23 ms·

100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

495 points by lftherios 7y ago

jsnell 7y ago
Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a "donate to Mozilla" banner. The case for "reshaping the economics of the web" would have been a bit more compelling without that... (My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)
- sp332 7y ago
  Super ironic too, considering they are working on blocking in-page JS popups like this and there's an addon to report them. https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter
  - carapace 7y ago
    Also ironic asking for donations on a post about giving away $100,000,000.
    - reubenmorais 7y ago
      The funding comes from Coil.
- Jaygles 7y ago
  Its sort of fitting though. Obtrusive popups like that are prevalent because, unfortunately, they work better than anything else. If something less obtrusive worked, then this particular grant would not be needed. Essentially Mozilla is offering people money to find a way to make that banner unnecessary.
- saurik 7y ago
  I dunno, I could see that as being the most effective thing possible: I mean, if Mozilla wasn't feeling the need to do that, the problem might already have been solved.
- crispinb 7y ago
  I instantly put a permanent block on any site that does this, and never visit it again. So that's Mozilla done for me.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I find this weird. I believe most people who donate to mozilla want to do it to keep the lights on for the browser development. Now they are simultaneously asking for donations and giving 100 mil away. Non profits donating money to other causes seems wrong to me, I think it would be better if they offered an option Humble Bundle-style to split the money and let the donors choose
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    > Funded and led by Coil
FreeHugs 7y ago
It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.
- ryacko 7y ago
  It exists: http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
  - FreeHugs 7y ago
    The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more: 1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. 2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy. 3: It is less private then cash. 4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      These aren't show stopping problems. Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry. Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still. Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions. Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people. You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.
thisisitnownow 7y ago
I don't understand why Mozilla doesn't implement a native web3 wallet directly in Firefox. This would help onboard people more easily to Ethereum & EVM-compatible decentralized networks. People wouldn't have to install MetaMask or download another desktop wallet/browser app.
- matdehaast 7y ago
  And then the lightning crowd would ask why did you not implement their wallet... Or say I want to do payments on the web using my creditcard,paypal. You need to have something built into the browser that allows transfer of value be agnostic to underlying ledger
maerF0x0 7y ago
I used to use flattr and thought the concept was sound. Until I saw that most of the creators I wanted to sponsor never bothered to sign up and collect their money. Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives? I figure with all the "block chain" interest we'd have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing "direct" microdonations to a website's "wallet" EDIT: looks like coil is kinda of like flattr
- sp332 7y ago
  Readability tried something like this. Readers liked it a lot more than publishers did. https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145822/http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145822/http://blog.reada... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105891
  - zem 7y ago
    this comment was telling: Keith Calder June 13, 2012 • 10:41 am I considered signing up for the Readability Publisher Program. Then I read the Terms of Service (amusingly I just read it yesterday, so this is all fresh in my mind). There is no way in hell I could agree to those terms. It basically gives Readability the right to do whatever they want with my content (which they were already doing, even without my permission) and I would have to limit any liability Readability might have for doing whatever they want with my content. Some gems from the Readability Publisher Program Terms of Service. You shall not “modify, translate, or otherwise create derivative works of any part of the Readability Service” You know, the exact thing Readability does with my content. Or are we pretending that Readlists aren’t a derivative work? “You agree to hold Readability, its directors, officers and employees, harmless, including costs and attorneys’ fees, from any claim of copyright infringement or intellectual property misappropriation related to ANY WEB pages or articles sent THROUGH or processed through the Readability Service, the Readability website (readability.com) or through the Readability API.” So basically if I sign up to collect money from Readability, I have to hold them harmless for ANY copyright infringement on ANY web page or article I have authored that is sent through the Readability Service. So if I wrote an article that is behind a pay-wall, and someone figures out a way to add that to a ReadList… Oh well. Nothing I can do about that, unless Readability decides to be nice to me and remove the article. But they’re under no obligation to do that. They could just choose to let people freely redistribute my content against my wishes because I signed up for their Publisher Program to collect money they decided to collect on my behalf. And just to add insult to injury… “The Readability Service are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws of both the United States and foreign countries. Nothing in the Terms gives you a right to use the Readability name or any of the Readability trademarks, logos, domain names, and other distinctive brand features.” Nice to know that Readability is protected by copyright and trademark laws that apparently don’t protect any of my content. So yeah. Good riddance to the Readability “publisher payment plan.” I look forward to the other exciting ways Readability will help great content flourish online.
Kiro 7y ago
I liked Coinhive but despised that 99% used it for malevolent things. I do like the idea of letting my computer do some proof of work for a few seconds to unlock an article. It's like doing a micro payment with your electricity bill, anonymously and without any setup.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  In any world in which work that a browser can do in a few seconds will make any appreciable amount of money, someone can make more money by throwing a server or GPU or dedicated hardware at it, and the browser's few seconds of work stops having value.
  - Kiro 7y ago
    Coinhive mined Monero, which is ASIC resistant and where GPUs are only twice as efficient than CPUs. It's suited for browser mining. The browser shot the calculated hashes into a pool so it's not really about one browser vs. dedicated hardware. It's about a large quantity of browsers doing the work in parallel.
- gbear605 7y ago
  Suppose the minimum amount to make this make sense is worth 1 cent over 4 seconds of running the proof of work. Then this proof of work would earn 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute / 4 cents/second / 100 cents/dollar = $216/day. But any proof of work system that can earn $216/day would make far more sense to run dedicated miners for instead of running miscellaneous computers on.
marknadal 7y ago
Congrats Stefan & team!!! Very curious to see how this will shape up. Would you say this directly competes with Brendan Eich's BAT token in Brave? Yes/no? How so? I've also been working on figuring out some mathematical models for economically evaluating digital goods (intro here https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7... ), would love to discuss various web/open-source centric economics ideas with people!
VikingCoder 7y ago
Is this right? https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ It lists Coil as a provider.
zallarak 7y ago
Interesting that Ripple affiliates are sponsoring this.
- fastball 7y ago
  Ripple is sponsoring this. They gave ~$250m (in XRP) to Coil[0]. Coil is now giving $100m to people to monetize the web. Gotta do something with that sweet, sweet ICO money. [0] https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-is-giving-away-1-billion-xrp-in-massive-bid-to-fund-online-content https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-is-giving-away-1-billion-xrp...
dangrossman 7y ago
None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The only way that would change is if online advertising went away overnight, and instead of companies redirecting that to other forms of advertising, the prices of all consumer goods went down so it stayed in our collective pockets.
