7 ms·

Readability: An Important Announcement

153 points by bjonathan 14y ago

kbob 14y ago
$150,000. "millions of domains". That works out to an average of a few pennies per domain. Given that the top 100 sites take a big chunk of the total, the median is probably much less. We're still looking for that sustainable business model.
- zevyoura 14y ago
  Right, that's why they stopped doing it.
  - gcb 14y ago
    But that blog post claim the opposite. "we got money, but there's no content site"
danso 14y ago
Whew, I thought they were going to kill their API.
JCB_K 14y ago
This is just goodwill-in-disguise. They've collected money on behalf of publishers, without consent, and now they realise that was a bad idea. They understand they obviously can't get away with keeping the money, but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners.
- jerf 14y ago
  "but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners." That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.) No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those who gave it, but that may have its own problems.
  - sjs382 14y ago
    They stole the idea from Superman III
  - simonbrown 14y ago
    Another option could be to allocate the money between the site owners that have registered in the same proportions as before. If they set a date to do this, and the planned amount for most sites ends up being significant, this may provide an incentive for more people to register.
  - darushimo 14y ago
    "That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking." Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort. What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20 or more. Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion of the way they've ended this operation. Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could put in work to contact those publishers.
- freehunter 14y ago
  They offered a service similar to adblock and noscript, but offered money back to the sites to make up for the loss of ad revenue. To my eyes, your post came across as critical of this service, so I apologize if I misunderstood, but you should be leveraging even harsher criticism against projects which deny sites their revenue and don't offer that money back to them.
  - JCB_K 14y ago
    offered money back to the sites That's where the problem lies, they first took money from users, and then "offer" to pay it back. They should've done it the other way around, only charging money for sites which actually signed up to the service. They've done a good job at making it sound like a great service for publishers, but when you think about it a bit more it's quite shady.
    - Groxx 14y ago
      There's no charging for reading on sites that have signed up. It was a voluntary monthly payment for them to try to distribute evenly to publishers based on your use, not a "use Readability on x.com, pay Readability $1 which we'll transfer to x.com" model. If it were the latter, I'd agree with you, but it's nothing like that.
    - freehunter 14y ago
      As Groxx said, the money was collected, but not on behalf of the sites. The only reason it was offered back to the sites was because of good will. They didn't have to pay them a dime. They could have easily pocketed the $5/mo.
- Groxx 14y ago
  Is the complaint that they are holding the money in the hopes that people will claim it? Or that they should have been giving it all out to the ones who did register, and every new source would start from zero? "... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner. If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.
Uchikoma 14y ago
"If you haven’t already registered your domain with Readability, you have until July 15, 2012 to do so." They love to give money away, but a.) do not link to the page where to register or tell how to register b.) The signup page only caters to readers c.) The publisher page does not show how to register. If you search the page, you will find a link buried beside others called "Register" IMHO that is not the way to have millions of sites to register. UPDATE: Registered for http://codemonkeyism.com http://codemonkeyism.com Now I get $0.18 - Wohooo! Didn't know before that they wanted to give me money. The model seems nice, easier than Flattr but when reading about Readability (and I'm a InstaPaper payer) I thought the model was only for big publishers, not small blogs like mine.
- freerobby 14y ago
  Ha. You actually don't get $0.18 though, because the minimum payout is $50.
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    "If you registered as a publisher with Readability, we’ll be sending you any remaining money your site has earned by July 31, 2012, regardless of amount." Ha ;-)
    - freerobby 14y ago
      Thanks, I must have missed that. I got that info from my publisher dashboard, which still says this: http://cl.ly/1O1F011f1H3p1T2h0j0Z http://cl.ly/1O1F011f1H3p1T2h0j0Z
    - Uchikoma 14y ago
      The text is part of the blog post. Guess they've change the policy for the cleanup.
- iand 14y ago
  Direct link https://www.readability.com/publishers/register/ https://www.readability.com/publishers/register/
mike-cardwell 14y ago
I wonder if they'll mail out a cheque for the $1.45 they owe me.
- veyron 14y ago
  minimum is 50 bucks, so i doubt you are getting anything
  - spullara 14y ago
    In the blog entry they say they will send out any amount.
    - josscrowcroft 14y ago
      I'm really looking forward to taking my cheque for $0.21 to my bank here in England!
SMrF 14y ago
"Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers." And somewhere out there Ted Nelson is saying, "I told you so. We needed transclusion, transcopyright, and micropayments in our hypertext from the beginning!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu (p.s. not a xanadu zealot, just fascinated by the history)
