4 ms·

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month. Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine. Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.

abustamam 6mo ago
This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.
- dotancohen 6mo ago
  > distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
    Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.
    - lukechu10 6mo ago
      Well what makes you think the VPN providers are not tracking? You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
      - wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
        They have been subject to warrant requests, and had nothing to turn over. There are only a few vpn providers that I genuinely trust. (Mullvad, airvpn, etc) Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.
  - abustamam 6mo ago
    Yeah that's the problem (and possibly why such a thing didn't exist). But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
- CamperBob2 6mo ago
  The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't. The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
  - Terretta 6mo ago
    Texture was incredible. Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads. Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...
  - abustamam 6mo ago
    I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!
- saghm 6mo ago
  > This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
- Terretta 6mo ago
  content creator is new speak people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
  - totallymike 6mo ago
    I couldn’t disagree with this more if I tried. The biggest benefit of the internet is to make it easier to talk to each other and share ideas. Putting financial gates in front of that ability is hot garbage. Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.
kbelder 6mo ago
But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention. I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.
- vannevar 6mo ago
  >"Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention." Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.
- zadikian 6mo ago
  Microtransactions have been done in various ways, in fact the word refers to those more than a hypothetical.
- FloorEgg 6mo ago
  In 2023 I did a deep dive into the crypto community with two main questions: - do these people understand the principles of making good products? - is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models? After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing. I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc. Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...
  - mistrial9 6mo ago
    you are not alone, people seriously proposed one thing after another in the early 2000s.. same time frame as RSS, roughly. Somehow, these proposals were undermined and slow-walked? merger and acquisition in Silicon Valley was aligned with very different things
gfody 6mo ago
I believe this and it makes a web 3.0 solution seem viable if only we could escape the collective action trap
mlinsey 6mo ago
YouTube had an estimated $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-paramount-wbd-in-2025-ad-revenue/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-p... And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.

abustamam 6mo ago

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

dotancohen 6mo ago
> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
  Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.
  - lukechu10 6mo ago
    Well what makes you think the VPN providers are not tracking? You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
    - wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
      They have been subject to warrant requests, and had nothing to turn over. There are only a few vpn providers that I genuinely trust. (Mullvad, airvpn, etc) Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.
- abustamam 6mo ago
  Yeah that's the problem (and possibly why such a thing didn't exist). But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
CamperBob2 6mo ago
The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't. The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
- Terretta 6mo ago
  Texture was incredible. Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads. Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...
- abustamam 6mo ago
  I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!
saghm 6mo ago
> This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
Terretta 6mo ago
content creator is new speak people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
- totallymike 6mo ago
  I couldn’t disagree with this more if I tried. The biggest benefit of the internet is to make it easier to talk to each other and share ideas. Putting financial gates in front of that ability is hot garbage. Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.

kbelder 6mo ago

But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention. I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.

vannevar 6mo ago
>"Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention." Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.
zadikian 6mo ago
Microtransactions have been done in various ways, in fact the word refers to those more than a hypothetical.
FloorEgg 6mo ago
In 2023 I did a deep dive into the crypto community with two main questions: - do these people understand the principles of making good products? - is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models? After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing. I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc. Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...
- mistrial9 6mo ago
  you are not alone, people seriously proposed one thing after another in the early 2000s.. same time frame as RSS, roughly. Somehow, these proposals were undermined and slow-walked? merger and acquisition in Silicon Valley was aligned with very different things

gfody 6mo ago

I believe this and it makes a web 3.0 solution seem viable if only we could escape the collective action trap

mlinsey 6mo ago

YouTube had an estimated $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-paramount-wbd-in-2025-ad-revenue/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-p... And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.