If anything gets adopted it either needs to be from a group of big players (think: Libra) or in a decentralized way with a consortium (blockchain + 2 major browsers). Would love to see it happen, but having a startup run it just won’t surmount the needed push to make it a standard.
For a long time I've thought that we need a browser based universal tip jar. Some way that lets me read a blog post, and then tip the site with however much I want. 1 cent, 25 cents, 1 dollar, 200 dollars, any amount.
From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.
The second thing is making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. With services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner.
So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received.
Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult, but I'd rather something like that than hope that my favorite blogger is somehow able to get onto Scroll or another service like that.
People have been beating the micro-payments horse since at least the late '90s.
I don't get it, at all.
No one likes turning every action into a financial decision.
History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing - because you only have to make the decision ONCE. There is no financial pain for consuming content.
Sure, as long as the amount of those buffets stays within reasonable limits. If I stumble to a site from Google, there's no way I'm just going to register to their monthly subsciption plan, no matter how useful their content was. But if I was happy with the content, I could maybe make a one-time donation or payment.
I'm afraid that embracing periodic "buffet-style" pricing also embraces big centralized platforms, like Medium, that can provide me enough content to consume for the whole billing period and then they can distribute the profits among content creators. Maybe that could work, but I'm sure HNers have a thing or two to say about the idea of making Medium the buffet where everyone's going to eat.
> History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing
For all we know, Netflix and Spotify might be special cases. Cable TV uses the same buffet-style pricing and plenty of people object to that, because it means funding content that they have zero interest in.
I'd say the better solution is crowdfunding a la Patreon/Kickstarter, combined with free-and-open content release as an incentive for users to pitch in. This model can be problematic for some forms of media where full costs are hard to assess, especially in advance (feature video), but it would work wonders for "plain" text and other low-commitment stuff.
People have been talking about it since the (mid) 90's, sure. But nobody has ever implemented it, at least not at any sort of scale. So we can't really say that buffet style has proven "better" - it's just been available.
The problem isn't making things into a financial decision, it's making them into a non-trivial financial decision.
If you want $10/mo for me to access your particular walled garden, I'm going to have to think about it. And if I'm already paying for a couple other walled gardens, the answer is probably "no". But micropayments are supposed to go the other way. If you have an article that looks interesting from the headline and it costs me a nickle to press "read", I'll probably do that without thinking about it at all.
The problem isn't with the idea, the problem is that nobody knows (or wants to know?) how to get the transaction costs down low enough so that the payments are actually "micro". Regulatory bodies don't help here either, as it's not a scenario they've planned around or actually care about.
Netflix is a good example of buffet-style offerings, but you have to remember that Netflix was born out of cable, which is a much better example of buffet-style, and was largely despised because it was buffet-style. People hated paying for dozens of channels when they only wanted sports.
I would add a caveat to this that people like paying a low price for a lot of content. If the price of a buffet is too high, then people will start to ask why they can't just pay for the small amount of food or content that they want to consume.
> History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing
Maybe, but I don't think anyone could make the claim that a micropayments hypothesis has been tested (market or tech) with anything like the robustness or to anywhere near the scope with which those services have been. There's not yet a solid basis from which to compare.
In any case, appetising or not, the subscription model is deeply antagonistic to the fundamental nature of the web. It's a model borrowed from prior tech. It works, but it retards the web's innate potential.
> because you only have to make the decision ONCE
That's the problem. The web is a web. Each link is a decision point. Portals are portals. Leaping through the locked gate is a single decision. They are different things. Portals can be built on the web, but much would be lost if the whole web were to only be portals.
Micropayments may or may not be a solution to funding the web in its best potential form. We don't know - but the success of portals has little to say about it either way. They were just a known quantity from a previous world.
> services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner.
And the site has to not challenge the current political climate, or (leftist) political activist will pressure payment providers like MasterCard and Visa into banning the site in question from receiving payment from downstream payment services[1].
> Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url.
And the second a anti-religious/anti-Muslim website starts receiving significant money, Mozilla risks getting all payment processing frozen.
> Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult
Actually that’s the easy part. Avoiding censorship and avoiding being made into a political puppet by the current payment-provider duopoly seems to be what’s difficult.
This should not be downvoted. It's indeed beyond ridiculous that some sites, and even some individual content makers (such as the well known 'SexyCyborg'/'Machinery Enchantress'), are having trouble accepting funding online for what are unambiguously political reasons.
