61–70 of 156 posts
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…
I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropaym…
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…
As I understand it, this was the premise of cable TV - pay for your cable, and in return you get no ads. Yet, here we are with ads on cable, because it turned out to be more profitable to both charge and show ads than just do one or the other.
No, that was never the case, it seems to be a myth that started getting repeated a lot in the last decade; at least, I've never heard of it before it started getting used as a “historical precedent” in discussing online advertising trends, despite is ahistoricity.
What you originally paid for with cable was access to channels, largely existing broadcast channels: not everyone was choose enough to the transmitter to get good (or even usable) broadcast reception, even when they were nominally in the media market.
From very early on, IIRC, the were (ad-supported) cable-only channels for which cable was the only means of access. Over time those became the main thing you paid for cable for.
Commercial-free premium channels were a later development, which you paid for (and still do) on top of cable (though they may be bundled into higher tiers). But commercial free service was never the key value proposition of cable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
micro-payment system This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them.
> This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them. All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. I think it's still a worthwhile discussion. Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended cons…
It's not ads I hate. It's #1 tracking and #2 obtrusive ada. Videos, animations, pop ups, etc... Unobtrusive ads are fine. Stack Overflow, Google Search, JSFiddle come to mind as ads I like. They are often relevant and they are unobtrustive
If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.
More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to just be more effective when the site can pull them off correctly. Kotaku's deals section, for example, is consistently lovely and makes it right through my ad blocker. I'll even click it on purpose from time to time, because I value their curation and it's usually all stuff that most gamers would be interested in anyway. I don't think all advertising is bad, but the third-party iframe "drop it on the page and forget" nonsense has got to go.
I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( https://www.gwern.net/Ads ) of (15% vs my 14%, 13-16% CI). The unit of analysis isn't the same but they're arguably equivalent.
This is also interestingly parallel to Pandora's giant A/B test: Huang et al 2018's https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio".
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…
I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropaym…
But once you start doing aggregate stats instead of individual stats, you start to run into other problems. First, the math gets really weird. Let's say that I have a website that's getting 2% of all traffic. Now, let's say Netflix comes out and is insanely popular. My percentage drops to 1%, even though I have experienced zero drop in traffic. Because even though all of my users are still visiting the site exactly the same as they used to, people are spending more time online and they're spending more of it on Netflix.
The next problem you run into is distinguishing a site visit from a normal network request. So... what's a site visit? We can't go by bandwidth usage for obvious reasons, unless you want every site's homepage to weigh in at 300MB. So probably we go by request volume, and we ought to only allow requests for HTML resources, since otherwise people just stop bundling CSS and stick a thousand invisible images on every page.
Except now single-page apps don't work (maybe you think this is a positive) because they rely on regular AJAX requests. A micropayment system suffers from the same problem, but (assuming we're not foolish enough to build micropayments directly into browsers) it has the advantage of not being standardized, so you can have an individual site set up its own payment model. This cuts down on bad actors, because there's not a standardized set of rules to exploit, and because users have to consent to the system before they're charged -- ie, they're not giving someone money without knowledge just by clicking on a link.
Ignoring problems like that (and I think there are more that we could go into) what exactly is your goal? Is your goal to get people to make high-quality content? Because we already know that payment models based on clicks (micropayments included) bias towards low-quality, clickbait content. We've seen this on Youtube. We've seen it in news sites.
When just clicking on a link is enough to get someone money, and there's no advantage after clicking on that link to provide some kind of high-quality memorable content, then everyone who's investing in high-quality content is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes an app without twenty page refreshes is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes a news article that isn't paginated into 5 different screens is at a disadvantage.