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  Xanadu was a fascinating idea, but they still don't have a product I could put a user in front of and have them use it to read things. If they ever had, I'd have some sympathy/respect for them.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I don't think it's really been a "them" for a while now; Xanadu as a funded project with employees wound down around 1993-94, and since then it's just been Ted Nelson occasionally sketching out designs.
- cageface 14y ago
  This is why I think that people that predict that custom native apps will displace the web are getting ahead of themselves. I'm willing to install a dedicated app for a handful of services I use all the time but otherwise I'm happier to just keep a bookmark.
- jes5199 14y ago
  which is the bigger problem with Xanadu: that no one ever solved the technical issues, or that no one ever got a critical mass of users?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Micropayments do not scale. The cost of my deciding whether or not an article is worth whatever the cost of reading it is, let alone the huge privacy invasion that per-article pricing implies (tying information content and payment to a single user) is a non-starter for all but a very few sites. That leaves us with accompanying advertising, patronage, syndication, content-as-promotion (propaganda/advertising), and self-publishing. "Accompanying advertising" is the existing model of display or other ads accompanying content. This works for some sites, but not particularly well, and there are concerns in the mobile space. "Patronage" is essentially sponsorship of work, as fine art patronage was fairly common in the past. "Syndication" would require a model of mechanical payments and essentially a tax-like funding stream (part of your monthly data plan) from which content providers are paid. "Content-as-promotion" is where the initiative for creating content is its own utility in promoting the commercial or ideological goals of the author. Bands promoting live acts, political or religious organizations. "Self-publishing" is essentially vanity publishing -- where many blogs are (possibly a special case of content as promotion). Of this list, the syndication model is the only one I see as having strong viable economic potential for general works, though it requires the creation of a syndicate. Small-scale syndicates, in the form of paywall/paygate operators could be the start of this -- major periodical publishers (NY Times, Murdoch/Dow Jones), Apple, Amazon, eBay. But for general content, I'd see a mix of a mechanical reproduction right, a flat (or very simply tiered) level of content payments, and what would amount to an all-you-can-eat or bandwidth-based scheme through a data service provider or independent syndicate provider. It's a leaky system, but might just work.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
As a content owner, I had no idea readability was doing this. Like Peter Thiel says, the distribution is sometimes the hardest problem. The idea isn't a bad one, and just because the domain owners never registered doesn't mean the idea can't work. It just means most domain owners probably don't even know about this.
- droithomme 14y ago
  Yeah, I am familiar with Readability but didn't know they had this program. I think for the guys signing up and getting a 15 cent check, their form should also have the option of the site owner saying it's OK to just give the amount less than $1 or whatever to the charity since the cost of handling the check isn't really worth it on either end.
nicholassmith 14y ago
It's great when people try new things, and honestly rewarding creators for the work they've created is a great thing. Here's the problem, outside of the sphere of influence people don't know about the service, and that's always going to be a problem. Also a problem? People not caring enough to sign up, if your minimum is $50 and the average site makes is $3.50, why's anyone going to take the time to get that money? Also a problem? A lot of readers like writers who don't like in the U.S., and a lot of the time that $3.50 then gets currency exchanged down to even less. I'm glad they've held their hands and said 'we made a mistake', but it was essentially not the greatest idea in the world to start with. You have to run through all the weird edge cases before you even get started.
droithomme 14y ago
Ah, what a mess. Hopefully no one will create problems for them since it seems their intentions are good, and 826 Valencia (McSweeney's nationwide network of writing workshops for young people) is quite awesome. I don't know what their original contracts with customers said, that contract is what needs to govern what happens to money collected that was not distributed. Perhaps the contract never thought to take into account left over money though. If that's the case, then the leftover amounts, calculated as the percentage of funds received per person that weren't disbursed based on their reading habits, should be refunded to the original customers. I think it would be worth also emailing each person and asking them what they want done - do they want it donated to 826 Valencia, or would they prefer their money back. Most will give permission to donate it since they are each small amounts anyway, but others will have problems getting ahold of them because their emails will bounce. But it will at least allow getting permission from many as to what they want done. This is all presuming, to state again, that this case of undistributable funds was not covered in the original contract. There is one case I am familiar with where a person collected money for a certain cause, but wasn't able to use the money for that cause. He didn't keep track of the people who he collected the money from (some of this was passing baskets around at churches) and so he just decided to donate all the money (around $10,000) to a different charity he chose. He ended up charged with theft and misappropriation of funds. So you have to be careful with this stuff. (No case citation as I know the person professionally and don't wish to call attention to him, just making the point that collecting money for one thing and then spending it on another can lead to problems in some cases even when your intentions are pure.)
