4 ms·

Maybe there should be a standard to go the other way: a scheme to let web sites communicate monetary requests to browsers in an "official" protocol. A lot of t

Maybe there should be a standard to go the other way: a scheme to let web sites communicate monetary requests to browsers in an "official" protocol. A lot of this tracking only seems to exist for advertising schemes, which only exist to monetize the page. We are years past the point where we should have figured out how to make it easy to pay who you're looking at. For instance, when you visit the page for Article X on news site Y, maybe Y's response includes a header that says it requests a donation, with some suggested value like "10 cents". And then, in some standard interface, the browser would show this request (e.g. a small icon in the corner with a price, including some given link on how to pay it). The request would require certain things for security; e.g. use of HTTPS and being on the same domain as the majority of the content. And since blatant copy/paste stealing and re-posting to blogs, etc. is a money-making scheme in itself, the browser might "protect" monetized pages in some way; e.g. disable the copy/paste and printing functions unless the donation interface is used to pay, to at least make it more difficult to outright rip off web sites.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
Why would I want to run a browser that hurt me to benefit other people?
- qu4z-2 11y ago
  Sometimes people forget that browsers are user agents. Sometimes that includes browser developers.
saidajigumi 11y ago
And then you're right back into the great micropayments hole. No one has "figured this out", in part because of the real-world payment logistics, and and I'll pose another part: because it's a bad idea from a UX standpoint. Having to make a decision about whether to tip/donate to what would rapidly become nearly every site on the Internet would be a terrible user experience. "Decision energy" (aka willpower) is a scarce human resource; this would be an unparalleled waste of it. I wish there were a great alternative to ads as well, but I believe action-required micropayments will always be a non-starter. The best we've got so far are tools like Patreon and Bountysource's similar system. These can be viewed as a kind of "preaggregated micropayments", which eliminate per-click decision making via a user-configurable subscription. > the browser might "protect" monetized pages in some way It's already possible to disable copy on web pages. Some blog themes do this, and I wish browsers would just unimplement it entirely. This is right up there with lame DRM schemes, in that view source (or else curl) are still going to work. Likewise, bots will be completely unaffected. Such an approach merely annoys users with legitimate needs (e.g. who must to look up a word or phrase), but will have zero impact on content piracy.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  A standard "tip" button on the browser may be an excellent feature. No willpower or cognitive load added, you just know the button is there, and use it when you decide to. Not sure if it would generate any reasonable revenue, nor if it's actually viable in the presence of our current financial institutions. But I can't see any real downside.
  - robinson7d 11y ago
    That might be tricky because you'd have to determine how much "one tip" (/click,submit) is. Even if a small amount was decided upon, I wonder if there would be too much added stress along the lines of "is reading this worth the X of a tip?" Which, also, is hard to know until you've actually consumed the whole item, at which point a lot of people have probably linked somewhere else, flowing their way across the web. I think that this might be helped if it acted like playlists, or bookmarks, where clicking the button would add the site to a list. Later you can opt to donate to items on the list (or provide a single donation split evenly among everything on the list). Of course, I doubt many would actually use such a feature either.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      This pretty much describes flattr.
      - robinson7d 11y ago