- Retric 7y ago
  Alternatively if advertising became significantly less effective companies would spend less money on it. That's the upside of Ad-blocking which could theoretically make a huge impact.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Some banners ads are not all of advertising. You’re affected by numerous channels and mediums that would pick up the slack (and already have) from adblocking on the web.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Does that matter? If advertising moves off of the web onto other channels and mediums, then necessarily the economics of the web would still change, right? Taking revenue away from a single medium will still alter the economics of that medium. Mozilla isn't trying to change the economics of the entire market, they're trying to change the economics of specifically web content.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Sure, if that actually happened, but the comment was that ad blocking could do it. In reality, ad-blocking is already priced in and slowly being recovered. All it did was create a new addressable segment of tech-savvy/ad-resistant consumers. The slack is now recovered in first-party walled-garden platforms, native advertising, "influencer" and other underground techniques.
hartator 7y ago
Isn't Mozilla already a non-profit to build a better browser? Shouldn't they focus on that or reduce in-browser ads if they have too much cash?
- detaro 7y ago
  > Isn't Mozilla already a non-profit to build a better browser No. Building a browser is one of the things they do to work for their goals, but is not their mission statement.
- qnsi 7y ago
  This is funded by Coil not Mozilla
z3t4 7y ago
Here I thought Mozilla had made it possible to do micro transactions in the browser. That Mozilla had started a bank backed by 100 million in Bitcoin, allowing zero-fee off-chain transactions between content creators and consumers.
- Sabinus 7y ago
  Imagine.
peterwwillis 7y ago
So, if I read this right, they want privacy-focused tech hipsters to vie for $20M a year to create open source fintech startups that will beat global banks and payment companies on transfer fees while simultaneously improving all social classes' access to the internet. Here's my solution: chargebacks. You surf a site, and see a preview of some content. To get the full content, you click "buy", and the site communicates with your own preferred online payment processor (OPP) to confirm a payment. The OPP checks your balance and replies if you have the balance requested, and the site then serves up your content. At the end of the month the OPP settles up with each site for what's owed. If you want to get fancy you can implement a whole rules engine so each site can set up subscriptions for users so users can limit how much each site can charge them. You support multiple subscription models so users can pay by a monthly contract or per-click. If everyone keeps their money in the OPPs (ala Paypal) the OPPs end up making tons of money by investing the balance that hasn't been transferred out yet. Once this is implemented, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will become the default OPP, because they still control all the platforms. Hooray open standards.
dvt 7y ago
Having worked in ad-tech for much of the past decade, I don't really like the idea of ads, but the reality is that advertising is much too effective to simply "go away." The article also conflates "advertising" with "data mining" -- the former is relatively benign; the latter not so much. The effectiveness of Facebook and Google ads are mainly due to (for the most part) information that was voluntarily handed over (likes, search history, etc.), not some evil rootkit. And even though it sounds like a lot, 100 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Consider that the top YouTubers make around ~$20M a year (this money comes largely via advertising). So your fund would barely cover the top 5. Also, the idea of lowering "the administrative costs of receiving payment for web content" seems kind at odds with a bureaucratic "Advisory Council initially made up of representatives from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons." I dunno', to me it just seems like posturing. No real solution offered, just some wishy-washy "feel good" proposals. At least Brave (which is my daily driver) took a hard stance against ads and blocks just about everything, while Mozilla just talks a good game[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480?lang=en https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
- skybrian 7y ago
  It seems like a good chunk of money to help startups get started? If a payment system can't make money or raise more funds, they're probably not getting anywhere.
trust07007707 7y ago
I see the following models of monetizing content on the web: 1. Gift economy (you give it away, take likes) 2. Goods and Service economy (you charge for it, sufficiently to make a living) 3. Advertising economy (many people want it but not many willing to pay for it) 4. Tipping (not a viable economic model, unless it's made compulsory and a minimum is set in which case it's not tipping) 1 & 2 have been with us since the dawn of human civilization. 3 is a modern invention and to many it is a failed experiment. Just observations, no answers
- manigandham 7y ago
  What makes advertising a failed experiment exactly? It's currently the only sustaining model for 95% of digital content and has created at least one trillion dollar corporation. That's the opposite of failure.
mizay7 7y ago
I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.
- manigandham 7y ago
  The current answer is to bundle. Use a subscription for content that is then split across sites/content by time/attention/some other measure. However the problem then becomes which bundles you subscribe to, and that can easily cause fatigue and a race to the bottom as seen by all the current video streaming services now. Even worse, none of it has proven completely profitable or sustainable either.
jriri99 7y ago
Teach parents to teach their kids to foster connections across the globe outside official channels like school which are heavily curated. Changing economics for us, in our lifetime is a lost cause. Our limbic systems are wired with the emotional bindings of our childhood. It’s hard to let go. Teach kids to work together directly from as early as possible. Cut out Wall Street middle men and political grifters.
networkimprov 7y ago
The FAQ: https://www.grantfortheweb.org/faq https://www.grantfortheweb.org/faq
manigandham 7y ago
There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1] Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it. Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820
- mr_toad 7y ago
  > are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford So advertising doesn’t work on these people? Seems unlikely. That would imply content providers are giving stuff away, and wasting bandwidth on adds they know will never work. Seems more likely to me that the advertising does work, and people aren’t getting content for free. They’re paying for stuff they don’t need, with money they don’t have.
  - eclipxe 7y ago
    How did you draw that conclusion?
  - manigandham 7y ago
    No, free in this context meaning they aren't paying upfront with cash. So yes, ads do work, and they allow people without other means to monetize their attention in real-time. They also own their attention and are perfectly capable of spending it however they want, on whatever they want, without any approval of what they need by you or anyone else.
- udkl 7y ago
issa 7y ago
To all the people saying some variant of "there's nothing new here", I think you are missing it: Tipping has always been an effort. If it all happened behind the scenes, with no action required on your part (beyond just browsing to a site), then "tipping" can viably compete with ads.
makecheck 7y ago
Instead of having payment systems that seem to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to pay, there should be a small number of very well defined friction points (such as: “maximum daily expenditure”) with literally zero friction anywhere else. By now for instance we should really have a security technology that allows anyone to spend $5 a day any way they want, in any denomination (e.g. literally 2 cents here and 2 cents there), without having to go through ridiculous virtual-cash systems, cards and other hoops. The money should simply be there, and it should be able to go anywhere. If it’s a relatively small amount, it doesn’t require a lot of gate-keeping, e.g. you do not need a customer-refunds infrastructure or fraud protection scheme for pennies. The money can then either reset automatically, e.g. each day, or after some explicit more-secure action, e.g. you log in to something with your face. I know that it would personally make me spend a lot more if a lot of transactions could “just happen”. Once I got a tap-here-and-pay watch, I spent more. Once I could shop online with a fingerprint, I actually did shop online. When I had to type in credit card details though, I hardly ever wanted to. When “fees” would appear as part of seemingly-small transactions, I hardly ever wanted to continue. Some things just sound like scams (don’t get me started on subscriptions), making me more likely to find an exit.