You are spot on, in this case, I fear, given every partner Scroll lists is on the /hard/ left of the political spectrum. That's not a healthy partnership for Mozilla to take on, unless they proactively reach out to other mature publications across the spectrum.
EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.
> So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received.
This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser.
You can either tip directly/manually, or setup a monthly payment that gets split automatically among the places you most read. It doesn't require the creator already be a member, but rather it holds the funds until they register, or until 90days have passed.
They've also built in some significant privacy features so that no one can determine who/what you're donating to. Though this leads to one of the contentious issues as refunds are not possible, so when the above mentioned 90 days passes without a donation being claimed, the funds go into the "User Growth Pool" which basically means they are given out to new people joining BAT as an incentive to join.
The big controversy though was exactly the issue of not requiring people sign up before they started accepted BAT donations to them. They had a system of showing if a user was 'verified'[0] meaning they were registered to receive the donations, and nothing would be shown if they were not verified.
This led to an issue where Tom Scott commenting that Brave was taking donations on his behalf without his consent. [1]
Imho that was hugely damaging to the potential of BAT and I think really stemmed from people who didn't use BAT and didn't understand the Verified/Unverified aspect of it. They've added a Non-Verified statement and icon now to make it explicit, but the damage has been done.
> You can redeem them for like, 30 cents, so that's something
At costs fixed (e.g. setting up cryptocurrency trading privileges, going through KYC, clearing receiving cryptocurrency proceeds with your bank) and variable (e.g. regulatory, accounting, tax wise, et cetera). To say nothing of volatile, uncertain and likely to get stolen.
This is an example of a good idea ruined by shoving cryptocurrencies where they only add marketing value.
> None of the things you mentioned are a real issue if you do a little homework
They’re costs. Material ones, particularly if one is dealing with micropayments. A simpler solution would have been batching payments with real money. There is counterparty risk, but given we’re talking about micropayments that’s negligible compared to the risks and costs cryptocurrencies brought to the table.
Cryptocurrencies don’t deserve to be rejected out of hand. But they don’t need to be unquestioningly choked into otherwise-fine products.
Hacker News seems to really hate cryptocurrencies, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Despite whatever properties you don't like about them, those tokens are being used today and have real value. You can close your eyes but the world will keep spinning.
Are you saying it just because you read it in some online article? There is no current law that prevents your to trade in crypto in India. There is news of a proposed bill that might make it illegal in future, but that's about it. We don't know if it will ever see the light of the day...
The Basic Attention Token notion is inscrutable to me. It's like the corporate sponsored charitable giving campaigns. Why would I give WalMart $1 to forward to Children's Hospital when I could just give Children's Hospital $1 directly?
BAT is a bad idea done badly by bad people.
Given my track record of predicting winners and losers (eg JavaScript), I can only assume BATs will be hugely successful.
What happens with the tips sent to a website that doesn't register with Mozilla? Maybe there should be a standard meta tag that websites can add to show they are looking for tips. And then they can even add a URL on the tag so they can use another provider if for some reason they don't want Mozilla to be the gatekeeper of their tip jar.
But then again, they can just add the link in the website itself like they already do.
The thing definitely needs to be opt-in instead of opt-out. BAT just recently got some backlash when Tom Scott tweeted that (I'm paraphrasing) he doesn't really like how Brave is using his identity to collect money without his consent.
Beaker Browser has (a version of) this feature -- you can specify a donate link for your dat site, and the browser then displays a heart button that takes you to that page.
This would be difficult to target on sites that host content/articles. Would Medium get the tip, or the author of the article. How would the browser decide, and how would it differentiate ownership.
It need not be a tip jar. It can be proper payments. But current credit based online payment system is too expensive for micropayments ( for a fraction of a penny) and it is too cumbersome to be used by the user.
We need a modern payment system, that can process micropayments ( that is a fraction of a penny ) with higher security guarantees and cheaper (or free) than the credit cards.
Some places have micropayment rates. For Paypal you can (maybe) sign up for 5% + $0.05 on purchases under $10. For $1, it's a lot more palettable.
But still, the problem with micropayments is usually not the cost, but the hassle; and if you're going for worldwide coverage, you'll also add ability to pay in an accepted form, and for poorer countries, ability to pay in a meaningful amount.
About 2 years ago I was having a conversation with someone and this was roughly the idea I had. A wallet that users can fill up and apportion appropriately.
So if someone really likes reddit, then they can automatically give say $5/month to reddit out of that wallet. And in exchange they get perks.
And, as you said, if they come across a blog post they really like, they can also tip ad hoc.
Patreon for the web essentially.
We were throwing around ideas for a business, and this was one of mine. I still think it's viable, but I also think it requires a large, established entity, such as Mozilla, to do it.
I like this idea, and would use it myself. I understand the Brave browser does this, essentially, and have been meaning to check it out.
I wonder if a "tip" would be a better system for verifying a real human than Google's captcha (which really goes nuts if you've taken steps to protect your privacy)?
I work on hCaptcha which is essentially what you describe. Customers pay us for data annotation and we pay out to websites for human provided labels while also providing bot detection.
So, to address some of the comments referencing Brave, Flattr, and other similar sites, as far as I know, those are all for profit entities. My idea would be a non-profit.
Initially they'd need to be bank rolled by someone, but I'd think that if they gained enough traction, operating costs could come out interest gains. Or just donations directly to the org.
I'd also hope that any unclaimed tips would be kept for something like 50 years. They'd just be generating interest for use by the non-profit.
Didn't Google try to do this a few years ago? IIRC, they had a service where you could put in a set amount of money a month, and Google would essentially use it to buy the ad slots on pages you visited. Bit of a conflict of interest since Google was also selling the ad slots at non-fixed costs, but it was a nice idea.
> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.
This is one of the largest problems (if not the largest problem) on the web that I've been thinking about recently. Services like Venmo aren't designed for commercial use. Paypal is a privacy nightmare, and it's bad for sellers too because their chargeback policy is a mess -- and that's even ignoring the fees. Bank transfers are insecure and cumbersome (and again, often come with fees).
Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem for a metric ton of different reasons -- it's proponents are too concerned with worrying about inflation and investments and alternate currencies then with actually practical questions like, "can the payment reliably be completed in less than 1 minute", and "does it have fees associated with that kind of speed?".
It's a very complicated situation, and I have no idea what the answers are or where to even start looking for the answers, but I'm increasingly frustrated by online payment systems, both as a consumer and as someone looking to accept payments. They're almost universally bad.
I think this might be one of the big reasons why advertising works so well -- it's not that advertising is efficient, or that fraud isn't a problem, or that consumers like it. But advertising is an easy way to have a micropayment of as low as a cent or two linked to a page view. And as far as I can see, there is no alternative to that.
In the absence of a way to do actual micropayments, paid subscriptions on the web are also far more costly than ads are. Your average website doesn't get 25 cents every time you load a page. But you have to scale everything up, because otherwise all of your gains just get eaten by fees.
I'm convinced our lack of a decent payment system is seriously holding the web back.
The biggest obstacle is likely that you need to be a licenses money transmitter in all major jurisdictions to carry out what you describe.
The second you let an American tip an Iranian there will be trouble somewhere.
It's not an unsolvable problem but you probably need to limit the scope a bit. There's a lot of implementation details hiding behind "accessing the tips they've received". I believe Flattr started out limited to the SEPA area and slowly expanded from there.
> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.
The biggest problem is people don't want to pay much for contents. They have no problem paying $2/day for a cup of coffee but then taking about online contents they will talk about cents.
People are willing to pay if it's made easy. The idea of Flattr (which soundd similar enough to what is proposed here) was that you top up your flattr account with let's say 20 usd and designate a monthly pay-out, let's say 5usd. This means that for the next 4 months flatter will pay out 5$ to creators you flattr, divided by the number of times the user clicked on the flatter button. If the user flattrs a lot of sites, then each site gets sth like 10cts. If they only click a few times, each site gets proportionally more of the 5$. The basic idea is that the user doesnt have to deal with thinking about exact amounts of money ("is this article really worth 50cts? Or should it be 2$?"). They set a monthly limit they are comfortable with spending on online content and it reaches the content creators they like. Unfortunately Flattr didn't really catch on in the USA, I think and is now largely irrelevant and I haven't followed its development since several years. (Anecdotally, it was quite big in the German podcasting scene...)
I wouldn't trust Mozilla with such a thing. Actually, I wouldn't trust any silicon valley corporation.
I predict that Mozilla would ban wrong-thinkers from their service using the excuse of hate speech.
Want to donate to a progressive/leftist organization? Mozilla will gladly help you. Want to donate to a right wing conservative? Mozilla doesn't allow "bigots" on their platform.
They did exaxtly that with the Dissenter extension.
Advocating for assaulting and murdering fellow people in your country will result in Visa, Mastercard, American Express & Discover pulling the plug on your merchant account.
All the payments networks have morals clauses in their payments contracts, InfoWars blatantly violated said contract and has kicked up a fit over First Data doing what they are contractually obligated to do.
Some of the frontends like First Data can be very restricitive with their own morals clauses, banning bars, sex shops, book stores, and various other "wrong think". Bitcoin and other schemes will never have a reliable connection to the USA's current payments system due to this type of embedded moralizing.
I somewhat share your concerns. Mozilla has been pretty intolerant in the past (firing someone due to personal political views.)
That said, I really can't see anything gaining traction unless it's centralized. There is no decentralized means of payments. Cryptocurrencies don't work because very very very few people use them. And fees from Visa/Mastercard/etc are high enough you have to have some form of a "tip wallet" for it to make financial sense.
The non-profit doesn't have to be from Mozilla. It's something any of us with the organizational skills and other resources could do. Is there a way to make something like a legally binding charter? Part of it could say "Unless your content breaks the law, you can register."
('Course, not sure how you'd apply that to countries with governments that suppress free speech...)
If anyone wants to try that, I'd be happy to help with ideas and Linux Sys Admin skills.
We're building something very similar to that with Thankful (https://getthankful.io/, https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful). It's still early, but we have browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox (and are making a new release today with many long-awaited fixes and improvements).
Unlike Brave, we aren't building an entire browser/ad platform, we don't have a special token (we currently use plain Ether), and our plan is to make it possible to donate using stablecoins (most likely Dai) to get rid of the issue of volatility.
We'll solve the creator registration using a couple of smart contracts, one for handling the ESCROW-nature of pending donations (allowing for refunds if the creator chooses not register), and one for the address registry (that maps from emails/URLs to eth addresses). The details are still very much up in the air, but you can read the (early and unaudited) WIP contracts are on GitHub: https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/
Unfortunately, advertisement typically pays to publishers at least one order of magnitude more than subscribers, even with paywalls in place. For example, ARPU of Facebook is way north of one of Netflix.
>One such partner that we are collaborating with is Scroll. [...] The service enables web users to pay for an ad-free experience on their favorite sites, across their devices.
To try and understand what this is, I go to the landing page of partner's site, Scroll: https://scroll.com/
Their webpage has no obvious explanation of what this is. Is this a tip jar? Micropayments? Subscription?
Plus, the partners Scroll highlights are... extremely biased, by any standards. That's not terribly reassuring in this circumstance for such a relationship.
EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.
Since Scroll's landing page today in 2019 does not prominently display "$5/month" anywhere, it signals to me that Scroll may have changed its mind about that $5 amount and has yet to commit to a publicized and transparent monthly price. With the "Request Invitation" button, are they collecting emails to gauge the level of interest to help them determine a price?
If Scroll is actually still charging $5/month, why not make that fact obvious on its website?
While the article doesn't specifically say, this will likely use the Firefox Studies(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield) system which does have an opt-out (Maybe even opt-in? Been a while since I've done a fresh FF install).
Honestly, I just want a subscription model like Netflix or Google Music: A nominal monthly fee for ad-free access to most content on most major websites.
Problems like creating an online tipping protocol could be addressed with work on new web standards, not private partnerships with for-profit companies spearheaded by a single browser developer. If something like this could work, it needs to be an open standard. I appreciate Mozilla's work on this important issue, but don't think they are even starting with the right approach.
> Why should Comcast pay for peoples' hentai blogs?
It wouldn't, and this whole subthread of tipping is way off from what this article and service provider is even on about. So since we aren't actually talking about micropayment tipping, lets continue:
Having the ISP handle both the subscription and payment would be reducing and bundling a pooled monthly subscription away from consumers.
No, wrong incentive structure for ISPs. They're job is to deliver packets from point A to point B, and I want to pay them to do that well, and ditch them if they don't.
Even Netflix doesn't work that way anymore. You subscribe to Netflix to get access to Netflix original content. Licensing the entire universe of video, even if you just limited yourself to only licensing from the biggest studios, became prohibitively expensive the moment the studios realized there was an actual market for online streaming and stopped charging peanuts for streaming rights.
I suspect a news aggregator that provided access to "most content on most major websites" would rapidly hit the same wall; just licensing content from the five biggest U.S. newspapers would require a higher subscription rate than most people would be willing to pay.