        Yeah, totally. I had not previously read about flattr, but it appears to be exactly what I proposed! That's excellent, and I think that I'll read more about it, and likely sign up. I certainly hope that it doesn't also live up to the bleak outlook that I had.
        StavrosK 11y ago
        Given that it was founded five years ago, I'd imagine it's almost dead now.
veridies 11y ago
This seems like a very good use case for BTC, or some other cryptocurrency. One of the reasons micropayments are so hard to do is you need a payment processor to transfer the money, and authorizing the payment and coordinating it is a big pain in the ass. But with BTC, you could, in theory, press a "tip" button and immediately authorize a small transfer.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  There was at least one company (tidbit.co.in) developing a JS Bitcoin mining client that websites can covertly run in readers' browsers as an alternative to ads.
Nursie 11y ago
Umm, my computer, my processor, browser does what I want, not what a site owner wants.
- corobo 11y ago
  You create your own stylesheets for each website you visit? What does HN look like for you?
  - Nursie 11y ago
    LOL. Usually what I want is to render the content in accordance with the suggestions given in the document, but not always, and that doesn't only apply to advertising.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Alt-V, Y, N has long been my very favourite Firefox finger-macro.
applecore 11y ago
Your mind share is worth more to advertisers than your wallet. The consequence of advertising isn't getting your money; it's getting your attention.
- adrianbg 11y ago
  Advertisers only get your attention because publishers want their money. It still boils down to money.
yuhong 11y ago
In IE11: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265021(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265021(v=vs.85).a...
ghoul2 11y ago
I know where you are coming from, and I myself would prefer something of this sort rather than the ad-choked pages _or_ the paywalls of today. That said, paying _anything_ at all - even a fraction of a cent, is a problem for a very large portion of humanity. * Poverty is one part of it. In India, the ARPU - Average Revenue Per User - of mobile providers is less than 2 USD/month. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who do have some sort of data access on their cheap android phones but cannot afford to spend even 10s of cents over and above their data charges. Its taking all our effort to get information services to them as cheaply as possible. * Payment method - billions of people around the world do not have a method of making a payment online. No credit cards, no (usable) bank accounts. India is trying to get every adult a basic bank account, theres been some success there, but these are people who do not even have the equivalent of 2 USD to deposit in their govt provided free bank accounts. * Regulatory hurdles - for the longest time, making a dollar payment from India involved running to the "foreign exchange branch" of your bank in the closest large city, filling out forms in triplicate, explaining why you needed the dollars, getting approvals, and then being issued a cashiers cheque for the exact amount already made out in the name of the recipient. This is no longer the case, but currency controls are part of most economies even today, and become tighter during economic crises. Any kind of mandatory payment would function way better than the Great Firewall in keeping people out. Such payments would also result in a massive privacy violation, because payment processors will want to keep a log of each transaction (sender, receiver, amount) pretty much forever, instantly killing any privacy benefits of TOR, VPNs, etc. Yes, its possible to offer both, in theory. What would happen is either the micropayments would work or they won't. If they do, a very large number of sites will prefer going pay-only (like the WSJ) rather than deal with the nastiness of ads. If they don't, we are anyway back to where we started. For some sites, it works I suppose - I know some forums offer a "subscriber mode" with benefits including ad-free versions. That is reasonable to an extent. But for a very large proportion of sites its not reasonable to go that way.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