Tloewald 14y ago
Well, I claimed my $0.50
- underwater 14y ago
  I have 52 cents that are rightfully mine. Where did you go in the publisher backend to claim the money?
  - _delirium 14y ago
    You just fill in your address information in your publisher profile, and they'll mail you a check by the end of July.
ethank 14y ago
Reminds me of SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and Sesac and other PRO's. "Not our fault if you don't claim the money we collected on your behalf!"
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the musical licensing and payments system is 1) supported by copyright law (17 USC 115(a) http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115), and 2) sanctioned by either regulation or industry as to the establishment . You left out the Harry Fox Agency, which is actually responsible for the bulk of mechanicals in the US.
  - ethank 14y ago
    Yes, it is backed up by law. Still, same type of issues, just legal breakage. http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-tell-artists-claim-your-digital-royalties/ http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-...
knowaveragejoe 14y ago
I stopped using readability when it changed from a simple bookmarklet that would work on any page, to a browser plugin/service combination. It's a shame, really, it was brilliantly useful then, and I haven't found anything that properly replaces it.
- Flow 14y ago
  Have you tried Safari Reader? It's quite similar.
  - knowaveragejoe 14y ago
    I have, and from what I've found it has limitations of its own(namely, paginated articles will not work). I've also tried greasemonkey/stylebot scripts, which work great with the caveat that they're on a case-by-case basis. Really all I want is a damn simple way to invert the colors of any website, so white-on-black sites don't burn the eyes when reading at night. I'm not at all bothered by choice of font(unless it's really obnoxious and actually hinders reading of course), and changing the size of text is already easily addressed in modern browsers. Unfortunately Readability had extremely limited options for color(only -one- color scheme had light text on dark background) and font size. Personally I see this as being in the realm of browser vendors - hopefully we will start to see them include such a feature, and flesh it out in such a way that it's customizable and really works for any site.
    - unfletch 14y ago
      I use Safari Reader all the time and it loads paginated articles very well as far as I can tell. When you scroll down a bit you should see an actual separated second page, labeled "Page 2 of N." Maybe there are certain sites whose pagination Reader can't figure out, but try this for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return-brings-rapid-chill-to-us-russia-ties.html?_r=1&hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return...
  - moron 14y ago
    I think it's great. When I don't have it, I use and recommend Readable, which does about the same thing that Readability used to do except without all the redirect shenanigans. Readable is awesome.
3pt14159 14y ago
Why not make the minimum cheque $1k and award them randomly via weighted ballot method? That way everyone along the tail gets a piece (eventually) but you only have to collect 150 contact details?
blhack 14y ago
Here is the link ton add additional domains: http://www.readability.com/publisher/domains/add http://www.readability.com/publisher/domains/add I couldn't find this anywhere on their site... :(
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
PaulHoule 14y ago
Wow. The temptation to take the money and run in a situation like this is high. I hope they get widely recognized for acting with the highest level of integrity.
moron 14y ago
Glad they've finally changed courses, but that was a bad idea. Collecting money "on behalf" of publishers they have no affiliation with... ick.
- lukifer 14y ago
  I think it was a good idea that could/should have been implemented in a way that felt less sketchy. For instance: show uncollected revenues to each user on a per-site basis; allow users to withdraw unpaid money at any time, or re-allocate their funds to other authors who are collecting; have interest from all unpaid authors go towards uncontroversial charities.
jacques_chester 14y ago
Um, actually, they might not be able to do that. What they may be sitting on here is a trust, for which the publishing websites are the beneficiaries. If they then repurpose the money for something else without the beneficiaries' permission, they'd be in breach of trust. Which is quite serious ju-ju. Before doing this stuff they need to consult a lawyer. I should point here that I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. Disclaimer: I am working on a startup that would have been seen as a close competitor.
zem 14y ago
this comment, analysing the four combinations of opt-{in,out}-to-be-scraped x opt-{in,out}-to-get-paid is well worth reading: http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-3419 http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-34...
jeromeparadis 14y ago
Do they have a domain lookup form that we can check without registering?
influx 14y ago
Why wouldn't they just refund the money back to the customers?
kirillzubovsky 14y ago
I am curious to know whether no one wanted to claim the money, or no one had a clue the money were available. Your "this didn't work" post is the first time that I've heard of this initiative. How many more users like me are out there? I'd bet, the majority.
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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Hominem 14y ago
Yvuewsa

