Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

IMO, letting the reader/user reward individual pieces is much more useful feedback than website-access payments. A site which is mostly crap could then discover what is drawing people, and could reform its editorial choices intelligently.

Subscriptions, on the other hand, reward the status quo.

> this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites

Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else.

> you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP

I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with.

> a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization

Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.

If the web is a market, then it's a magical one where everything of value on it can be copied infinitely for free. I admit that as an archliberal I'm skeptical of markets, so it's possible that a market-based solution would work here and my bias is preventing me from seeing it. But isn't our current solution market-based? How is the current setup not a market?

> If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead.

This sounds a little like a "people on food assistance spend their EBT on frivolous things" argument, to which I always respond: even poor people deserve the ability to eat junk food and waste time on the web, because those things help us deal with stress and stress literally kills us. I also think that knowledge is power, and the web is the biggest source of knowledge humanity's ever built. I also think that community is power, and the web is the biggest community we've ever built. I've never seen a news story on TV about the water in Flint, I only know about it via articles on the web. I'm then free to research the history of water pollution and water regulation in the United States, or how to contact my elected representatives to get the situation changed, or how to contact political groups in order to change the political regime that allowed this to happen in the first place. Access to the web is a huge, huge thing for poor people "to increase their standard of living".

> Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake.

I admit I mostly made up the numbers in my scheme completely off the cuff because they weren't really the point of my scheme, but even so I'm having trouble figuring out what your argument here is. I based my prototype model off of newspapers, where a newsstand or drug store would buy like 100 copies of the NYT, USA Today, whatever, and then mark them up slightly to sell to the public. So if you sell 80 copies of the NYT, you make whatever your profit margin is * 80, - the cost of the papers you didn't sell. In fact this model is better for "retailers" because you aren't out money if you don't sell everything. But because the ISPs here wouldn't be making any money anyway, it doesn't really matter.

Are you saying that my blog with 1 hit shouldn't make as much money as a major news site? It wouldn't (half the profit sharing is weighted by traffic) and I don't think it should. If I'm wrong in the way I expressed it, then apologies! I just think that if a content provider gets X% of your traffic, that should be reflected in the profit sharing. If that's (traffic_percent * total_profit / 2) + ((total_profit / 2) / number_of_content_providers_hit) then OK. If there's a different formula that actual smart people have actually worked on, even better.

It's definitely difficult for small sites to make money off of ads (although there are some that have been able to do so), but I don't think this is the right solution for that, either.

> I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with.

Even if the ISP is required to contract with you, just getting a contract with all of the ISP's is going to be a huge hurde. There's tons of providers in the US alone [0], and many of them will likely want a formal contract rather than offering a simple sign-up form. If you have visitors in other countries, it gets even harder, since now you have to worry about taxes, currency conversion, etc.

Most likely, you'd end up with some kind of "micropayments-as-a-service" company that would do it all for you in exchange for taking a percentage, but that still feels like it shouldn't be necessary.

> My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.

I'm not sure it's possible to make ISP's "dumb" while also giving them control over how the money is distributed. In theory, you could make a really exact specification for how they have to count views, how they have to make deals, and how they have to distribute the money, but I'm guessing that there's always going to be loopholes that they can take advantage of. Particularly in the US, ISP's have a history of being monopolistic and engaging in shady practices - I doubt that's going to change once they're given more control over how websites operate.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers