Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched.
So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, because many of the content producers and curators won't waste their time for no return.
I don't like ads, but I like my free content, and ads are an acceptable way of financing it.
Edit: I get that some of you really don't like ads, but the quality of comments here is abysmal. You guys are living in some kind of dreamland if you think you can just kill of advertising and not lose something in the trade off (PS imagine a world with no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) I honestly expect more intelligent commentary from HN, consider both sides of your argument.
I disagree. If you can't fund your content without ads then you have a bad business model. We should kill ads and any content that dies in the collateral is an acceptable loss.
Micropayments also don't work because no one has done it well, not because it's inherently not going to work.
I don't think micropayments will ever be a viable alternative to advertising. The internet started free. The cat is out of the bag. Most people won't pay for access to websites.
The distinction between ads and content is one that is ridiculously easy to close if needed.
The only reason that adblock works on a good number of adverts is that they're usually served from an external source. If you serve them from exactly the same place the content is coming from, and make no distinction between the two, then filtering becomes more problematic.
Subscriptions are a terrible fit for the bulk of the web, and inhibit one of its signal advantages over other media (free-flow via hyperlinks between pages relevant to one's current purpose). I'd go as far as to say they are anti-web; entirely the wrong funding model.
Ads are from my perspective a disaster from too many angles to list here.
In short we don't have the right funding model available yet. Ads just prop up a poor one, making it possible to appear vaguely viable. So I think the more ad blockers spread, undermining the online ad industry, the better.
I'd be more convincing no doubt if I had the right alternative model at my fingers, but if I did I would probably be working on it not writing it up in HN. Micropayments of some sort seems to be the last man standing, but which and how and by who?
I'll pay for content, but the value has to be there. And in this age of click bait headlines, non researched articles of no susbstance or value, I'm not about to pay for someone's low value opinions. Sure they have value, but it's like $0.02 of value. And it's not scarce. When everyone can create content and publish, and many are willing to do it for free to create their own brand, it creates a market where ideas and words are not monetizable. I don't even mind ads, when done right. A trailer for a movie I want to see is an ad, and I'll seek it out when I want the content. But ad agencies have done this to themselves by becoming a virus on content pages.
Besides, why should I have to pay? I create and consume something far more valuable in the form of OSS. No ads, no price.
To say monetization has to be ads or paywalls is excluding hundreds of other ways to monetize content. It's lazy, and won't succeed in the information era.
I took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad.
I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy.
Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist.
Good writing takes time.
You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"
The advertising problem is very strange. There is content we do want which we could have by paying a small amount. But we're (by and large) unwilling. So we get ads.
A tiny fraction of the ads are clicked, and a tiny fraction of the money spent on that product goes back to the content producer. And that's enough to fund them.
We could avoid seeing 100 ads which end up giving 10 cents to the site if we'd just pay 10 cents each.[1] It would be nicer for us and simpler for the content producers. But we're not willing, apparently.
It seems perverse to claim that we value good articles and shows if we force the creators to sell us boots in order to make a living.
Oh, micropayments, when will we find a workable system for you?
Funding your content through advertising is hugely inefficient. Of the people who visit your site, usually only a tiny proportion click on (or notice) an advert, and only a tiny proportion of those then spends any money.
This assumes that just viewing an advertisement doesn't create value for an advertiser. It does. Look at the average TV channel or print magazine for evidence.
I’ve heard Google pass as little as one twelfth onto the publisher in some cases
While I'm not sure about Google, I do know that most display advertising networks pay their publishers around 30% - 50% of the gross income.
But seriously, advertising is a broken method of paying for stuff. If we could unobtrusively pay for content on the Internet, I’m sure enough people would do so to more than cover costs of production.
While I agree that there is probably a decent community of people that would probably pay for content online, I'm not convinced that this would be true for most people. Sites that offer a subscription to get rid of the ads, usually have very few subscribers. People simply like free stuff, and don't like to pay for content. Now this could indeed be due to the payment model, I'm not sure; maybe something facebook-connect-like for paid content would work, but I'm still not convinced that a large enough base of people would actually pay the same money as they're generating in advertising value, to make this work.
Let's take a few very large sites, and imagine what would happen if they went to a payment supported revenue model, instead of advertising supported. Let's say, Google or CNN. What would happen if they started putting up a paywall? Would people really start paying for those services, or would they simply move to a competing site, which is ad-supported and for free? I'm willing to bet most people would go for the last option.
People just don't mind ads as much as they mind paying for stuff.
It would be nice to think that this will lead to a workable micropayments system. Relying on ad funding has never been a sustainable business model (edit: for the kinds of site you're talking about) if only because ad blockers will eventually kill it.