donohoe 7y ago
Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good). What happens? Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing. Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's original reporting you can wipe off 90 of them and still be fine. Those that have a foot-hold, brand, or better reach survive through affiliate marketing (see WireCutter), donations, or subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, etc.) I'm not saying there won't be casualties in this approach but you lose the alt-right and other reality-bending publishers pretty quickly.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > What happens? What happens if you do that without enough market share is that the browser gets detected and banned/redirected with a message about it being hostile to the people making the content. To some degree, they would be correct. If chrome, Firefox and Safari all did that all at once, many web properties would go under before the dust settled. It would probably cause a recession with how many people it affected, if not an outright depression, as it reverberated throughout the economy. There's a reason some things happen slowly, and why puahback against the better future isn't always a bad thing. Too much change all at once is far more destructive overall than if spread out over time (for the exact same reason having two cars need major repairs the same month can put a family in dire straits).
  - donohoe 7y ago
    All very good points and you could have a detailed discussion on many of them. I still think that this is a situation where the bandaid/knife needs to be pulled off quickly. Chrome will never go that path voluntarily but you could push Safari and Firefox to do so (unlikely). I've worked with publishers big and small and I know where this would hurt the most with smaller sites shuttering. That said, after working in advertising for over a decade its clear to me that it is manipulative, abused, and ultimately harmful and directly/indirectly funding several hateful voices that have influence on the world.
  - 7y ago
xvilka 7y ago
They could help also to build/improve the OpenCollective[1] that is a completely free and open-source[2] alternative to Patreon, aiming mostly for the open-source projects. [1] https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ [2] https://github.com/opencollective/ https://github.com/opencollective/
- Rafuino 7y ago
  Perhaps this project will receive a grant then to help it improve?
Causality1 7y ago
This feels like spending a hundred million dollars to recreate Beenz.
whsheet 7y ago
Mozilla is master of content marketing, PR and creating buzz. If they just spent their energy into building the best browser.
jmlon 7y ago
Great program, I hope it will help overcome the huge problems we know the current "centralized" model has.
frogpelt 7y ago
I wonder if a Spotify for the Internet would work. Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage. Mozilla would be in a good position to introduce that type of service and track consumption.
- brillout 7y ago
  This would be so neat but a problem is how do you distribute money in a fair way to creators? Spotify can give X dollars to a song author for each minute a user has listened to his song. You cannot easily do that with web content.
- olah_1 7y ago
  > Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage. That's exactly how Brave Browser works.
troydavis 7y ago
Here's how Coil ended up with $100 million to fund this grant (https://fortune.com/2019/09/16/grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coil https://fortune.com/2019/09/16/grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coi...): > As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple's operations—to settle financial transactions. … and here's why Ripple made the original (~$265 million USD) grant to Coil (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ripples-xpring-makes-1-billion-xrp-grant-to-drive-xrp-adoption-and-advance-coils-monetized-platform-for-creators-300902194.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ripples-xpring-make...) in August 2019: > Coil, a platform dedicated to reimagining monetization on the web for creators and their fans, today announced a 1 billion XRP grant from Ripple's Xpring. The money will be deployed towards driving adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) by growing Coil's monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP. > … > The platform enables creators to post public and exclusive content on Coil, which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators can web-monetize their own websites by adding a simple tag. Those who want to support creators using Coil can join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no membership fees for creators. In May 2018, the first of several lawsuits was filed that allege XRP is a security: https://www.coindesk.com/investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-guidance-to-argue-xrp-is-a-security https://www.coindesk.com/investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-gui.... They're seeking class-action status to represent everyone who bought XRP. Matt Levine briefly mentioned Ripple while covering the broader question of how the SEC would classify coins: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-15/the-sec-will-leave-good-icos-alone https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-15/the-se.... Obviously Ripple is inherently motivated to see XRP adopted, but also, an active micropayment/content payment ecosystem might strengthen their claim that XRP is a utility coin and that their ICO wasn't an unregistered securities offering. Some background on this question: https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-2017-12-11 https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-... Here's what that lawsuit alleges (http://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/716bee37-e45e-41d2-a4e1-2d966015a277.pdf http://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/716bee..., as amended Aug 2019): > Ripple claims that XRP has utility—like currency—in its use as a “bridge currency” for international payments. But, as discussed above, more than 60 percent of XRP is owned by Ripple and none of that XRP is used for anything at all, other than to be sold in the future to investors. Moreover, as for the XRP that was already sold or otherwise distributed by Defendants, the vast majority of it is not used for bridging international transactions, but for investment purpose. Accordingly, Defendants’ claim that XRP has a utilitarian purpose is nothing but a red herring attempt to avoid the application of securities laws.
pjzedalis 7y ago
Advertising is opt-out. Every idea centered around tipping, micro-transactions, cryptocurrency are opt-in. I don't think most content creators are willing to make that jump.
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
Trying to divorce publishing from advertising is like trying to divorce brewing from yeast. The only people who don't understand this are people who have never been in the publishing business.
longears 7y ago
I know credit card processors are hostile to "adult content", but as a human being with a sexuality that's part of who I am, I'm saddened that even "literature" related to sexuality is banned. The grant says it's seeking "makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more"[1] But Coil forbids "Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services."[2] [1] https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ [2] https://coil.com/terms https://coil.com/terms
richardw 7y ago
One good thing about advertising is that it allows the poorest free access to most content. Hopefully these initiatives will keep that.
trax 7y ago
> Special consideration will be given to creators who promote a vibrant commons; increase users’ autonomy, privacy, and control over their own data; promote diversity and inclusion on the internet; and increase access to the full capacity of the internet, both for content consumption and content creation, and for communities and individuals that have historically been marginalized, disadvantaged, or without access Pff. What a great way to kill innovation.
deleted 7y ago
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cookie_monsta 7y ago
