of data. I'm not mad that I can't make anonymous phone calls, I'm mad that my phone provider sells my real time location data. I am happy to pay a company that preserves privacy and trust them with my information. This is a bit aside though, because I more or less trust Google with my information, I just don't like ads. It's not about anonymity.
    • opportune 7y ago
• summerlight 7y ago
  > It dismisses the idea that there could be alternate ways to fund content (i.e. micropayments). I get why they promote "free content" but it is not free at all when you are trading your attention and privacy. Google have been very concerned about lack of diversity on their profitable business portfolio and this was a seemingly promising idea at the moment, so they actually tried that idea and miserably failed. People don't want to pay a single cent to publishers unless there's a significant value delivered (like music, movie subscriptions) while the majority is okay with using their privacy as currency. If you have a viable proposal on a "micropayment" business, go try and become the next tech giant.
  • kerkeslager 7y ago
    Other funding sources fail on the current market because they're competing with content users think is free. But if browser developers remove the option to pay with privacy, that competitor is removed. Google is one of the companies positioned to make that happen. It's true that people will probably still only pay for things that provide them significant value, but a) low-value content is one of the biggest problems on the internet, so putting those companies out of business is a great result as far as I am concerned, and b) search is obviously high value content, so Google has nothing to worry about.
  • blub 7y ago
    Individual decisions might make sense for individuals, although it's obvious that the level of tracking is now so deep that most people do not understand what is going on and they would be shocked if they knew how they could be taken advantage of. Collectively it's untenable for a single for-profit entity to hold highly personal information on billions of people from all over the world and have a direct, immediate communication channel open to them. These companies have immense power and they need to be brought under control.
  • KptMarchewa 7y ago
    They tried: >For instance, a site like Oxford Reference can charge between 25 to 99 cents for access to a single page of content I want something entirely different. I want to pay what google makes on me watching ads (or 2x that, I don't care), and distribute that to people creating content I watch without me interfering on that process. Essentially, what happens when I listen to music on Spotify.
• justapassenger 7y ago
  > It dismisses the idea that there could be alternate ways to fund content (i.e. micropayments) Because it's not valid alternative. It may work some edge-cases, but there's 0 evidence that it could support economy at the same scale as ads. > We absolutely need a new funding model for the web (to kill ads). We need to rework how ads work, but killing ads is very naive approach. Ads are core part to how world economy operates (and always have been). Calling for killing advertising is only hurting the case - it makes it easy to dismiss, as some crazy hippie talk.
  • _vertigo 7y ago
    I don't want to see ads. Given the alternative between having ads everywhere and paying a fraction of a cent to see content, I would choose the latter. Ads are annoying enough to me that I would absolutely pay a fraction of a cent to not view the ad. I know there are probably a lot of people who would rather be advertised to than pay any non-zero amount to view content. Those people should be able to pay with their attention. Maybe we don't need to kill ads, but having the choice to pay with money would definitely be welcome to people like me.
  • tripzilch 7y ago
    > Ads are core part to how world economy operates (and always have been). I don't think it's at all reasonable to compare the way ads used to be (inert) to the tracking/privacy/malware nightmare that online advertising has become. Just because we've always had some (comparatively mild) forms of advertisement doesn't mean we should put up with this blight.
• alkonaut 7y ago
  I don’t think micropayments will come any time soon. I hope dumb non-tracking ads will make a comeback meanwhile. If it becomes harder and harder to push invasive ad me then more money will end up in dumb ads instead.
  • btilly 7y ago
    Non-tracking ads are not necessarily dumb. The NY Times solution, for example, is to target ads based on relevance to content on the page being delivered. No tracking required, but its relevance to the page can sometimes be more effective than tracking ads. Conversely tracking ads are not necessarily smart. Go shopping for a fridge, then buy one. You'll have fridge ads following you around even though you're not in the market for a fridge any more.
    • jeff_tyrrill 7y ago
      > Go shopping for a fridge, then buy one. You'll have fridge ads following you around even though you're not in the market for a fridge any more. This persistent meme commits the fallacy of believing that every person follows the precise same fact pattern as yourself: Buying a fridge on some predictable, perfectly recurring and invariant schedule. In fact, it is probably far more likely that a person who just bought a fridge will be favorably economically incentivized by an ad for a fridge than a randomly selected person. For one thing, we know that this is a person who will ever influence a decision to buy a fridge (because they in fact did buy a fridge). Many people will never select a fridge in their life (for reasons that include renting a home, moving into a home which already has a fridge, replacing a non-working fridge with whatever a repairperson selects and is thus not influenced by an ad, is not the person in their family who selects a fridge, etc.) A person who just bought a fridge is more likely to return that fridge and buy another than a randomly selected person is likely to buy a fridge in the same time period. A person who just bought a fridge is more likely to be a decision-maker in selecting another fridge in the near-term than a randomly selected person (for reasons that include: buying another fridge for their garage, buying one for their business, recommending one to their contacts). Buying a fridge is a rare event that probably absolutely correlates positively to buying another fridge.
• tzs 7y ago
  Another barrier to models where users pay directly is taxes. If you come to my site, and I take money from an advertiser to show you an ad, I simply add that money into the income for my business on my Federal and state tax filings. If you come to my site, and pay me to view my content, then in addition to dealing with that money as income, I also have to worry about whether I owe sales tax to your state or VAT to your country. Worse, in many states that tax rate depends on your address, so I'll need to get that from you. To make micropayments work for web content, someone is going to have to offer a service that integrates the micropayment system with a sales tax/VAT collecting and reporting system. You probably have to set it up so it is actually that service that is selling the content to the end users, so that the sites themselves do not have to deal with the states at all. That may require the service to act as some sort of portal that the users go through to reach the sites.
• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  We don't need to ban ads. Doing so would be unrealistic. What we need is to ban tracking (through cookies and fingerprinting), and return to content-based advertising. This not only gets rid of privacy invasion and surveillance, but also of monopolization of the web, as ad money goes to many sites and their content creators.
• ngold 7y ago
  The first ad company that brings ads in house to the website they are serving will be the Google killer. It is an ad company that has no people behind it, paying content creator's pennies on the dollar, with no customer support on any end. Google should be employing big blue numbers in just customer support. But they don't have to since we have all been hoodwinked into it's monopoly. And I'm a fan.
• tsimionescu 7y ago
  Unfortunately, historical data suggests that ads are the only viable way to run a highly-profitable content delivery business. Look at newspapers and television - major, profitable ones have always been ad-driven,and that is despite the fact that they also had a physical cost. Newspapers especially fit your model of micro-payments: each newspaper is usually a minuscule amount of money, but that is never enough to sustain it. There is also the problem of incentives - even if your customers are paying to access the content, if you can then ALSO mix ads with the content, you are guaranteed more money, so businesses will usually be inclined to do so.
  • jazzyjackson 7y ago
    Newspapers were not journalists who wanted to place ads to pay for their salaries, they were admen who hired writers journalists to get people to pick up their advertisements. Similarly, the free web is mostly content produced by people with little interest in getting paid (see livejournal, tumblr, blogger, pre-monetized everything: youtube, tiktok) and the providers are not simply trying to cover costs, they are trying to become billion dollar platforms. All I'm trying to say is there's a vibrant internet to be had without prioritizing profitability and allowing ourselves to be subject to surveillance.
    • tsimionescu 7y ago
      I absolutely agree! I was just trying to point out that there was never any ad-free past at have strayed from. Perhaps though there is an ad-free future at could strive towards. I doubt it will happen within the current capitalist framework.