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B is what I'm worried about and I'm worried that this has a 90% chance of happening. I have about 2 years of experience working in online ads in some way shape

B is what I'm worried about and I'm worried that this has a 90% chance of happening. I have about 2 years of experience working in online ads in some way shape or form, and it frustrates me how much the implications here aren't really being considered. Currently, whenever I hear "I see too many ads for shit that is too related to my interests" (paraphrased), I consider it the ultimate 21st century 1st world problem. Because this is how sites make their money, and how Google got to where it is today. You want to cut off online ads? Fine: - Any sites that are free will undergo a paywall, as people don't work for free. - More apps in the app stores increase their prices, as ad revenue is no longer there for the apps they create - More paywalls and higher prices mean that lower income people and people in developing countries can't access free and distributable content. And don't give me this BS about how "If X site were pay-per-use with no ads, I would totally pay for it" because power users don't power websites ... as soon as you charge for something then 90% of the users drop off. [See: Google Reader, any social network, etc.]

tg3 13y ago
Power users can power websites, so long as the website's value isn't (too) dependent on the number of users it has. For example, Dropbox's power users essentially subsidize everyone else's usage. That model may have worked for Google Reader as well. Social networks have a harder time, because anything that reduces interaction in the network reduces the value for everyone.
- s3r3nity 13y ago
  Interesting point, though I'm still convinced that Dropbox is the exception rather than the rule -- being a >90% margin business means you can take a risk like this and it's not really a "risk", whereas a search engine, news site, Youtube, etc. would not
mirkules 13y ago
B is the option I am precisely hoping for. I find it really creepy to get cross-targeted ads. I am willing to give up 90% of the websites I view (and pay for the remaining 10%) so I don't have to look at ads, and more importantly, so that they don't look at me. After all the news about the government tracking us by gaining access to third-party services, I really don't want to give some company any more information that I absolutely have to. I regret that this hurts your bottom line as an employee of the advertising business, but just as my privacy is your casualty of doing business, your business is my casualty of maintaining my privacy.
betterunix 13y ago
"as soon as you charge for something then 90% of the users drop off" Maybe you should find less obstructive ways to charge people? If the charges occurred in the background, without anyone having to log in and enter credit card data over and over, it would be a lot easier to get people to do it. If paying 0.1 cents per page were transparent and required no login or special authorizations, I am pretty sure that 90% would drop significantly. Basically, what you need is digital cash, and you need to link it to something people already pay for (say, their ISP). Imagine if you pay your ISP for service, and as part of that payment, you received a bunch of digital cash tokens that would be sent to websites as you visited them. Yes, you would need some security to ensure that these tokens were not stolen by malicious advertisers, but I do not think that is an insurmountable problem (and it is no different than click fraud). Set a sensible default for the number of tokens that will be held at the begin of a billing period (say, enough for 50,000 page views per month -- probably more than even the most bored 4chan user will visit), and address issues related to large organizations providing their users with access (e.g. universities, libraries, etc.) and you might actually solve the problem. It is not a perfect solution by any means, but (a) it protects everyone's privacy and (b) removes the need for spam^H^H^H^Hweb advertising.
- s3r3nity 13y ago