Some seriously over-engineered solutions being offered in this thread, which I guess is understandable considering the cohort. And I'm glad that people smarter than me are looking at this from every angle. But here are the things that I know/feel to be true: 1) Back when advertising subsidised content was a straight up proposition nobody really minded about ads outside of finding them mildly annoying. It's how the most popular pre-internet content (privately owned free to air TV and newspapers/magazines) survived and flourished. 2) What most irks people about the current ad-tech based business model isn't the advertising, it's the data mining behind it. 3) Lots of people don't even care about data mining as long as they get what they need instantly, easily and for free. 4) The big ad-tech players' emergence and dominance after the bursting of the early 2000s dotcom bubble is widely attributed to their mastery of ad-tech whereas it seems to be that consolidation and concentration were much larger factors. 5) Ad-tech enabled targeted advertising isn't that much more effective than traditional- or content-based advertising (I wish I had the source for this but it seemed legit when I read it... Surveillance Capitalism, maybe?) What feeds the ad-tech industry really is advertisers' FOMO on the algorithms touted by the ad-tech vendors. "Why buy a traditional mass-spray ad when you can have one delivered with surgical precision?" goes the sales pitch. And considering the old saw about 50% of advertising being useless but nobody knows which 50% it is, having numbers and measurable insights dangled in front of you must be compelling. My suggestion is that we try to steer things back to content-based advertising. Of course the web needs to make money. Money is a great incentive for innovation, etc. Of course users aren't going to pay for it except in exceptional circumstances. We've been spoiled with too much free content to turn that ship around now. But if I'm on a site about skiing for example and I see an ad for a ski store that has a sale, that's a good and useful piece of advertising. I'm happy to see that, as long as it doesn't follow me around the web for the next 6 months. And how do we steer companies to do the right thing? The only way that has proven to be effective over the years - by naming and shaming, boycotting the bad actors and supporting the good ones. Basically making the costs of behaving badly outweigh the benefits. How do we get there? I haven't figured that bit out yet. The big problem is that it's kind of axiomatic that the likelihood of change is inversely proportional to the amount of money being generated by the status quo, and hundreds of billions of dollars is a lot of weight to throw behind keeping the current system humming along as is.
baud147258 7y ago
Couldn't have they used that money to make Firefox consume less battery on mobile? At least on par with Chrome?
- qnsi 7y ago
  Funded by coil
  - baud147258 7y ago
    It's true that the money is not coming from the Mozilla Foundation, but as Coil is trusting the foundation with 100 M$ to make good use, the foundation could have asked 'hey, how about some money (from the 100 M$ or not) for our software, since it's what we are primarily known for?'
    - baud147258 7y ago
      > since it's what we are primarily known for? 'And because without the browser, we'd just be an advocacy group'
buboard 7y ago
Want to help publishers? Fund a competitor to google that either doesnt track users, or does it in an ethical way. With monopolistic google disappointing both advertisers and publishers by raising prices and keeping most of the profit, there is an opportunity in the market that wasn't there 10 years ago when most of their competitors gave up. Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures, and publishers in particular cannot escape that.
- zamfi 7y ago
  > Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures [...] Can you say more about this?
  - buboard 7y ago
    having thousands of customers paying $0.1 per day is a huge accounting hassle. Trying to account e.g. for EU VAT is a maze of galactic proportions for a small startup. So you 'll need an intermediary who will get a cut of that income. And then you 'll occasionally be getting weird looks from banks because apparently that business model looks suspicious ( i've had my bank deny me services because we do virtual currency sales in game - through an intermediary). There is also no frictionless way to do it: payments should ideally be integrated in browsers, and people should be able to pay anonymously by preloading their browser with small chunks of money, again anonymously. Maybe there is a way to make this mechanism both anonymous and legal (for tax purposes) , but i don't think anyone has cracked that yet. Advertising circumvents all these requirements, and creates an indirect channel that transfers value from the user to the publisher. And advertising is here to stay: businesses always have and always will will keep spending a similar % of revenues for advertising. It's not advertising that's wrong with the internet, it's tracking.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  Would 100 million be anywhere remotely close to enough for that? Bing, with all the money and power of MS behind it, has about 5% market share. Yahoo has about 2% market share. Baidu has about 15% but also total assets of 40 Billion US Dollars. > The best ideas What are those?
airnomad 7y ago
They would do better if they spent 100M on ads to promote Firefox downloads. Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you'll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose. And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc. What's going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn't mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions. But the trouble is - they don't have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.
philipps 7y ago
I can’t help but think that this is an example of jumping to the wrong solution too quickly. Is the problem that the web doesn’t contain as much high-quality content anymore as before; or that independent content providers are having a hard time making a living. I don’t enjoy the web as much as I used to, but I am pretty sure that in the early days almost nobody was making money off the content they created. So maybe the problem is discoverability rather than compensation. It would be helpful to see a little more of the analysis that Mozilla has done to define the problem.
mcv 7y ago
Here's an idea that just came to me. Feel free to shoot holes in it. It's based on my assumption that users do prefer things without ads, and might want to pay for it. So how about a search engine where, if you pay for it, it ranks sites without ads at the top. And if you click a link to an ad-less site, that site gets some of the money you paid to the search engine. Maybe combine it with a social network that works a similar way, though that's harder to do because you don't control what people share. The major downside is that there would be a central place (the search engine) where the money gets distributed. It would be better to have something non-centralised. Still, I might use a search engine like that.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  A major question, for me, is: how does it get started? What would motivate someone to create a website without ads, for the purposes of what you're suggesting, when the scheme is in its infancy? What would motivate a website to remove ads, when the scheme is in its infancy?
  - mcv 7y ago
    Plenty of websites already have no ads. Wikipedia, for example. Many blogs too. But even with ads, you'll still be listed. But ad-free sites get a higher ranking, making that a more viable decision for some.
    - jamesrcole 7y ago
      That doesn't matter unless the existing pool of ad-free sites can supply good results for a reasonable proportion of the actual web searches being performed. I doubt very much it can. For the idea to work it'd mean that there'd b incentive to have a website on a particular topic be ad-free vs ad-based competitors. How does that incentive start in the first place?
      - mcv 7y ago
        It probably shouldn't put all ad-free sites above all ad-laden sites, but some preferential treatment would be nice. But there are already plenty of ad-free sites that have tons of useful information. I wouldn't mind seeing them ranked higher.
dannyw 7y ago
Coil is a company that has raised 269M. And they're spending 100M of this on a grant?
m-i-l 7y ago
Back in the early days of the internet I used to believe that monetization, or micropayments, was one of the key unsolved problems. Now I'm starting to wonder if it is the problem, that monetization is the root of all evil on the internet, such as advertising and limbic capitalism, social media and surveillance capitalism, the spammers and scammers and cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, the re-intermediation of new monopolies, and so on. Maybe it would be better if people were still working on free content for love not for money, and/or working on sites and apps that provide a useful service in return for a simple subscription or fee.
carapace 7y ago
If you think about this as a marketing campaign for Coil then it seems to me to be brilliantly enlightened. I mean that sincerely, no sarcasm.

