This is fine as far as it goes, but RPM on a blog post is what $1.50? $3.00? So to replace your ad revenue you need to charge 1/3 of cent, not the "15 cents" that was shown in the mock. That would be $150 RPMs which would make Google blush.<p>There is a fundamental disconnect in how writers value their writing, and how readers value their writing. Trying to understand the economic forces that drive information value will really help writers understand what is, and isn't, valuable prose to readers.<p>Too many people are stuck in the mindset of "buy a book/article" etc, but the web is 99.99% one and done. So nobody wants to pay 15 cents for something they will never read again, and may not even like the first time. But have them pay a third of a cent? Sure, if they go back an re-read it 100 time's they will have paid you 30 cents for it. The value would be emergent rather than demanded.<p>Until journalists can internalize that, this conversation will remain unresolved.
> Apple’s new content filtering and São Paulo’s Clean City Law both use code — one via the law, the other through software APIs — to enable the creation of ad-free public spaces.<p>Except that content filtering isn't about the creation of ad-free <i>public</i> spaces, but rather ad-free <i>private</i> spaces. There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session.<p>The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I am free to configure it however I want; the server, of course, is free to try to determine whether I'm actually viewing its ads or not, and may refuse to serve my requests if it chooses.<p>As for micropayments, I love the idea but people in general seem to be extremely resistant to them. For one thing, they definitely don't want unbounded monthly charges. That could be solved by having a set amount of money, divided up by the sites one visits—but the service that does that would be a privacy nightmare.
No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psychology.<p>Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of $1-$2-$10. These are the models that work.<p>It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that <i>it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel.</i><p>It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or any other platform. It's what's built into your <i>brain</i>. "Pay as you go" is incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers.<p>I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.
Why is the "independent web" in all of these articles exclusively referring to people trying to make money with ads? I make software and put it on the web for free. There are millions of Github repositories like this, are they not the "independent web"? I post pictures on various sites, under CC0. In high school, I made games and put them on the web, always for free.<p>It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(
"I would argue that your browser should be helping you safely, securely, and easily make purchases of content and services across the web."<p>It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient virtual-reality strip mall.<p>We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire. Infrastructure and upkeep costs are why ISPs are actual businesses. The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution, which spreads costs much more evenly <i>while</i> decreasing latency by bringing data closer to edges of the network. You support Wikipedia-over-IPFS by flipping a switch in your settings to help host it, rather than doling out a handful of USD to the incessant baleful banners of Jimmy Wales' face.<p>Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware.
Working within the existing HTTP spec is an idea worth pursuing. Of course I'm biased because my startup is in the process of doing just this by implementing a 402 server. <a href="http://www.fairtread.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fairtread.com/</a><p>While the status code is a good place to start, you really need Accept-Monetization and the corresponding Content-Monetization headers to fill out the picture. We propose these to work the same way that Accept-Language and Content-Language headers work. Essentially the user passes along the monetization methods they allow, and when there's a mismatch on the server, a 402 error occurs...along with instructions on how to fix that.<p>The ideal system would allow multiple ways to pay for content, and would include advertising as a "free" option.
We need to also then figure out how to handle a situation where a purchaser is unsatisfied in some way with the paid-for content. How do you refund their money (regardless of the amount)?<p>It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments, but they still have your money.
Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to a new form factor because it has been succesful in the past or because there is a sulerficial similarity rarely ends up being a good design decision. Often when it works it is not at all for the reasons one initially presumed.<p>UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to proceeding with the use case?<p>To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry. Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists, that’s another story.<p>The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its physically parts. It will have many solutions.<p>I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet at the moment.
This seems like great advocacy for <a href="http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/</a><p>My first concern is the lack of (popular) payment providers that enable microtransactions. If you want to pay $0.15 for a web page, and there's a flat 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee on every transaction, the model doesn't work.<p>Second concern is using primarily commercial payment providers nothing to break the oligopolies created by payment gateways, which is what makes these transaction fees so high in the first place. I would love to see cryptocurrency support baked into any implementation of browser payments, as microtransactions and user freedom are both well supported.
We don't want ads and we don't want to pay for anything. Unfortunately, I don't think we've worked out the economics for that model.
All the web has to do is figure out why people will spend $1 at a vending machine for tiny terrible snack that is completely unsatisfying but won't spend $1 on a mobile app that they would use every day.
I don't see this flying because putting this info into my web browser means that lending someone my smartphone or tablet empowers them to <i>spend my money</i>, practically without thinking about it. Yeah, no. I think things like Patreon and tip jars just make more sense.