  Interesting, though I don't think the optimization of friction in payment flows is the issue -- it's more that people in general don't want to pay for access to the internet just to have to pay for specific sites/apps. It would be like paying for cable connection AND paying for individual channels -- it's stupid and a generally despised practice (and they STILL show you commercials!) Further it's regressive, as it impacts lower income and developing countries hardest.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    "people in general don't want to pay for access to the internet just to have to pay for specific sites/apps" People in general do pay for apps and do pay for subscriptions to specific sites (e.g. Netflix). I do not think the problem is that people are cheap. Let's put it this way: imagine having to enter payment information every time you clicked on a HN link. That is the reason sites see people running for the hills when they put up a paywall. The paywall interrupts the entire experience, and people just go elsewhere. There is also the matter of charging people enough to even cover the transaction costs -- which results in big charges that scare people off. From where I sit, the answer is to make the payments as small and transparent as possible, and digital cash is a perfect fit. "it's stupid and a generally despised practice (and they STILL show you commercials!)" This is where I think the problem will come in: the fact that web advertising would not go away even if a micropayment system were used. The answer is for browsers to fight advertising head on, making things like ABP the default. "Further it's regressive, as it impacts lower income and developing countries hardest." Sure, but that is a social problem, not a technical problem, and there are social solutions to it. Here is one idea, adapted from Jaron Lanier: pay people for their contributions to websites. Imagine if every HN upvote gave you 1/10 the cost of a single page view. Imagine if every time someone viewed your Youtube video, you received some fraction of the micropayment sent to Youtube. That is clearly a harder thing to do, since it requires that individual people receive payments, but again it is not insurmountable from a technical perspective. People in developing countries could then monetize their own use of the Internet, and possibly bootstrap their web browsing (or make it less painful). Another idea is that developing countries can host their own websites, with their own payment structures, catering to local cultures and languages. The Internet is not supposed to have borders, so I am not a big fan of this approach, but it does have its advantages.
tomjen3 13y ago
Most sites that are free won't suddenly turn paysites, people will continue to make blogposts for fame and the ability to sell their own products (which isn't ads in the traditional internet sense), plenty of newspapers may have to close their news sites but the best of the them will make enough money the old fashioned way: charging a few bucks a month. And that is basically what I want: an internet of people who are writing because they want to, about what they want, not demand media writing crap. I want the rest to be paid for, or run on donations (see Wikipedia). I would love the best webmail client to be one I had to pay 3 usd/month for but which integrated PGP, instead of gmail. Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition.
- s3r3nity 13y ago
 "Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition." I REALLY disagree with this statement, namely because the data shows otherwise when it comes to the online space -- for example, Waze became a legitimate contender by remaining free and instead doing location based advertising. Bing and other search engines are allowed to be decent competitors to Google because advertising drives search. Second, donations is not a scalable model for the internet, as it definitely doesn't allow for competition in any meaningful way at large scale. Why does it work for Wikipedia? Because of its mission to remain free for anyone in the world (also because of a desire to be unbiased, but let's table that for now, because as politics tells us donations don't always lead to unbiased decisions.) And honestly, that should be the crux here: the idea of a paywall for Wikipedia or any site that advocates for free and open information dispersal would immediately devalue its mission -- a rando in Uganda should have the same access to information as me in my cushy western Tech job.