495 points by lftherios 7y ago

Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a "donate to Mozilla" banner. The case for "reshaping the economics of the web" would have been a bit more compelling without that... (My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)

sp332 7y ago
Super ironic too, considering they are working on blocking in-page JS popups like this and there's an addon to report them. https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter
- carapace 7y ago
  Also ironic asking for donations on a post about giving away $100,000,000.
  - reubenmorais 7y ago
    The funding comes from Coil.
Jaygles 7y ago
Its sort of fitting though. Obtrusive popups like that are prevalent because, unfortunately, they work better than anything else. If something less obtrusive worked, then this particular grant would not be needed. Essentially Mozilla is offering people money to find a way to make that banner unnecessary.
saurik 7y ago
I dunno, I could see that as being the most effective thing possible: I mean, if Mozilla wasn't feeling the need to do that, the problem might already have been solved.
crispinb 7y ago
I instantly put a permanent block on any site that does this, and never visit it again. So that's Mozilla done for me.
yoz-y 7y ago
I find this weird. I believe most people who donate to mozilla want to do it to keep the lights on for the browser development. Now they are simultaneously asking for donations and giving 100 mil away. Non profits donating money to other causes seems wrong to me, I think it would be better if they offered an option Humble Bundle-style to split the money and let the donors choose
- Vinnl 7y ago
  > Funded and led by Coil

FreeHugs 7y ago

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.

ryacko 7y ago
It exists: http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.
BubRoss 7y ago
Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
- FreeHugs 7y ago
  The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more: 1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. 2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy. 3: It is less private then cash. 4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    These aren't show stopping problems. Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry. Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still. Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions. Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people. You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.

thisisitnownow 7y ago

I don't understand why Mozilla doesn't implement a native web3 wallet directly in Firefox. This would help onboard people more easily to Ethereum & EVM-compatible decentralized networks. People wouldn't have to install MetaMask or download another desktop wallet/browser app.

matdehaast 7y ago
And then the lightning crowd would ask why did you not implement their wallet... Or say I want to do payments on the web using my creditcard,paypal. You need to have something built into the browser that allows transfer of value be agnostic to underlying ledger

maerF0x0 7y ago

I used to use flattr and thought the concept was sound. Until I saw that most of the creators I wanted to sponsor never bothered to sign up and collect their money. Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives? I figure with all the "block chain" interest we'd have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing "direct" microdonations to a website's "wallet" EDIT: looks like coil is kinda of like flattr

sp332 7y ago
Readability tried something like this. Readers liked it a lot more than publishers did. https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145822/http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145822/http://blog.reada... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105891
- zem 7y ago
  this comment was telling: Keith Calder June 13, 2012 • 10:41 am I considered signing up for the Readability Publisher Program. Then I read the Terms of Service (amusingly I just read it yesterday, so this is all fresh in my mind). There is no way in hell I could agree to those terms. It basically gives Readability the right to do whatever they want with my content (which they were already doing, even without my permission) and I would have to limit any liability Readability might have for doing whatever they want with my content. Some gems from the Readability Publisher Program Terms of Service. You shall not “modify, translate, or otherwise create derivative works of any part of the Readability Service” You know, the exact thing Readability does with my content. Or are we pretending that Readlists aren’t a derivative work? “You agree to hold Readability, its directors, officers and employees, harmless, including costs and attorneys’ fees, from any claim of copyright infringement or intellectual property misappropriation related to ANY WEB pages or articles sent THROUGH or processed through the Readability Service, the Readability website (readability.com) or through the Readability API.” So basically if I sign up to collect money from Readability, I have to hold them harmless for ANY copyright infringement on ANY web page or article I have authored that is sent through the Readability Service. So if I wrote an article that is behind a pay-wall, and someone figures out a way to add that to a ReadList… Oh well. Nothing I can do about that, unless Readability decides to be nice to me and remove the article. But they’re under no obligation to do that. They could just choose to let people freely redistribute my content against my wishes because I signed up for their Publisher Program to collect money they decided to collect on my behalf. And just to add insult to injury… “The Readability Service are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws of both the United States and foreign countries. Nothing in the Terms gives you a right to use the Readability name or any of the Readability trademarks, logos, domain names, and other distinctive brand features.” Nice to know that Readability is protected by copyright and trademark laws that apparently don’t protect any of my content. So yeah. Good riddance to the Readability “publisher payment plan.” I look forward to the other exciting ways Readability will help great content flourish online.

Kiro 7y ago

I liked Coinhive but despised that 99% used it for malevolent things. I do like the idea of letting my computer do some proof of work for a few seconds to unlock an article. It's like doing a micro payment with your electricity bill, anonymously and without any setup.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
In any world in which work that a browser can do in a few seconds will make any appreciable amount of money, someone can make more money by throwing a server or GPU or dedicated hardware at it, and the browser's few seconds of work stops having value.
- Kiro 7y ago
  Coinhive mined Monero, which is ASIC resistant and where GPUs are only twice as efficient than CPUs. It's suited for browser mining. The browser shot the calculated hashes into a pool so it's not really about one browser vs. dedicated hardware. It's about a large quantity of browsers doing the work in parallel.
gbear605 7y ago
Suppose the minimum amount to make this make sense is worth 1 cent over 4 seconds of running the proof of work. Then this proof of work would earn 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute / 4 cents/second / 100 cents/dollar = $216/day. But any proof of work system that can earn $216/day would make far more sense to run dedicated miners for instead of running miscellaneous computers on.

marknadal 7y ago

Congrats Stefan & team!!! Very curious to see how this will shape up. Would you say this directly competes with Brendan Eich's BAT token in Brave? Yes/no? How so? I've also been working on figuring out some mathematical models for economically evaluating digital goods (intro here https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7... ), would love to discuss various web/open-source centric economics ideas with people!

VikingCoder 7y ago

Is this right? https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ It lists Coil as a provider.

zallarak 7y ago

Interesting that Ripple affiliates are sponsoring this.

fastball 7y ago
Ripple is sponsoring this. They gave ~$250m (in XRP) to Coil[0]. Coil is now giving $100m to people to monetize the web. Gotta do something with that sweet, sweet ICO money. [0] https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-is-giving-away-1-billion-xrp-in-massive-bid-to-fund-online-content https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-is-giving-away-1-billion-xrp...

dangrossman 7y ago

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The only way that would change is if online advertising went away overnight, and instead of companies redirecting that to other forms of advertising, the prices of all consumer goods went down so it stayed in our collective pockets.

