5 ms·

There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay

There's a growing segment of users that just don't want advertising in their faces, period. Thankfully a not-insignificant portion of these are willing to pay for it through subscriptions on sites that offer this. Not enough sites offer this. I envision an "ad network" appearing eventually that doesn't display any ads, just distributes revenues from an aggregate subscription. Then sites can still be supported by spontaneous visitors and users can control their exposure to advertisements online.

tomflack 13y ago
I pay for Arstechnica premium for this reason. I have adblockers turned off on The Verge, and emailed them asking for a subscription option but received no reply. I don't want advertising in my face, full stop.
jacques_chester 13y ago
This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times. As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  Very interesting. I figured someone must have tried it but hadn't found examples. Kachingle looks like a deeply flawed implementation of it. What were the others?
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too. It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard. I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert. In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/ http://robojar.com/
andrewflnr 13y ago
That would be tricky. People would need to have a good idea of which sites they care about would have ads removed if they pay X dollars/month. Then maybe their favorite sites use three different networks, all of which they have to pay for. Maybe you could do it where the user picks the network, not the site.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Having looked at this for a while, the show/not-show needs to be decided at the publisher's server based on input from an authentication service. eg. if ( auth.is_subscriber ) puts advertisement_block end
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    Right, my idea is that the user gets to pick which auth object to check against on the server
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      My design is authenticating per-request, so the publisher's server is the one that would decide what to query. From the user perspective it's opt-in.

tomflack 13y ago

I pay for Arstechnica premium for this reason. I have adblockers turned off on The Verge, and emailed them asking for a subscription option but received no reply. I don't want advertising in my face, full stop.

jacques_chester 13y ago

This idea has been around for a while; I call it "microsubscription". Several companies have tried and failed to make a go of it. Kachingle is still limping along, though fatally hamstrung itself by picking a dumb, public fight with the New York Times. As I said in reply to another of your comments, I've been working on the technology to make it possible to do this reliably for some time now. It's harder than it looks.

ianlevesque 13y ago
Very interesting. I figured someone must have tried it but hadn't found examples. Kachingle looks like a deeply flawed implementation of it. What were the others?
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  From memory there was a few, but I've lost the links file I had. Contenture was one of them. There was a project at one of the journalism schools trying to push the same model too. It's a good idea on paper, but actually making the market-building side work is really hard. I've been focused on the technology side because hey, that's how I'm wired. Essentially, you can't rely on standard web bugs or javascript approaches; they're much too easy to subvert. In my honours dissertation I identified 9 distinct attacks on the "naive" protocol and developed countermeasures for each. But that design is fatally flawed too. I have another design which ... well, watch this space: http://robojar.com/ http://robojar.com/

andrewflnr 13y ago

That would be tricky. People would need to have a good idea of which sites they care about would have ads removed if they pay X dollars/month. Then maybe their favorite sites use three different networks, all of which they have to pay for. Maybe you could do it where the user picks the network, not the site.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Having looked at this for a while, the show/not-show needs to be decided at the publisher's server based on input from an authentication service. eg. if ( auth.is_subscriber ) puts advertisement_block end
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Right, my idea is that the user gets to pick which auth object to check against on the server
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    My design is authenticating per-request, so the publisher's server is the one that would decide what to query. From the user perspective it's opt-in.