I think what a lot of these models miss is the consent part of the system. In ads you don't give explicit consent to pay the publisher but they do get paid. I think that psychological element is both very obvious and almost always ignored with any new model. If we want to make a successful model we have to maybe borrow good ideas from models that are most successful today and lack of explicit consent is absolutely one of them. This reminds of the water my plant project where someone created a bot controlled by a subreddit to water a plant. Can we sort of allow access to a money account that we, the user, own but controlled by someone else? What would happen if any website publisher could withdraw from that account based on their judgement? There would need to be some obvious limits in place.
I've come to the conclusion that advertising is the only viable monetization model for most content businesses. This is not a new phenomenon, this is the same reason advertising is dominated television (even paid cable channels), print media like newspapers and magazines, and even in sports. The economics of it are pretty straightforward—customers simply don't value most content at what it costs to produce it.
I do a good amount of media buying and content production. From where I stand, the issue is in the consolidation of power. Content discovery and ad placement are far too closely related, which is bad for everyone involved (well, all but the ad platforms). Going directly to publishers is possible but difficult, it's not currently a scalable solution.
It's definitely viable, but I'm not sure about it being the only way.
Netflix shows that there's an appetite towards paying for content, and HBO furthers the idea while demonstrating how that same approach can be much more profitable.
For journalism side, premium, niche publications like The Information putting bets on the idea that users are willing to pay a lot of money for content as long as it's much better and more useful than the free alternatives.
I like the proposal of a mandatory subscription: People who pay for internet access would also have to include a 10% donation, split between the content producers of their choice.
This is imperfect, but much better than the current broken system.
> The economics of it are pretty straightforward—customers simply don't value most content at what it costs to produce it.
Well, but right now consumers don't even have the option of paying for single pieces of content as their only option usually is to buy the whole subscription to NY Times, etc. (The situation is a little like in the music industry where people had to buy a whole album to be able to listen to the 2-4 really good songs on it.)
If it was easier for people to pay/tip for individual pieces of content, good content could amass a significant number of micro donations which in aggregate might become enough to cover the costs incurred in the creation of the content piece.
Google Contributor already solved this problem in a way that every site that runs ads can handle without having to opt-in to an alternative payment universe. Of course, Google shut down Contributor, but if anyone has the ability to reimplement it on a large scale it's probably Firefox (or Microsoft, or Apple I guess).
It's pretty straightforward. You bid on ads on the user's behalf, and you show them cat pictures - or nothing, user's choice. The ad revenue still goes to the website and the user doesn't have to see ads. Everyone gets what they want and this is really important sites don't have to opt-in.
I've run large internet sites and we'd get email into our webmaster@ address saying we'd be tipped by some users and if we went to sign up we could claim our $3.35 or something. Nobody got time for that. Just use the existing payment rails (the ad system).
If over time the sites saw more people using this, they might change their business model to support subscriptions or something and cut the exchanges out of the middle, but to start, this would work.
I hate how everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. looking at you Brave. We don't need cryptocurrency to solve this.
Many content providers want a funding model for their work. That's fine. Nothing to do with the web, specifically.
IMO the web technology is and should be totally orthogonal to the needs of some businesses that happen to want to use it.
The web should be a mechanism for people to publish documents. That's it. And that's great. In fact we should be making it easier for normal humans to do this. The web had lots of excellent content long before anyone expected they would profit directly from eyeballs on their web-content.
The tier where to implement this seems (mobile) Telcos who have already your details, a customer account, etc., and who are on the regulatory hook anyway.
Exploring alternative funding models for the web publishers*
That said, if it's so little money in it due to ads. Then shop around. If you're going to complain about the elephant in the room, Google being the only choice, then create your own ad network and charge more. Google has such a monopoly, that you may be getting pennies for every thousands they get. As well, ad blockers are becoming a fact of life that there's no solution for.
My opinion; Incredibly, the only way for publishers to publish on Internet and still have food on table is UBI. Sucks if you are the business owner though.
I think the basic problem with all these schemes is people don’t want to pay for most content, the entire concept of ‘surfing’ the web is frictionless interactions with content and constantly needing to make decisions about whether to buy something, even if it were pennies, is a cognitive burden that forced accounting and a shopping mentality on a reader who just wants to fall down the rabbit hole of link chasing.
Sure, some high quality long form content can pull this off, but would I pay for the Verge, or say, MKBHD’s reviews? No. Maybe Anandtech once in a while.
(It's still from 2019 so HN probably won't add that info to the title)
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