Retric 7y ago
Alternatively if advertising became significantly less effective companies would spend less money on it. That's the upside of Ad-blocking which could theoretically make a huge impact.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Some banners ads are not all of advertising. You’re affected by numerous channels and mediums that would pick up the slack (and already have) from adblocking on the web.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Does that matter? If advertising moves off of the web onto other channels and mediums, then necessarily the economics of the web would still change, right? Taking revenue away from a single medium will still alter the economics of that medium. Mozilla isn't trying to change the economics of the entire market, they're trying to change the economics of specifically web content.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Sure, if that actually happened, but the comment was that ad blocking could do it. In reality, ad-blocking is already priced in and slowly being recovered. All it did was create a new addressable segment of tech-savvy/ad-resistant consumers. The slack is now recovered in first-party walled-garden platforms, native advertising, "influencer" and other underground techniques.

hartator 7y ago

Isn't Mozilla already a non-profit to build a better browser? Shouldn't they focus on that or reduce in-browser ads if they have too much cash?

detaro 7y ago
> Isn't Mozilla already a non-profit to build a better browser No. Building a browser is one of the things they do to work for their goals, but is not their mission statement.
qnsi 7y ago
This is funded by Coil not Mozilla

z3t4 7y ago

Here I thought Mozilla had made it possible to do micro transactions in the browser. That Mozilla had started a bank backed by 100 million in Bitcoin, allowing zero-fee off-chain transactions between content creators and consumers.

Sabinus 7y ago
Imagine.

peterwwillis 7y ago

So, if I read this right, they want privacy-focused tech hipsters to vie for $20M a year to create open source fintech startups that will beat global banks and payment companies on transfer fees while simultaneously improving all social classes' access to the internet. Here's my solution: chargebacks. You surf a site, and see a preview of some content. To get the full content, you click "buy", and the site communicates with your own preferred online payment processor (OPP) to confirm a payment. The OPP checks your balance and replies if you have the balance requested, and the site then serves up your content. At the end of the month the OPP settles up with each site for what's owed. If you want to get fancy you can implement a whole rules engine so each site can set up subscriptions for users so users can limit how much each site can charge them. You support multiple subscription models so users can pay by a monthly contract or per-click. If everyone keeps their money in the OPPs (ala Paypal) the OPPs end up making tons of money by investing the balance that hasn't been transferred out yet. Once this is implemented, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will become the default OPP, because they still control all the platforms. Hooray open standards.

dvt 7y ago

Having worked in ad-tech for much of the past decade, I don't really like the idea of ads, but the reality is that advertising is much too effective to simply "go away." The article also conflates "advertising" with "data mining" -- the former is relatively benign; the latter not so much. The effectiveness of Facebook and Google ads are mainly due to (for the most part) information that was voluntarily handed over (likes, search history, etc.), not some evil rootkit. And even though it sounds like a lot, 100 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Consider that the top YouTubers make around ~$20M a year (this money comes largely via advertising). So your fund would barely cover the top 5. Also, the idea of lowering "the administrative costs of receiving payment for web content" seems kind at odds with a bureaucratic "Advisory Council initially made up of representatives from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons." I dunno', to me it just seems like posturing. No real solution offered, just some wishy-washy "feel good" proposals. At least Brave (which is my daily driver) took a hard stance against ads and blocks just about everything, while Mozilla just talks a good game[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480?lang=en https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

skybrian 7y ago
It seems like a good chunk of money to help startups get started? If a payment system can't make money or raise more funds, they're probably not getting anywhere.

trust07007707 7y ago

I see the following models of monetizing content on the web: 1. Gift economy (you give it away, take likes) 2. Goods and Service economy (you charge for it, sufficiently to make a living) 3. Advertising economy (many people want it but not many willing to pay for it) 4. Tipping (not a viable economic model, unless it's made compulsory and a minimum is set in which case it's not tipping) 1 & 2 have been with us since the dawn of human civilization. 3 is a modern invention and to many it is a failed experiment. Just observations, no answers

manigandham 7y ago
What makes advertising a failed experiment exactly? It's currently the only sustaining model for 95% of digital content and has created at least one trillion dollar corporation. That's the opposite of failure.

mizay7 7y ago

I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.

manigandham 7y ago
The current answer is to bundle. Use a subscription for content that is then split across sites/content by time/attention/some other measure. However the problem then becomes which bundles you subscribe to, and that can easily cause fatigue and a race to the bottom as seen by all the current video streaming services now. Even worse, none of it has proven completely profitable or sustainable either.

jriri99 7y ago

Teach parents to teach their kids to foster connections across the globe outside official channels like school which are heavily curated. Changing economics for us, in our lifetime is a lost cause. Our limbic systems are wired with the emotional bindings of our childhood. It’s hard to let go. Teach kids to work together directly from as early as possible. Cut out Wall Street middle men and political grifters.

networkimprov 7y ago

The FAQ: https://www.grantfortheweb.org/faq https://www.grantfortheweb.org/faq

manigandham 7y ago

There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1] Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it. Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820

mr_toad 7y ago
> are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford So advertising doesn’t work on these people? Seems unlikely. That would imply content providers are giving stuff away, and wasting bandwidth on adds they know will never work. Seems more likely to me that the advertising does work, and people aren’t getting content for free. They’re paying for stuff they don’t need, with money they don’t have.
- eclipxe 7y ago
  How did you draw that conclusion?
- manigandham 7y ago
  No, free in this context meaning they aren't paying upfront with cash. So yes, ads do work, and they allow people without other means to monetize their attention in real-time. They also own their attention and are perfectly capable of spending it however they want, on whatever they want, without any approval of what they need by you or anyone else.
udkl 7y ago

issa 7y ago

To all the people saying some variant of "there's nothing new here", I think you are missing it: Tipping has always been an effort. If it all happened behind the scenes, with no action required on your part (beyond just browsing to a site), then "tipping" can viably compete with ads.

makecheck 7y ago

Instead of having payment systems that seem to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to pay, there should be a small number of very well defined friction points (such as: “maximum daily expenditure”) with literally zero friction anywhere else. By now for instance we should really have a security technology that allows anyone to spend $5 a day any way they want, in any denomination (e.g. literally 2 cents here and 2 cents there), without having to go through ridiculous virtual-cash systems, cards and other hoops. The money should simply be there, and it should be able to go anywhere. If it’s a relatively small amount, it doesn’t require a lot of gate-keeping, e.g. you do not need a customer-refunds infrastructure or fraud protection scheme for pennies. The money can then either reset automatically, e.g. each day, or after some explicit more-secure action, e.g. you log in to something with your face. I know that it would personally make me spend a lot more if a lot of transactions could “just happen”. Once I got a tap-here-and-pay watch, I spent more. Once I could shop online with a fingerprint, I actually did shop online. When I had to type in credit card details though, I hardly ever wanted to. When “fees” would appear as part of seemingly-small transactions, I hardly ever wanted to continue. Some things just sound like scams (don’t get me started on subscriptions), making me more likely to find an exit.

