I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compensation, but at the unacceptable price of privacy. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies) into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading their articles.
Realistically, while professional content creators can make a living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "monetize" everything, we would be better off with free content like on the internet of old. There are other means of making money.
It seems that the current situation means that the "content creators" earn insignificant money, while ad companies earn huge money because of scale, and we all somehow keep believing that this is necessary for content to appear.
You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?
> writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income
Should people receive meaningful income for writing a blog post every once in a while?
I feel like that's the real question and not everyone agrees on the answer
> we would be better off with free content like on the internet of old
Well as someone who was there you used to need meaningful income to use the Internet of old. Nowadays everyone needs the Internet and it's a pretty big expense in most peoples' budget, and I think that's why so many people are willing to try something at it,
I figure if you just gave everyone meaningful income we could have that again
What if it could? Or should (be able to produce FTE or close income)?
In that world, the amount of pointless shite - questing to “go viral” - would be reduced to near zero. That is, if the incentive were more quality, and less quantity, we’d be better off, yes?
That's tempting, but I still don't think it should. There would still be the quest to go viral. "Quality" would still be determined in the aggregate, which means that your income depends on appealing to the widest audience possible, which means high quality niche bloggers still don't get paid much.
Metrics are hard. Just making sure they reward one particular desired outcome doesn't mean you'll escape the unintended consequences.
Also, note that we are past the point of being able to reasonably able to manage any of this. Today, you'd need to come up with a reward function that cannot be maximized by AI. (And lest you think you can fix that by using site visitors to evaluate, most of them will be bots too.)
Anything that can provide income inevitably leads to a flood of garbage from people trying to game the system. The current ad-driven web resulted in SEO garbage and near-uselessness of search engines.
So there's an element of truth to that. And there are those who can contribute enough value, have enough audience, etc., that they can "coast" on those 2 blog posts a month and make significant income...
... but that's also not, nor should it be the median. I'm not sure how the economy functions if, say 8h/mo effort generates a median living wage.
Without any transactions or user tracking it’s difficult to separate ‘legitimate’ content farms from those using bot farms to boost their page views.
Print media was also trying to guarantee their audience was an actual person by charging nominal fees, the difference was how much info required to do so.
Yep, exactly. So ideally, we'd have some technology that would be able to achieve those goals without needing all the info that is gathered nowadays. Though that is pretty unpopular here too.
Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine.
I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not.
Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me - like at all.
Same here. By the time I was old enough to have an income, reading comics had already made it possible for me to -not even see any- advertising. That carried over to newspapers, magazines... all those advertisers were wasting their money.
Later on in life I got pissed at cable-TV advertisers shoved into my favorite movies every 5-10 minutes ... ruining any ambience or artistic merit in them ... so I got rid of cable TV. By the time analog TV went away, I'd got rid of my television set. No return address on an envelope? junk mail, into the garbage unopened.
Now the pollution's ruined the 'net ... it's YouTube (re-routed) and some websites (blocked). So long, boing-boing and wired and your 'native ads'. Sites demand subscription? blocked. How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off?
Odd. In the midst of a (well-deserved) anti-ad rant, you throw in the primary non-ad alternative and discard it.
> How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off?
A while longer, if the same people who reject ads are also the people who reject alternatives to ads. The advertisers can safely ignore those people's opinions.
(I'm not saying subscriptions are the answer. I don't have an answer. I'm just saying that companies wanting subscription money is not part of the problem where companies want to shove ads in our faces 24/7.)
The main “problem” with contextualized advertising is that the people producing the content get a larger share of the ad spend.
Targeted ads concentrate control over the market into a few players, which can do things like acquire competitors or run them out of business with loss leaders.
With AI, the supply of ad real estate will go to infinity, so the only thing that will matter is the quality of the places the ads run.
This would be a good time to ban targeted advertising, or for the content producers to form a cartel that only purchases contextual ads.
