Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

In a way, when it comes to advertisements, I do that already. I don't watch broadcast tv, I don't read newspapers or magazines on paper, I listen to BBC radio if I listen to the radio, I have adblockers for the internet.

Th world can be a quieter, calmer place when you stop letting people make sales pitches at you constantly.

Great, finally micropayments http://www.useit.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ will work? If Google wants to display its good intentions, they would take a lower percentage when the user bought the ads. The same price paid by an user would top the advertiser.

> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist.

YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.

Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.

Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).

TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.

Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.

That paper talks about how advertising experiments require larger-than-expected sample sizes to calculate ROI, because the signals are more diluted.

It also doesn't specify mediums of advertising, because of confidentiality agreements, but hints that it included mediums such as television and billboards which are traditionally harder to track. I don't think it's shocking that out of home media is hard to statistically track ROI on.

In the messages in this subthread (the ones that are direct ancestors of my message) you mentioned more often how much you hate Buzzfeed-style sites than how much you hate tracking. You used having to pay for Buzzfeed as your main (only?) argument against Contributor. Maybe it's not your intended objection, but it is the one you were making.

If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.

So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.

(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)