donohoe 7y ago

Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good). What happens? Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing. Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's original reporting you can wipe off 90 of them and still be fine. Those that have a foot-hold, brand, or better reach survive through affiliate marketing (see WireCutter), donations, or subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, etc.) I'm not saying there won't be casualties in this approach but you lose the alt-right and other reality-bending publishers pretty quickly.

kbenson 7y ago
> What happens? What happens if you do that without enough market share is that the browser gets detected and banned/redirected with a message about it being hostile to the people making the content. To some degree, they would be correct. If chrome, Firefox and Safari all did that all at once, many web properties would go under before the dust settled. It would probably cause a recession with how many people it affected, if not an outright depression, as it reverberated throughout the economy. There's a reason some things happen slowly, and why puahback against the better future isn't always a bad thing. Too much change all at once is far more destructive overall than if spread out over time (for the exact same reason having two cars need major repairs the same month can put a family in dire straits).
- donohoe 7y ago
  All very good points and you could have a detailed discussion on many of them. I still think that this is a situation where the bandaid/knife needs to be pulled off quickly. Chrome will never go that path voluntarily but you could push Safari and Firefox to do so (unlikely). I've worked with publishers big and small and I know where this would hurt the most with smaller sites shuttering. That said, after working in advertising for over a decade its clear to me that it is manipulative, abused, and ultimately harmful and directly/indirectly funding several hateful voices that have influence on the world.
- 7y ago

xvilka 7y ago

They could help also to build/improve the OpenCollective[1] that is a completely free and open-source[2] alternative to Patreon, aiming mostly for the open-source projects. [1] https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ [2] https://github.com/opencollective/ https://github.com/opencollective/

Rafuino 7y ago
Perhaps this project will receive a grant then to help it improve?

Causality1 7y ago

This feels like spending a hundred million dollars to recreate Beenz.

whsheet 7y ago

Mozilla is master of content marketing, PR and creating buzz. If they just spent their energy into building the best browser.

jmlon 7y ago

Great program, I hope it will help overcome the huge problems we know the current "centralized" model has.

frogpelt 7y ago

I wonder if a Spotify for the Internet would work. Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage. Mozilla would be in a good position to introduce that type of service and track consumption.

brillout 7y ago
This would be so neat but a problem is how do you distribute money in a fair way to creators? Spotify can give X dollars to a song author for each minute a user has listened to his song. You cannot easily do that with web content.
olah_1 7y ago
> Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage. That's exactly how Brave Browser works.

troydavis 7y ago

Here's how Coil ended up with $100 million to fund this grant (https://fortune.com/2019/09/16/grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coil https://fortune.com/2019/09/16/grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coi...): > As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple's operations—to settle financial transactions. … and here's why Ripple made the original (~$265 million USD) grant to Coil (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ripples-xpring-makes-1-billion-xrp-grant-to-drive-xrp-adoption-and-advance-coils-monetized-platform-for-creators-300902194.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ripples-xpring-make...) in August 2019: > Coil, a platform dedicated to reimagining monetization on the web for creators and their fans, today announced a 1 billion XRP grant from Ripple's Xpring. The money will be deployed towards driving adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) by growing Coil's monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP. > … > The platform enables creators to post public and exclusive content on Coil, which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators can web-monetize their own websites by adding a simple tag. Those who want to support creators using Coil can join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no membership fees for creators. In May 2018, the first of several lawsuits was filed that allege XRP is a security: https://www.coindesk.com/investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-guidance-to-argue-xrp-is-a-security https://www.coindesk.com/investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-gui.... They're seeking class-action status to represent everyone who bought XRP. Matt Levine briefly mentioned Ripple while covering the broader question of how the SEC would classify coins: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-15/the-sec-will-leave-good-icos-alone https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-15/the-se.... Obviously Ripple is inherently motivated to see XRP adopted, but also, an active micropayment/content payment ecosystem might strengthen their claim that XRP is a utility coin and that their ICO wasn't an unregistered securities offering. Some background on this question: https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-2017-12-11 https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-... Here's what that lawsuit alleges (http://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/716bee37-e45e-41d2-a4e1-2d966015a277.pdf http://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/716bee..., as amended Aug 2019): > Ripple claims that XRP has utility—like currency—in its use as a “bridge currency” for international payments. But, as discussed above, more than 60 percent of XRP is owned by Ripple and none of that XRP is used for anything at all, other than to be sold in the future to investors. Moreover, as for the XRP that was already sold or otherwise distributed by Defendants, the vast majority of it is not used for bridging international transactions, but for investment purpose. Accordingly, Defendants’ claim that XRP has a utilitarian purpose is nothing but a red herring attempt to avoid the application of securities laws.

pjzedalis 7y ago

Advertising is opt-out. Every idea centered around tipping, micro-transactions, cryptocurrency are opt-in. I don't think most content creators are willing to make that jump.

MisterBastahrd 7y ago

Trying to divorce publishing from advertising is like trying to divorce brewing from yeast. The only people who don't understand this are people who have never been in the publishing business.

longears 7y ago

I know credit card processors are hostile to "adult content", but as a human being with a sexuality that's part of who I am, I'm saddened that even "literature" related to sexuality is banned. The grant says it's seeking "makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more"[1] But Coil forbids "Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services."[2] [1] https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ [2] https://coil.com/terms https://coil.com/terms

richardw 7y ago

One good thing about advertising is that it allows the poorest free access to most content. Hopefully these initiatives will keep that.

trax 7y ago

> Special consideration will be given to creators who promote a vibrant commons; increase users’ autonomy, privacy, and control over their own data; promote diversity and inclusion on the internet; and increase access to the full capacity of the internet, both for content consumption and content creation, and for communities and individuals that have historically been marginalized, disadvantaged, or without access Pff. What a great way to kill innovation.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cookie_monsta 7y ago