Rather than trying to prop up a dying business model, we need to develop new ones that do cater to the needs of both consumers and providers. I suggest we try the radical "we make something you find useful, and you pay us a fair price for it" model that I hear was used by a couple of bricks 'n' mortars places with some success. :-)
Edit: I would gladly pay a small flat fee for, say, a month of access to the BBC's web site, provided that this could be done with trivial effort and with decent tools to track my total spend and some sort of simple refund/guarantee policy that works for any site using the system. If that also means I can throw a bone to other sites I value to help with their running costs, I don't have a problem with that either.
I'd be more likely to pay in exchange for no ads whatsoever than to pay money and continue to be exposed to essentially an unaccountable 3rd party (the ad network) when it comes to security issues like being served malware when that 3rd party gets hacked.
If micropayments were a thing I'd be willing to pay $1 for a day pass to view an article on an infrequently read website as opposed to paying $50/yr which is a complete waste of my money.
Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content.
The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway)
To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native.
The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads.
If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.
I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them. They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe on a very rare occasion I might) if given a micro-payments solution because it doesn't seem worth paying for. I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. Honestly I don't feel any compulsion to fund any of the media whose links bombard my social media daily. Even some of the good stuff on this site I wouldn't feel compelled to pay for because truly it isn't transformative and I would probably be better off not reading it and doing something productive instead.
Stuff I do pay for: educational content (books, courses etc), Spotify, Netflix.
You're obviously much more deeply invested in this and have done the maths. I am curious, what percentage of web users do you calculate will use the micro-payments, if it was a seamless perfectly executed experience? How much revenue do you think it will generate and will it be enough to disrupt web-ads?
This is a “feature”. There’s so much content out there whose sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as targeting is never 100% reliable, there’s always a bit of “leakage” where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on).
A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper micropayments system for the web and while that’s true, I don’t think it’s the only problem. A lot of people’s careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where they don’t actually provide any tangible value and only profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn’t be sustainable in a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn’t actually get any value out of it and thus would never willingly pay money for this “service”.
Micropayments are generally considered to be unviable for the general population (edit: business model wise, not tech). People are unwilling to pay even pennies for an article[0], because now users are facing the burden of choice, constantly thinking about how their browsing is racking up pennies. Not to mention, it boxes you into the pay-per-article model. Sites like Twitter or Facebook don't make sense in this world.
I also think it adds significant barriers to entry, since micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. Information should be as free as possible imo.
If the market decides all ads should be blocked, then sure, things will change, but please don't pretend this won't have huge ramifications - things will not be remotely like they are today. For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive.
I don't like ads either, but you can argue that ads benefit the user by paying for the service that they want to use. Until we have some viable micropayment system that allows me to pay the fraction of a cent that the website would otherwise receive by showing me an ad it's hard to finance popular services.
They do work, I pay Netflix, Spotify and Prime. But there is a limit. I can't pay every single publisher. Micropayments didn't seem to have taken off, and when I hit paywalls these days I turn away - I don't want a subscription in order to consume one article. I now dread the day where content will be so distributed across publishers and subscriptions, we'd be back at the start in a cable-company style world.
I'm not saying ads are good, and no ads are great. I'm saying there has to be a balance. And publishers are best to realise this as well since the more they push, the more people will push back.
Maybe (just a passing thought as I'm typing), the ad pricing model should change? Maybe if ads were more expensive and more selective it would offset the revenue by quantity into revenue by quality ad-wise...
Some turn to ads because they can't afford to host/build the content otherwise, even though they don't like having ads.
I think we do desperately need viable widespread micropayments system(s). We need an alternative funding mechanism. Plastering everything with ads is no good solution, whether they invade privacy or not.
Personally I have no problems with ads per se, it's the tracking, privacy, and security aspect I'm concerned about (and also the unbelievable bloatedness of ad-financed sites lately as ad prices race to the bottom). Personally I'd be fine with ads if we could go back to a content-oriented model where first-party static assets are served as ads rather than the targeted advertising we have now. I know others here who have zero tolerance for any kind of ads, though. Trying to grasp what a feasible business model for content creation could be, including paywalled content/micropayments as almost anything seems better than the clickbait and brainwash crap we have now.
You can argue it, doesn't make it right! Nor are micropayments the only solution. Nor do sites make a fraction of a cent - it's usually at least a few.
With ads comes everything from annoyance, tracking, data theft, and malware. All things I am not a fan of, nor are they worthwhile tradeoffs for visiting a site.
But i'll agree - it's not as easy to do other things as it is to serve ads. You have to be creative, and also provide actual value that people are willing to pay for. But trying to romance the idea of serving ads - that it's good for users - is insulting.
So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, because many of the content producers and curators won't waste their time for no return.
I don't like ads, but I like my free content, and ads are an acceptable way of financing it.
Edit: I get that some of you really don't like ads, but the quality of comments here is abysmal. You guys are living in some kind of dreamland if you think you can just kill of advertising and not lose something in the trade off (PS imagine a world with no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) I honestly expect more intelligent commentary from HN, consider both sides of your argument.
reply