That cartel will probably be even worse than what we have now, since it’s going to be 2-3 mega conglomerates like Disney, and they already have handed editorial control over to the White House.
Hopefully the invisible hand of capitalism will somehow fix this.
Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking.
How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't really see why they cannot.
Also why does every web store need to show me ads? Don't they make money out of selling things? If they really have to, do they have to invade privacy? This is like walking into a physical store and them doing facial recognition, then showing you tailored ads/inventory. That feels creepy to me.
> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better?
If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.
> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read
Would you pay per view? Most people (me included) would probably hesitate to say yes, because we’re used to not paying for that. But what if it meant that ad based model is gone and everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?
> what if ... everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?
Except in practice we see the opposite.
There's something interesting going on with companies when they want to get paid directly versus by ads: they demand 3x - 4x or more for subscriptions or pay per view versus what they make from ads.
Easiest place to see this is ad supported non-linear TV in the years you could get without ads, or with ads. You pay significantly more to not see the ads, than they make from the ads.
Perhaps this is justified because ad-free subscriptions reduce the audience size for ad buys, but when you look at the numbers watching with ads versus paying, it wouldn't seem like the "no ads" buyers make a dent in whatever pricing tier.
In the 90s when we were young and naive, we imagined a library card model, with a library fee and then you have fractions of a cent cost to read a post, and using (hand waving) technology to uncouple viewing history from payables to content creators. That, or the British TV license model, an Internet license of some kind.
It's curious to me the ad networks haven't gotten together to preemptively offer this. Arguably Brave tried, but from an adversarial (to the ad companies) stance. It would work better from the inside with a simple regulation: if you serve ads for ad-supported content, you have to participate in the library card system at CPM rates no greater than you receive for ads to skip the ads for card holders.
This is price discrimination. Everybody would love to charge more money to rich people and less money to poor people, since that increases the total profit.
The only companies that we directly allow to do this are schools, but having a premium version lets you approximate this.
That's because you usually pay via credit card (or some other financial mean) which is cumbersome (and may be illegal) to spoof. But yeah, it can be hard to justify a subscription when it's the price of a full meal. Especially when other essential subscriptions (electricity, water, internet, cell services,...) is straining your monthly budget.
The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source for the content owners.
it takes a lot of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss of a $5/month recurring revenue stream that might last for years.
The fact that advertising is more profitable doesn't mean that the PPV model is not viable. It could certainly be so. Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers, which users can agree to, just like they do with subscription-based content today.
The problem is skewed incentives, of course. Advertising is acceptable to most users and easy to integrate, so why should website authors go out of their way to please a minority of their users who object to it?
>Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers, which users can agree to, just like they do with subscription-based content today.
you're describing the model of a product called blendle, a service which i loved but which totally failed. they failed to attract users, and they failed to attract publishers. this isn't some new idea that nobody had tried. it's been done. and it failed, not just for blendle. people have tried micropayments, they've tried subscriptions, if you can imagine a PPV model, it's probably been tried. readers and publishers both hate it.
I wasn't aware of Blendle, but I'm not surprised that it failed.
Advertising is ubiquitous on the web. Integrating it into web sites is simple, it works well for generating revenue at scale, and users have been conditioned from every other media industry to accessing content for "free". There is practically no friction for users, save for the degraded user experience, which most people have learned to live with or ignore.
So right off the bat, anyone trying to deploy alternative business models is going against the current of a trillion-dollar industry, and well established consumer expectations.
> readers and publishers both hate it.
Why do you think that is? Is it because the micropayment model is inherently bad, or because implementing it is difficult for website owners, it is annoying to use for users, and ultimately brings little revenue?
What if implementing it were as easy and convenient as advertising is today? What if users had an easy and convenient way to link their payment method into their browser, and from then on it required no maintenance? What if they understood that the web is not "free", but someone on the other end should be paid for their work if they find it valuable? What if this model actually generated significant revenue for publishers? What if all this was simply the way the web operated from the start?