Here's an old hacker news discussion about the 402 code's slot in the spec which is fairly interesting: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236</a>
> Of course not everything on the web needs to cost something, and I’m not arguing that every site charge for its content, and go behind paywalls.<p>I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100% of the 402 payment?
"At the point where you want to read one, you are presented with a Buy now with 1-click button. Clicking it does just what it says, and suddenly, instead of being denied access to that book’s content, you can read it."<p>What a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has ever downloaded something knows how confusing and difficult it is to press the right button (instead of some ad or virus or whatever). The idea that one single click could reveal my identity to the site owner AND wire my money to them is truly frightening.
There is no way people are going to pay for individual articles, what might work though is letting people customize what kind of ads they see.<p>For example I want to see car ads, movie trailers, new gadgets and I want to see what's on sale at grocery and hardware stores with 10 miles of the zip code I give it. No video, no animation, no tracking, no targeting, no fucking Taboola. And if an ad pisses me off I want a "never show me ads from this company again" button.
There are not many sites I would pay for that are purely content. I think HN is one of the few that could get away with charging $5/month and not lose me as a reader. The biggest problem is that most sites can't transition from free to subscription without losing most of their customers. Even a site that proves to be extremely useful could not do that without a competitor popping up that'll offer the same service for free.
There is also the situation of security to consider. Although browsers have made great strides in improving security, if we start including our payment information directly in the browser it could lead to potentially interesting situations. If a malicious entity escapes the sandbox or some memory reading vulnerability, they could figure out the payment information.
Of course there's also XSS and CSRF which could potentially allow a malicious entity to silently authorize payment by the user for their own website, all of which would have to be considered not only by the websites implementing the 402 API but also the browser.
Sure we're already working to fix these problems for all other data and account purposes, but if history is any indicator then I don't think we're ready just yet.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a number of years (even coded a micropayment solution which was terrible). But this article reminded me of that and just gave me a thought:<p><pre><code> What if you flipped the burden to online commerce providers?
</code></pre>
For example, stripe provides a small toggle so that your integration can add an extra 0.1% to all transactions (so your $49 SaaS offering pays an extra $0.049). In exchange you get a small JS code to embed on your marketing blog.<p>I'm not crazy about the bitcoin bandwagon, but this seems like a good entry point for distribution. Multiple providers other than stripe can deposit to the same bitcoin address stored in your browser, and then that bitcoin address is paid out according to the sites you visited that had "opted in" to the revenue sharing.
That is all well and good if you can use Paypal (As per screenshot in article)<p>Some of us can not use Paypal (and are not being told by paypal as to why after being banned) so have to use bitcoin, bank transfers, prepaid cards and cash for day to day transactions.
I like it, and I would like to be the first meta comment about the topic. Please reference my proposition from 10 days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226</a><p>I actually have been thinking about this for some time and while there are many things to consider, this is a problem Mozilla could get behind. My assumption about them is still unsubstantiated, but given enough research, it is a solution that is in serious need.<p>I might do a write up on my detailed thoughts on the subject.
Good luck with that.<p>When web advertisements finally die off, I imagine subscribing to one or two news websites, maybe the NY Times and a local site. Other than that, I'm not interested in paying for web content.<p>The funny thing is, the sites I'd be most likely to pay for don't have ads in the first place.<p>I really miss the days when people made websites and posted things on the web because they enjoyed it and were trying to be helpful, and not because they were out to make a buck on ad clicks. Quality has plummeted so far it's not even funny.
In reality I don't think ads are a problem, as long as they aren't annoying, are hosted by the webpage I am on, have zero trackers and are related to the content on the page.<p>Though the best system will always be free primary content with paid "premium" content. That way if you enjoy the content of the webpage you can support them, but you aren't required to pay to figure out if you do enjoy it.
Maybe internet providers should pay fee to the website owners. Same as cable tv providers pays HBO or other channels. We could log the time each user spent on website and then similar to spotify pay proportionally to the website owners. For each internet connection we could pay e.g. $10 that goes to content creators.<p>Ofcourse Facebook and Google would earn most of this money.
Sorry, I have to say it. If someone isn't willing to pay money for your content or service then you probably aren't offering anything of value. Instead you're surviving off of ad based revenue that you're generating while people are figuring out you are offering nothing of value.
The real story should be: why don't consumers have full root access on their mobile computers so they can do whatever they want? It shouldn't be controversial for Apple to let consumers have a little more access, it should be controversial that no major mobile OS allows full access.
Any way the solution to this problem will be the same as streaming movies and music. There will be an aggregator or curator you pay money to for access, and they will pay pennies to the content creators per view.
I submit that subscriptions at the level of micro payments work..at least on mobile devices..$36 Billion in 2016.<p>Do it the same way first month is the free trial..want to keep reading each month than pay the month subscription