153 points by bjonathan 14y ago

kbob 14y ago

$150,000. "millions of domains". That works out to an average of a few pennies per domain. Given that the top 100 sites take a big chunk of the total, the median is probably much less. We're still looking for that sustainable business model.

zevyoura 14y ago
Right, that's why they stopped doing it.
- gcb 14y ago
  But that blog post claim the opposite. "we got money, but there's no content site"

danso 14y ago

Whew, I thought they were going to kill their API.

JCB_K 14y ago

This is just goodwill-in-disguise. They've collected money on behalf of publishers, without consent, and now they realise that was a bad idea. They understand they obviously can't get away with keeping the money, but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners.

jerf 14y ago
"but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners." That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.) No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those who gave it, but that may have its own problems.
- sjs382 14y ago
  They stole the idea from Superman III
- simonbrown 14y ago
  Another option could be to allocate the money between the site owners that have registered in the same proportions as before. If they set a date to do this, and the planned amount for most sites ends up being significant, this may provide an incentive for more people to register.
- darushimo 14y ago
  "That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking." Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort. What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20 or more. Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion of the way they've ended this operation. Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could put in work to contact those publishers.
freehunter 14y ago
They offered a service similar to adblock and noscript, but offered money back to the sites to make up for the loss of ad revenue. To my eyes, your post came across as critical of this service, so I apologize if I misunderstood, but you should be leveraging even harsher criticism against projects which deny sites their revenue and don't offer that money back to them.
- JCB_K 14y ago
  offered money back to the sites That's where the problem lies, they first took money from users, and then "offer" to pay it back. They should've done it the other way around, only charging money for sites which actually signed up to the service. They've done a good job at making it sound like a great service for publishers, but when you think about it a bit more it's quite shady.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    There's no charging for reading on sites that have signed up. It was a voluntary monthly payment for them to try to distribute evenly to publishers based on your use, not a "use Readability on x.com, pay Readability $1 which we'll transfer to x.com" model. If it were the latter, I'd agree with you, but it's nothing like that.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    As Groxx said, the money was collected, but not on behalf of the sites. The only reason it was offered back to the sites was because of good will. They didn't have to pay them a dime. They could have easily pocketed the $5/mo.
Groxx 14y ago
Is the complaint that they are holding the money in the hopes that people will claim it? Or that they should have been giving it all out to the ones who did register, and every new source would start from zero? "... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner. If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.

Uchikoma 14y ago

"If you haven’t already registered your domain with Readability, you have until July 15, 2012 to do so." They love to give money away, but a.) do not link to the page where to register or tell how to register b.) The signup page only caters to readers c.) The publisher page does not show how to register. If you search the page, you will find a link buried beside others called "Register" IMHO that is not the way to have millions of sites to register. UPDATE: Registered for http://codemonkeyism.com http://codemonkeyism.com Now I get $0.18 - Wohooo! Didn't know before that they wanted to give me money. The model seems nice, easier than Flattr but when reading about Readability (and I'm a InstaPaper payer) I thought the model was only for big publishers, not small blogs like mine.

freerobby 14y ago
Ha. You actually don't get $0.18 though, because the minimum payout is $50.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  "If you registered as a publisher with Readability, we’ll be sending you any remaining money your site has earned by July 31, 2012, regardless of amount." Ha ;-)
  - freerobby 14y ago
    Thanks, I must have missed that. I got that info from my publisher dashboard, which still says this: http://cl.ly/1O1F011f1H3p1T2h0j0Z http://cl.ly/1O1F011f1H3p1T2h0j0Z
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    The text is part of the blog post. Guess they've change the policy for the cleanup.
iand 14y ago
Direct link https://www.readability.com/publishers/register/ https://www.readability.com/publishers/register/

mike-cardwell 14y ago

I wonder if they'll mail out a cheque for the $1.45 they owe me.

veyron 14y ago
minimum is 50 bucks, so i doubt you are getting anything
- spullara 14y ago
  In the blog entry they say they will send out any amount.
  - josscrowcroft 14y ago
    I'm really looking forward to taking my cheque for $0.21 to my bank here in England!