Clearly this model hinges on a bunch of hypotheticals, but hopefully you get the point. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about users paying for consuming content. This is the way business transactions work in most respectable industries. You want something, you pay for it directly. You don't ask a third party to step in between you and the seller, to show you manipulative content that directly benefits them and their associates, while indirectly paying for the thing you actually want to buy. The fact we've accepted this corrupt business model as normal in many facets of life is absolutely insane. Never mind the fact that it's being used to manipulate us into thinking and acting in ways which corrupt democratic processes and cause sociopolitical instability, or that it's abusing our right to privacy and exploiting our data. To hell with all of that.
Do you think the fact that NO major content websites (NYT, substack, WSJ, ...) have settled on a PPV model is simply because they haven't thought of it? Or is it more likely that the numbers absolutely do not work?
No one uses the PPV model because there isn't sufficient payment infrastructure (402 payment required). The friction for entering your credit card information into a website is ridiculous, you might as well target the high end of the market with a monthly subscription.
The PPV model, like Ads, works well for websites that you're not well associated with. Random blogs and websites that you otherwise wouldn't be willing to share your credit card info with.
I think it might be because with ad model you can sell profiling data many times over to different parties. You can’t do the same with a single charge.
I can't speak for all web sites, but I reckon a combination of factors could explain why such a solution hasn't been deployed:
1. Advertising is ubiquitous, easy to integrate, and provides a safe revenue stream.
2. There is little to no infrastructure for the PPV model. Whoever builds it would need to maintain their own version of it.
3. People expect the web to be "free". This is even true within technical crowds who understand that it's really not free. And a large part of that group doesn't mind advertising.
So, really, it would require a substantial amount of effort to implement, it would add additional friction to users, and ultimately only a minority would appreciate it.
Had this model been in place from the beginning of the web, things might be different today. Alas, if my grandma had wheels...
Have any of them actually tried it though? If they have and I missed it, then I apologize, but I can't recall the NYT letting me read an article for $1 with zero friction via Apple or Google Pay or Stripe link or something. It they tried it and the numbers didn't work, that's one thing, but I don't recall that happening.
Doing it via conventional card networks won't work, the fees would eat most/all of the payment.
A critical mass of publishers would need to team up and form a cooperative/etc where a user could register once, deposit some money, and then that money would be spent every time they view an article. But that requires cooperation between competitors, which is already hard enough, and the cancer that is the advertising industry wouldn't like this potential existential threat and would be more than happy to pour fuel onto the fire to ensure it never succeeds.
What's surprising is why the card networks themselves don't get in on it. They could do so in a completely backwards-compatible manner, introducing a new card number range that only works with transactions under a certain amount and have different fraud protection/chargeback rules.
WSJ was available on blendle (pay-per-view microtransactions). Washington Post was available on scroll (monthly subscription, divided up amongst the publishers you read each month). neither service still exists.
i don't believe NYT has ever tried a pay-per-view model.
At the risk of pedantry, though it's still germane to this context, that's more the Tidal model than the Spotify model.
Spotify's model is more that your monthly amount gets disproportionately redistributed to the artists that bring more interest and listens to Spotify, regardless of whether you were one of those listeners. Smaller and niche artists suffer under Spotify's model.
You're presupposing that these blogs are producing content worth paying for. The unfortunate truth is that the overwhelming majority of blogs (99.9%+) are not.
Then why is everyone so nostalgic for the old days of the blogosphere to return? If blogs are all worthless, then we shouldn't care that they're disappearing and/or being put behind paywalls; we haven't lost anything.
I blog for my own satisfaction, and my blog has no ads on it, and I don't charge visitors. I'm happy to have a few dozen readers.
That's what people are bemoaning the loss of: the before times, when people did interesting stuff without regard for whether it could be monetized or not.
Yes, but only after viewing, of else I'd pay for "editorial" or AI generated slop which would be generated like link farms pointing to Amazon etc.