tg3 13y ago

Power users can power websites, so long as the website's value isn't (too) dependent on the number of users it has. For example, Dropbox's power users essentially subsidize everyone else's usage. That model may have worked for Google Reader as well. Social networks have a harder time, because anything that reduces interaction in the network reduces the value for everyone.

s3r3nity 13y ago
Interesting point, though I'm still convinced that Dropbox is the exception rather than the rule -- being a >90% margin business means you can take a risk like this and it's not really a "risk", whereas a search engine, news site, Youtube, etc. would not

mirkules 13y ago

B is the option I am precisely hoping for. I find it really creepy to get cross-targeted ads. I am willing to give up 90% of the websites I view (and pay for the remaining 10%) so I don't have to look at ads, and more importantly, so that they don't look at me. After all the news about the government tracking us by gaining access to third-party services, I really don't want to give some company any more information that I absolutely have to. I regret that this hurts your bottom line as an employee of the advertising business, but just as my privacy is your casualty of doing business, your business is my casualty of maintaining my privacy.

betterunix 13y ago

"as soon as you charge for something then 90% of the users drop off" Maybe you should find less obstructive ways to charge people? If the charges occurred in the background, without anyone having to log in and enter credit card data over and over, it would be a lot easier to get people to do it. If paying 0.1 cents per page were transparent and required no login or special authorizations, I am pretty sure that 90% would drop significantly. Basically, what you need is digital cash, and you need to link it to something people already pay for (say, their ISP). Imagine if you pay your ISP for service, and as part of that payment, you received a bunch of digital cash tokens that would be sent to websites as you visited them. Yes, you would need some security to ensure that these tokens were not stolen by malicious advertisers, but I do not think that is an insurmountable problem (and it is no different than click fraud). Set a sensible default for the number of tokens that will be held at the begin of a billing period (say, enough for 50,000 page views per month -- probably more than even the most bored 4chan user will visit), and address issues related to large organizations providing their users with access (e.g. universities, libraries, etc.) and you might actually solve the problem. It is not a perfect solution by any means, but (a) it protects everyone's privacy and (b) removes the need for spam^H^H^H^Hweb advertising.

s3r3nity 13y ago
Interesting, though I don't think the optimization of friction in payment flows is the issue -- it's more that people in general don't want to pay for access to the internet just to have to pay for specific sites/apps. It would be like paying for cable connection AND paying for individual channels -- it's stupid and a generally despised practice (and they STILL show you commercials!) Further it's regressive, as it impacts lower income and developing countries hardest.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "people in general don't want to pay for access to the internet just to have to pay for specific sites/apps" People in general do pay for apps and do pay for subscriptions to specific sites (e.g. Netflix). I do not think the problem is that people are cheap. Let's put it this way: imagine having to enter payment information every time you clicked on a HN link. That is the reason sites see people running for the hills when they put up a paywall. The paywall interrupts the entire experience, and people just go elsewhere. There is also the matter of charging people enough to even cover the transaction costs -- which results in big charges that scare people off. From where I sit, the answer is to make the payments as small and transparent as possible, and digital cash is a perfect fit. "it's stupid and a generally despised practice (and they STILL show you commercials!)" This is where I think the problem will come in: the fact that web advertising would not go away even if a micropayment system were used. The answer is for browsers to fight advertising head on, making things like ABP the default. "Further it's regressive, as it impacts lower income and developing countries hardest." Sure, but that is a social problem, not a technical problem, and there are social solutions to it. Here is one idea, adapted from Jaron Lanier: pay people for their contributions to websites. Imagine if every HN upvote gave you 1/10 the cost of a single page view. Imagine if every time someone viewed your Youtube video, you received some fraction of the micropayment sent to Youtube. That is clearly a harder thing to do, since it requires that individual people receive payments, but again it is not insurmountable from a technical perspective. People in developing countries could then monetize their own use of the Internet, and possibly bootstrap their web browsing (or make it less painful). Another idea is that developing countries can host their own websites, with their own payment structures, catering to local cultures and languages. The Internet is not supposed to have borders, so I am not a big fan of this approach, but it does have its advantages.

tomjen3 13y ago

Most sites that are free won't suddenly turn paysites, people will continue to make blogposts for fame and the ability to sell their own products (which isn't ads in the traditional internet sense), plenty of newspapers may have to close their news sites but the best of the them will make enough money the old fashioned way: charging a few bucks a month. And that is basically what I want: an internet of people who are writing because they want to, about what they want, not demand media writing crap. I want the rest to be paid for, or run on donations (see Wikipedia). I would love the best webmail client to be one I had to pay 3 usd/month for but which integrated PGP, instead of gmail. Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition.

s3r3nity 13y ago
"Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition." I REALLY disagree with this statement, namely because the data shows otherwise when it comes to the online space -- for example, Waze became a legitimate contender by remaining free and instead doing location based advertising. Bing and other search engines are allowed to be decent competitors to Google because advertising drives search. Second, donations is not a scalable model for the internet, as it definitely doesn't allow for competition in any meaningful way at large scale. Why does it work for Wikipedia? Because of its mission to remain free for anyone in the world (also because of a desire to be unbiased, but let's table that for now, because as politics tells us donations don't always lead to unbiased decisions.) And honestly, that should be the crux here: the idea of a paywall for Wikipedia or any site that advocates for free and open information dispersal would immediately devalue its mission -- a rando in Uganda should have the same access to information as me in my cushy western Tech job.