SMrF 14y ago

"Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers." And somewhere out there Ted Nelson is saying, "I told you so. We needed transclusion, transcopyright, and micropayments in our hypertext from the beginning!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu (p.s. not a xanadu zealot, just fascinated by the history)

AndrewDucker 14y ago
Xanadu was a fascinating idea, but they still don't have a product I could put a user in front of and have them use it to read things. If they ever had, I'd have some sympathy/respect for them.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I don't think it's really been a "them" for a while now; Xanadu as a funded project with employees wound down around 1993-94, and since then it's just been Ted Nelson occasionally sketching out designs.
cageface 14y ago
This is why I think that people that predict that custom native apps will displace the web are getting ahead of themselves. I'm willing to install a dedicated app for a handful of services I use all the time but otherwise I'm happier to just keep a bookmark.
jes5199 14y ago
which is the bigger problem with Xanadu: that no one ever solved the technical issues, or that no one ever got a critical mass of users?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
dredmorbius 14y ago
Micropayments do not scale. The cost of my deciding whether or not an article is worth whatever the cost of reading it is, let alone the huge privacy invasion that per-article pricing implies (tying information content and payment to a single user) is a non-starter for all but a very few sites. That leaves us with accompanying advertising, patronage, syndication, content-as-promotion (propaganda/advertising), and self-publishing. "Accompanying advertising" is the existing model of display or other ads accompanying content. This works for some sites, but not particularly well, and there are concerns in the mobile space. "Patronage" is essentially sponsorship of work, as fine art patronage was fairly common in the past. "Syndication" would require a model of mechanical payments and essentially a tax-like funding stream (part of your monthly data plan) from which content providers are paid. "Content-as-promotion" is where the initiative for creating content is its own utility in promoting the commercial or ideological goals of the author. Bands promoting live acts, political or religious organizations. "Self-publishing" is essentially vanity publishing -- where many blogs are (possibly a special case of content as promotion). Of this list, the syndication model is the only one I see as having strong viable economic potential for general works, though it requires the creation of a syndicate. Small-scale syndicates, in the form of paywall/paygate operators could be the start of this -- major periodical publishers (NY Times, Murdoch/Dow Jones), Apple, Amazon, eBay. But for general content, I'd see a mix of a mechanical reproduction right, a flat (or very simply tiered) level of content payments, and what would amount to an all-you-can-eat or bandwidth-based scheme through a data service provider or independent syndicate provider. It's a leaky system, but might just work.

endlessvoid94 14y ago

As a content owner, I had no idea readability was doing this. Like Peter Thiel says, the distribution is sometimes the hardest problem. The idea isn't a bad one, and just because the domain owners never registered doesn't mean the idea can't work. It just means most domain owners probably don't even know about this.

droithomme 14y ago
Yeah, I am familiar with Readability but didn't know they had this program. I think for the guys signing up and getting a 15 cent check, their form should also have the option of the site owner saying it's OK to just give the amount less than $1 or whatever to the charity since the cost of handling the check isn't really worth it on either end.

nicholassmith 14y ago

It's great when people try new things, and honestly rewarding creators for the work they've created is a great thing. Here's the problem, outside of the sphere of influence people don't know about the service, and that's always going to be a problem. Also a problem? People not caring enough to sign up, if your minimum is $50 and the average site makes is $3.50, why's anyone going to take the time to get that money? Also a problem? A lot of readers like writers who don't like in the U.S., and a lot of the time that $3.50 then gets currency exchanged down to even less. I'm glad they've held their hands and said 'we made a mistake', but it was essentially not the greatest idea in the world to start with. You have to run through all the weird edge cases before you even get started.

droithomme 14y ago

Ah, what a mess. Hopefully no one will create problems for them since it seems their intentions are good, and 826 Valencia (McSweeney's nationwide network of writing workshops for young people) is quite awesome. I don't know what their original contracts with customers said, that contract is what needs to govern what happens to money collected that was not distributed. Perhaps the contract never thought to take into account left over money though. If that's the case, then the leftover amounts, calculated as the percentage of funds received per person that weren't disbursed based on their reading habits, should be refunded to the original customers. I think it would be worth also emailing each person and asking them what they want done - do they want it donated to 826 Valencia, or would they prefer their money back. Most will give permission to donate it since they are each small amounts anyway, but others will have problems getting ahold of them because their emails will bounce. But it will at least allow getting permission from many as to what they want done. This is all presuming, to state again, that this case of undistributable funds was not covered in the original contract. There is one case I am familiar with where a person collected money for a certain cause, but wasn't able to use the money for that cause. He didn't keep track of the people who he collected the money from (some of this was passing baskets around at churches) and so he just decided to donate all the money (around $10,000) to a different charity he chose. He ended up charged with theft and misappropriation of funds. So you have to be careful with this stuff. (No case citation as I know the person professionally and don't wish to call attention to him, just making the point that collecting money for one thing and then spending it on another can lead to problems in some cases even when your intentions are pure.)

