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Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have ve

Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money. Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up). [0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

pdonis 6y ago
> if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money There's an easy solution to this: what economists call price discrimination. Basically, people who can afford to pay more, pay more, and people who can't afford to pay more, don't. It looks like the Contributor program you describe could have been set up to do this.
- sidibe 6y ago
  This easy solution sounds very difficult. Also the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent. It's no longer a secret that they are the product, even non-technical people see Google as big brother now, but people still prefer not to have to use their credit card.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    The vast majority of people in HN prefer free, too. It's frustrating to see whenever a relevant article from the WSJ or the NY Times is discussed, a significant number of posts are complaining about the paywall. Get all your news from spam-blogs if you want, but don't complain about people who are willing to pay for slightly better (in some dimensions at least) news sources.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent Yes, I get that Google and Facebook and Twitter and friends have gotten people accustomed to having all these wonderful services that everyone loves to use somehow magically appear on the Internet for free. That doesn't mean it's actually free. It just means that the costs are hidden. Which is all fine in and of itself: if everyone else wants to hand over their private data to be sold, sure, go ahead, do it. I don't even have a Twitter account, and while I have a Facebook account I almost never use it and have entered zero data beyond my name into its profile. I can't quite say the same about my Google account, since I do buy books and apps from Google Play, but it's as close as I can get it to zero data in its profile. So I at least have some way of limiting how much I am participating in the great selling of personal data. However, I don't have a way of getting better service from Google for things that could be better services if those of us who want the better service were allowed to pay for it. That's one of the standard ways of doing price discrimination, and should be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with cloud services, or indeed anyone who has used an app with a freemium business model: service tiers. The lowest tier is the free one; the other tiers are progressively more expensive and provide more added functionality. But Google can't be bothered to do it for its hugely useful apps like Maps and search, and then they tell us how difficult it is to staff these hugely useful apps with enough engineering resources. It doesn't add up.

pdonis 6y ago

> if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money There's an easy solution to this: what economists call price discrimination. Basically, people who can afford to pay more, pay more, and people who can't afford to pay more, don't. It looks like the Contributor program you describe could have been set up to do this.

sidibe 6y ago
This easy solution sounds very difficult. Also the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent. It's no longer a secret that they are the product, even non-technical people see Google as big brother now, but people still prefer not to have to use their credit card.
- fortran77 6y ago
  The vast majority of people in HN prefer free, too. It's frustrating to see whenever a relevant article from the WSJ or the NY Times is discussed, a significant number of posts are complaining about the paywall. Get all your news from spam-blogs if you want, but don't complain about people who are willing to pay for slightly better (in some dimensions at least) news sources.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent Yes, I get that Google and Facebook and Twitter and friends have gotten people accustomed to having all these wonderful services that everyone loves to use somehow magically appear on the Internet for free. That doesn't mean it's actually free. It just means that the costs are hidden. Which is all fine in and of itself: if everyone else wants to hand over their private data to be sold, sure, go ahead, do it. I don't even have a Twitter account, and while I have a Facebook account I almost never use it and have entered zero data beyond my name into its profile. I can't quite say the same about my Google account, since I do buy books and apps from Google Play, but it's as close as I can get it to zero data in its profile. So I at least have some way of limiting how much I am participating in the great selling of personal data. However, I don't have a way of getting better service from Google for things that could be better services if those of us who want the better service were allowed to pay for it. That's one of the standard ways of doing price discrimination, and should be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with cloud services, or indeed anyone who has used an app with a freemium business model: service tiers. The lowest tier is the free one; the other tiers are progressively more expensive and provide more added functionality. But Google can't be bothered to do it for its hugely useful apps like Maps and search, and then they tell us how difficult it is to staff these hugely useful apps with enough engineering resources. It doesn't add up.