Some seriously over-engineered solutions being offered in this thread, which I guess is understandable considering the cohort. And I'm glad that people smarter than me are looking at this from every angle. But here are the things that I know/feel to be true: 1) Back when advertising subsidised content was a straight up proposition nobody really minded about ads outside of finding them mildly annoying. It's how the most popular pre-internet content (privately owned free to air TV and newspapers/magazines) survived and flourished. 2) What most irks people about the current ad-tech based business model isn't the advertising, it's the data mining behind it. 3) Lots of people don't even care about data mining as long as they get what they need instantly, easily and for free. 4) The big ad-tech players' emergence and dominance after the bursting of the early 2000s dotcom bubble is widely attributed to their mastery of ad-tech whereas it seems to be that consolidation and concentration were much larger factors. 5) Ad-tech enabled targeted advertising isn't that much more effective than traditional- or content-based advertising (I wish I had the source for this but it seemed legit when I read it... Surveillance Capitalism, maybe?) What feeds the ad-tech industry really is advertisers' FOMO on the algorithms touted by the ad-tech vendors. "Why buy a traditional mass-spray ad when you can have one delivered with surgical precision?" goes the sales pitch. And considering the old saw about 50% of advertising being useless but nobody knows which 50% it is, having numbers and measurable insights dangled in front of you must be compelling. My suggestion is that we try to steer things back to content-based advertising. Of course the web needs to make money. Money is a great incentive for innovation, etc. Of course users aren't going to pay for it except in exceptional circumstances. We've been spoiled with too much free content to turn that ship around now. But if I'm on a site about skiing for example and I see an ad for a ski store that has a sale, that's a good and useful piece of advertising. I'm happy to see that, as long as it doesn't follow me around the web for the next 6 months. And how do we steer companies to do the right thing? The only way that has proven to be effective over the years - by naming and shaming, boycotting the bad actors and supporting the good ones. Basically making the costs of behaving badly outweigh the benefits. How do we get there? I haven't figured that bit out yet. The big problem is that it's kind of axiomatic that the likelihood of change is inversely proportional to the amount of money being generated by the status quo, and hundreds of billions of dollars is a lot of weight to throw behind keeping the current system humming along as is.

baud147258 7y ago

Couldn't have they used that money to make Firefox consume less battery on mobile? At least on par with Chrome?

qnsi 7y ago
Funded by coil
- baud147258 7y ago
  It's true that the money is not coming from the Mozilla Foundation, but as Coil is trusting the foundation with 100 M$ to make good use, the foundation could have asked 'hey, how about some money (from the 100 M$ or not) for our software, since it's what we are primarily known for?'
  - baud147258 7y ago
    > since it's what we are primarily known for? 'And because without the browser, we'd just be an advocacy group'

buboard 7y ago

Want to help publishers? Fund a competitor to google that either doesnt track users, or does it in an ethical way. With monopolistic google disappointing both advertisers and publishers by raising prices and keeping most of the profit, there is an opportunity in the market that wasn't there 10 years ago when most of their competitors gave up. Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures, and publishers in particular cannot escape that.

zamfi 7y ago
> Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures [...] Can you say more about this?
- buboard 7y ago
  having thousands of customers paying $0.1 per day is a huge accounting hassle. Trying to account e.g. for EU VAT is a maze of galactic proportions for a small startup. So you 'll need an intermediary who will get a cut of that income. And then you 'll occasionally be getting weird looks from banks because apparently that business model looks suspicious ( i've had my bank deny me services because we do virtual currency sales in game - through an intermediary). There is also no frictionless way to do it: payments should ideally be integrated in browsers, and people should be able to pay anonymously by preloading their browser with small chunks of money, again anonymously. Maybe there is a way to make this mechanism both anonymous and legal (for tax purposes) , but i don't think anyone has cracked that yet. Advertising circumvents all these requirements, and creates an indirect channel that transfers value from the user to the publisher. And advertising is here to stay: businesses always have and always will will keep spending a similar % of revenues for advertising. It's not advertising that's wrong with the internet, it's tracking.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
Would 100 million be anywhere remotely close to enough for that? Bing, with all the money and power of MS behind it, has about 5% market share. Yahoo has about 2% market share. Baidu has about 15% but also total assets of 40 Billion US Dollars. > The best ideas What are those?

airnomad 7y ago

They would do better if they spent 100M on ads to promote Firefox downloads. Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you'll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose. And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc. What's going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn't mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions. But the trouble is - they don't have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.

philipps 7y ago

I can’t help but think that this is an example of jumping to the wrong solution too quickly. Is the problem that the web doesn’t contain as much high-quality content anymore as before; or that independent content providers are having a hard time making a living. I don’t enjoy the web as much as I used to, but I am pretty sure that in the early days almost nobody was making money off the content they created. So maybe the problem is discoverability rather than compensation. It would be helpful to see a little more of the analysis that Mozilla has done to define the problem.

mcv 7y ago

Here's an idea that just came to me. Feel free to shoot holes in it. It's based on my assumption that users do prefer things without ads, and might want to pay for it. So how about a search engine where, if you pay for it, it ranks sites without ads at the top. And if you click a link to an ad-less site, that site gets some of the money you paid to the search engine. Maybe combine it with a social network that works a similar way, though that's harder to do because you don't control what people share. The major downside is that there would be a central place (the search engine) where the money gets distributed. It would be better to have something non-centralised. Still, I might use a search engine like that.

jamesrcole 7y ago
A major question, for me, is: how does it get started? What would motivate someone to create a website without ads, for the purposes of what you're suggesting, when the scheme is in its infancy? What would motivate a website to remove ads, when the scheme is in its infancy?
- mcv 7y ago
  Plenty of websites already have no ads. Wikipedia, for example. Many blogs too. But even with ads, you'll still be listed. But ad-free sites get a higher ranking, making that a more viable decision for some.
  - jamesrcole 7y ago
    That doesn't matter unless the existing pool of ad-free sites can supply good results for a reasonable proportion of the actual web searches being performed. I doubt very much it can. For the idea to work it'd mean that there'd b incentive to have a website on a particular topic be ad-free vs ad-based competitors. How does that incentive start in the first place?
    - mcv 7y ago
      It probably shouldn't put all ad-free sites above all ad-laden sites, but some preferential treatment would be nice. But there are already plenty of ad-free sites that have tons of useful information. I wouldn't mind seeing them ranked higher.

dannyw 7y ago

Coil is a company that has raised 269M. And they're spending 100M of this on a grant?

m-i-l 7y ago

Back in the early days of the internet I used to believe that monetization, or micropayments, was one of the key unsolved problems. Now I'm starting to wonder if it is the problem, that monetization is the root of all evil on the internet, such as advertising and limbic capitalism, social media and surveillance capitalism, the spammers and scammers and cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, the re-intermediation of new monopolies, and so on. Maybe it would be better if people were still working on free content for love not for money, and/or working on sites and apps that provide a useful service in return for a simple subscription or fee.

carapace 7y ago

If you think about this as a marketing campaign for Coil then it seems to me to be brilliantly enlightened. I mean that sincerely, no sarcasm.