Tloewald 14y ago

Well, I claimed my $0.50

underwater 14y ago
I have 52 cents that are rightfully mine. Where did you go in the publisher backend to claim the money?
- _delirium 14y ago
  You just fill in your address information in your publisher profile, and they'll mail you a check by the end of July.

ethank 14y ago

Reminds me of SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and Sesac and other PRO's. "Not our fault if you don't claim the money we collected on your behalf!"

dredmorbius 14y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the musical licensing and payments system is 1) supported by copyright law (17 USC 115(a) http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115), and 2) sanctioned by either regulation or industry as to the establishment . You left out the Harry Fox Agency, which is actually responsible for the bulk of mechanicals in the US.
- ethank 14y ago
  Yes, it is backed up by law. Still, same type of issues, just legal breakage. http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-tell-artists-claim-your-digital-royalties/ http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-...

knowaveragejoe 14y ago

I stopped using readability when it changed from a simple bookmarklet that would work on any page, to a browser plugin/service combination. It's a shame, really, it was brilliantly useful then, and I haven't found anything that properly replaces it.

Flow 14y ago
Have you tried Safari Reader? It's quite similar.
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago
  I have, and from what I've found it has limitations of its own(namely, paginated articles will not work). I've also tried greasemonkey/stylebot scripts, which work great with the caveat that they're on a case-by-case basis. Really all I want is a damn simple way to invert the colors of any website, so white-on-black sites don't burn the eyes when reading at night. I'm not at all bothered by choice of font(unless it's really obnoxious and actually hinders reading of course), and changing the size of text is already easily addressed in modern browsers. Unfortunately Readability had extremely limited options for color(only -one- color scheme had light text on dark background) and font size. Personally I see this as being in the realm of browser vendors - hopefully we will start to see them include such a feature, and flesh it out in such a way that it's customizable and really works for any site.
  - unfletch 14y ago
    I use Safari Reader all the time and it loads paginated articles very well as far as I can tell. When you scroll down a bit you should see an actual separated second page, labeled "Page 2 of N." Maybe there are certain sites whose pagination Reader can't figure out, but try this for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return-brings-rapid-chill-to-us-russia-ties.html?_r=1&hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return...
- moron 14y ago
  I think it's great. When I don't have it, I use and recommend Readable, which does about the same thing that Readability used to do except without all the redirect shenanigans. Readable is awesome.

3pt14159 14y ago

Why not make the minimum cheque $1k and award them randomly via weighted ballot method? That way everyone along the tail gets a piece (eventually) but you only have to collect 150 contact details?

blhack 14y ago

Here is the link ton add additional domains: http://www.readability.com/publisher/domains/add http://www.readability.com/publisher/domains/add I couldn't find this anywhere on their site... :(

deleted 14y ago
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PaulHoule 14y ago

Wow. The temptation to take the money and run in a situation like this is high. I hope they get widely recognized for acting with the highest level of integrity.

moron 14y ago

Glad they've finally changed courses, but that was a bad idea. Collecting money "on behalf" of publishers they have no affiliation with... ick.

lukifer 14y ago
I think it was a good idea that could/should have been implemented in a way that felt less sketchy. For instance: show uncollected revenues to each user on a per-site basis; allow users to withdraw unpaid money at any time, or re-allocate their funds to other authors who are collecting; have interest from all unpaid authors go towards uncontroversial charities.

jacques_chester 14y ago

Um, actually, they might not be able to do that. What they may be sitting on here is a trust, for which the publishing websites are the beneficiaries. If they then repurpose the money for something else without the beneficiaries' permission, they'd be in breach of trust. Which is quite serious ju-ju. Before doing this stuff they need to consult a lawyer. I should point here that I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. Disclaimer: I am working on a startup that would have been seen as a close competitor.

zem 14y ago

this comment, analysing the four combinations of opt-{in,out}-to-be-scraped x opt-{in,out}-to-get-paid is well worth reading: http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-3419 http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/#comment-34...

jeromeparadis 14y ago

Do they have a domain lookup form that we can check without registering?

influx 14y ago

Why wouldn't they just refund the money back to the customers?

kirillzubovsky 14y ago

I am curious to know whether no one wanted to claim the money, or no one had a clue the money were available. Your "this didn't work" post is the first time that I've heard of this initiative. How many more users like me are out there? I'd bet, the majority.

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Hominem 14y ago

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