And that's the chicken-and-egg problem ...
In theory that could be resolved by registering for free at reputable sites and then paying per view with micropayments. Or by a scheme where one would register and only pay when I actually did read stuff, not with the currently en-vogue monthly fee for each and every site.
Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.
Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly ads or topping it up manually, which then gets distributed to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose, transparently in the background while they browse.
It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is precisely the right model that could work at scale to eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for everyone.
It's frustrating that humans are stoichastic parrots and the minute you mention crypto they go into conniptions because the rails are basically there. It's not user friendly, but it's possible to build a system where you transfer $0.05 cents of crypto to someone as you scroll down a web page using a special browser.
Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators some of that money if and only if the creator realizes they have to sign up for Brave's cryptoshit. It's straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak is deserved.
But then again, online ads are the physical equivalent of a crowd of paparazzi following you 24/7 including inside your home, which would also prompt physical violence in the real world.
From my perspective I couldn't care less if one bad guy is stealing from another bad guy.
This is exactly what I want. I don't really care to subscribe to most written media (I do in some cases) but once in awhile an article grabs my attention and I would shell out to read it.
The Ad model is exactly the problem. If you had anonymous, cheap micropayments where you pay 1 cent per pageview it would not just solve the surveillance problem but it would solve the DDoS problem too (you set up a web server where the price increases with load and clients bid for bandwidth).
Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed.
I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view - if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every click.
Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for different reasons.
Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting anyway.
I think it is a technical problem. If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. Even without the lightning network and just direct 1-to-1 payment channels, it would work.
The article you lists assumes a "conventional" credit card system with chargebacks, massive fees, etc. which makes micropayments ecosystem impractical in the first place. Proposals for micro-payment systems usually describe a way top enable low-fee payments.
The author doesn't take into account modern cryptocurrency tech like payment channels. I really doubt that payments have a natural fixed floor of 10s of cents - Payment providers charge these fees simply because they are in a natural monopoly position, thanks to lock-in and regulation. The need to control fraud is caused by regulatory requirements, which are in turn caused by monopolization.
Despite being technologically less efficient, even traditional cryptocurrency payments are cheaper than bank transfer fees due to competition and low regulation.
Secondly, you assume that no one wants to do micropayments. The infrastructure doesn't exist for it yet. If you don't build it, they will not come.
As for browser fingerprinting, it can be solved on the client side with enough effort. Look at tor browser. Just have a system where cookies, WebGL, etc. are opt in on a browser level in the same way that WebUSB is. Artificially limit the performance of javascript to prevent bench-marking. I think it is possible to solve this architecturally.
> If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough.
That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.
People have been hacking on this "if" for a while, and I suspect we will break through to the other side eventually, probably by the end of the decade. The problem is really just that cryptocurrencies like monero want to minimize their use of scripting, because transactions with scripts are a heuristic that can be used to de-anonymize you. But payment channels require some sort of timelock, in bitcoin this is done with HTLC script.
There have been a number of proposals, I think the oldest is DLSAG: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/595.pdf There are other ones based on time-lock puzzles, but those have always been kinda crappy.
It may be possible with some ZK magic I'm unfamiliar with. But the core of the problem is that we need to find a way to make a transaction valid but only after a certain block height, and make it so that validators can't learn any specific heuristics about the transaction (like what the block height is exactly).
>But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.
Sure, but after the micropayments revolution there will also be a change in the types of sites people use, enabled by the new form of monetization. You could rely more on people posting things like videos to their personal blogs and interlinking them instead of having to shack up with one of the few sites large enough to support ad-funded monetization. The internet would have a basic spam-resistance function, so it would be less reliant on the existing players to gatekeep (for example, email, forum moderators, etc).