Why would I want to run a browser that hurt me to benefit other people?

qu4z-2 11y ago
Sometimes people forget that browsers are user agents. Sometimes that includes browser developers.

saidajigumi 11y ago

And then you're right back into the great micropayments hole. No one has "figured this out", in part because of the real-world payment logistics, and and I'll pose another part: because it's a bad idea from a UX standpoint. Having to make a decision about whether to tip/donate to what would rapidly become nearly every site on the Internet would be a terrible user experience. "Decision energy" (aka willpower) is a scarce human resource; this would be an unparalleled waste of it. I wish there were a great alternative to ads as well, but I believe action-required micropayments will always be a non-starter. The best we've got so far are tools like Patreon and Bountysource's similar system. These can be viewed as a kind of "preaggregated micropayments", which eliminate per-click decision making via a user-configurable subscription. > the browser might "protect" monetized pages in some way It's already possible to disable copy on web pages. Some blog themes do this, and I wish browsers would just unimplement it entirely. This is right up there with lame DRM schemes, in that view source (or else curl) are still going to work. Likewise, bots will be completely unaffected. Such an approach merely annoys users with legitimate needs (e.g. who must to look up a word or phrase), but will have zero impact on content piracy.

marcosdumay 11y ago
A standard "tip" button on the browser may be an excellent feature. No willpower or cognitive load added, you just know the button is there, and use it when you decide to. Not sure if it would generate any reasonable revenue, nor if it's actually viable in the presence of our current financial institutions. But I can't see any real downside.
- robinson7d 11y ago
  That might be tricky because you'd have to determine how much "one tip" (/click,submit) is. Even if a small amount was decided upon, I wonder if there would be too much added stress along the lines of "is reading this worth the X of a tip?" Which, also, is hard to know until you've actually consumed the whole item, at which point a lot of people have probably linked somewhere else, flowing their way across the web. I think that this might be helped if it acted like playlists, or bookmarks, where clicking the button would add the site to a list. Later you can opt to donate to items on the list (or provide a single donation split evenly among everything on the list). Of course, I doubt many would actually use such a feature either.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    This pretty much describes flattr.
    - robinson7d 11y ago
      Yeah, totally. I had not previously read about flattr, but it appears to be exactly what I proposed! That's excellent, and I think that I'll read more about it, and likely sign up. I certainly hope that it doesn't also live up to the bleak outlook that I had.
      - StavrosK 11y ago
        Given that it was founded five years ago, I'd imagine it's almost dead now.

veridies 11y ago

This seems like a very good use case for BTC, or some other cryptocurrency. One of the reasons micropayments are so hard to do is you need a payment processor to transfer the money, and authorizing the payment and coordinating it is a big pain in the ass. But with BTC, you could, in theory, press a "tip" button and immediately authorize a small transfer.

cpeterso 11y ago
There was at least one company (tidbit.co.in) developing a JS Bitcoin mining client that websites can covertly run in readers' browsers as an alternative to ads.

Nursie 11y ago

Umm, my computer, my processor, browser does what I want, not what a site owner wants.

corobo 11y ago
You create your own stylesheets for each website you visit? What does HN look like for you?
- Nursie 11y ago
  LOL. Usually what I want is to render the content in accordance with the suggestions given in the document, but not always, and that doesn't only apply to advertising.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Alt-V, Y, N has long been my very favourite Firefox finger-macro.

applecore 11y ago

Your mind share is worth more to advertisers than your wallet. The consequence of advertising isn't getting your money; it's getting your attention.

adrianbg 11y ago
Advertisers only get your attention because publishers want their money. It still boils down to money.

yuhong 11y ago

In IE11: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265021(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265021(v=vs.85).a...

ghoul2 11y ago

I know where you are coming from, and I myself would prefer something of this sort rather than the ad-choked pages _or_ the paywalls of today. That said, paying _anything_ at all - even a fraction of a cent, is a problem for a very large portion of humanity. * Poverty is one part of it. In India, the ARPU - Average Revenue Per User - of mobile providers is less than 2 USD/month. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who do have some sort of data access on their cheap android phones but cannot afford to spend even 10s of cents over and above their data charges. Its taking all our effort to get information services to them as cheaply as possible. * Payment method - billions of people around the world do not have a method of making a payment online. No credit cards, no (usable) bank accounts. India is trying to get every adult a basic bank account, theres been some success there, but these are people who do not even have the equivalent of 2 USD to deposit in their govt provided free bank accounts. * Regulatory hurdles - for the longest time, making a dollar payment from India involved running to the "foreign exchange branch" of your bank in the closest large city, filling out forms in triplicate, explaining why you needed the dollars, getting approvals, and then being issued a cashiers cheque for the exact amount already made out in the name of the recipient. This is no longer the case, but currency controls are part of most economies even today, and become tighter during economic crises. Any kind of mandatory payment would function way better than the Great Firewall in keeping people out. Such payments would also result in a massive privacy violation, because payment processors will want to keep a log of each transaction (sender, receiver, amount) pretty much forever, instantly killing any privacy benefits of TOR, VPNs, etc. Yes, its possible to offer both, in theory. What would happen is either the micropayments would work or they won't. If they do, a very large number of sites will prefer going pay-only (like the WSJ) rather than deal with the nastiness of ads. If they don't, we are anyway back to where we started. For some sites, it works I suppose - I know some forums offer a "subscriber mode" with benefits including ad-free versions. That is reasonable to an extent. But for a very large proportion of sites its not reasonable to go that way.