I think it would be more competitive. Let's say you have a site like twitter that says "now that there are micropayments, we will charge you 1 cent per pageview AND force you to login and collect your data", well then you will have a competitor like xcancel.com which can charge 2 cents per pageview and not require login. The market would decide what the best model is. Right now proxy sites like xcancel have to do it for free. Even if they wanted to run ads, the ad market isn't competitive in the same sense because it is more profitable for larger players.
I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would want to support micropayments because of piracy. I consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment system. It's pro-piracy by default. If you look at the origins of ad-funded sites like youtube, they started out as hubs of (light) piracy. The content of social media sites should be pirated and mirrored: they are just getting rich off of network effects in the first place. If you combine micropayments with some sort of bittorrent-like system, this could be very powerful. Imagine a decentralized archive site, where you take advantage of TLS to archive a verifiably timestamped version of a page, and anyone else can send you money that is conditional on you providing them a copy of that archive in return.
Micropayments don't fund the development of new intellectual work, but they let you recoup the cost of bandwidth. He who does not host, also does not earn. If you want to fund the development of new work, I think you need patronage. We are already seeing this with a lot of videographers from youtube depending mostly on sites like patreon and donations from dedicated fans. In a micropayments world, you wouldn't have sites like patreon taking a cut. Aside from just having ~0.1c micropayments-per-pageview, you could have very easy p2p "mini-payments" on the order of ~$1 in exchange for donation rewards.
With less money in the annoying ads economy, google and others would have less power to alter the web standards to their whim, and we could claw back features that enable fingerprinting. I don't know, that is just my dream.
Ideal for what problem? Certainly not for reducing Google's data collection and improving privacy. It would only work with tons of small payment providers, but then you are back at square 1 that users need to subscribe with tons of services for just pennies.
I read from too many different sources through aggregators like hackernews. With a network you'd probably still have too many subscriptions.
Also wonder if it will really work out, i open too many articles that are pretty bad when you start reading them. So i quit after 1 or 2 paragraphs.
Now if you get the first 2 paragraphs for free, contents writers will start to optimize for good first 2 paragraphs, and afterwards quality will drop. Also, many blog posts or news articles don't have more than 2 paragraphs of good content.
Eh, that's too expensive unless the recipient can authorize refunds for non-spam emails.
But yes, I always thought some form of network syndication would emerge on the Web, where creators could register for their share of aggregated periodic payments made by users.
Still not sure why that's not a thing. I would pay $50/month to a syndicate in return for never having to deal with paywalls on any sites affiliated with them. But only as long as the vast majority of sites participated, and that is probably the showstopper, I guess. We'd end up paying 20 different 'syndicates' for absolutely no good reason, just as we now have to deal with 20 different streaming services.
They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription price must be a lot lower.
One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.
Ads are annoying, but they are ok, what is not ok is collecting data and then selling it, so they can profile you without your consent across different platforms.
how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription, just occasional donations whenever people feel like it - content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy it or are well off can actually fund the development
Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.
No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send.
Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.
If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment page, I think that's good enough.
The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on creating content instead of making other things. Giving money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for people that publish good content because they can and are passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the friction of clicking a button and filling in payment details is enough to deter people from paying them, then maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should find some other way to make a living instead.
> I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator.
This is false: We're the ones who pay the creator, because:
> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read
If that upsets you, please understand it upsets me to, because
> but at the unacceptable price of privacy
I want you to consider a different toothbrush brand, or maybe a hot location for a holiday, and the idea that I am "invading" your privacy in trying to do this is disconcerting.
I understand there are actors who want to use your private personalising data to harm you. I think that is bad, but I am telling you friend, that isn't me.
> I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
Listen, as an insider I am not quite sure what the answer is either, but I'm telling you that content creators need to eat because you have threatened them with capitalism which murders you if you don't participate, and I am the one feeding them and not you.
I think though, it probably takes the form of better laws that prevent people from using personalised data to harm you without public (judicial) review, and I think that is going to require people like you thinking of the outcome that you want, instead of foolishly trying the impossible to conserve your personal privacy.
