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100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

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Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#81

Post by ribosometronome »

bill_rr wrote: post #80
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

That first sentence took me a little while to wrap my head around and I don't think it's true or logical. In other words, even if it was true, I don't see why it matters. I'm building a company that plans to charge people to read things. The reading experience, without ads, is superior. It's worth paying for. That means that an ad free future is possible.

>It's worth paying for.

Given the current state of the web and the struggle that many media companies are having, I don't think we can take this for granted today.

Fingers crossed that you and experiences like Mozilla's proposed can change this.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#82

Post by mizay7 »

I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#83

Post by SQueeeeeL »

bill_rr wrote: post #80
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

That first sentence took me a little while to wrap my head around and I don't think it's true or logical. In other words, even if it was true, I don't see why it matters. I'm building a company that plans to charge people to read things. The reading experience, without ads, is superior. It's worth paying for. That means that an ad free future is possible.

You may think it's worth paying for, but your average consume will not. It makes sense from a consumer point of view, how am I to know if this "superior" experience is worth my money if I haven't tried it. How do I know it will stay that way, lots of magazines and newspapers quality tanked after they got high subscription numbers.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#84

Post by gbear605 »

Kiro wrote: post #15

I liked Coinhive but despised that 99% used it for malevolent things. I do like the idea of letting my computer do some proof of work for a few seconds to unlock an article. It's like doing a micro payment with your electricity bill, anonymously and without any setup.

Suppose the minimum amount to make this make sense is worth 1 cent over 4 seconds of running the proof of work. Then this proof of work would earn 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute / 4 cents/second / 100 cents/dollar = $216/day. But any proof of work system that can earn $216/day would make far more sense to run dedicated miners for instead of running miscellaneous computers on.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#85

Post by julien »

bloopernova wrote: post #73
FreeHugs wrote: post #3

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…

There's probably a different cryptocurrency for each user on HN, certainly enough for people to argue over until the end of time. Perhaps it's as simple as this: 1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links. 2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto. 3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to pu…

https://unlock-protocol.com ;) [disclaimer: I made this!]

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#86

Post by 205guy »

FreeHugs wrote: post #3

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…

My idea was just to have this integrated into your ISP bill.

I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out.

So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#87

Post by weberc2 »

tlb wrote: post #42
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

> the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income] is likely a small fraction of the pool of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. "Discretionary income" is a short-term idea, defined as [income - cost to maintain current lifestyle]. Over longer periods, lifestyles expand to fit current income and the idea is meaningless. For instance, when cars were new, people could only buy them if they had a large chunk…

Discretionary income is measured in dollars/time, cars are valued in dollars. That’s relevant because cars are affordable to middle class Americans because of _financing_ (also because of mass production). Your car payment deducts from your discretionary spending while web advertising does not—without web advertising you would need to subscribe to the websites and services you consume and that would come from your discretionary dollars. Whatever your views on the matter, getting rid of advertising isn’t going to come for free.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#88

Post by sgc »

cameronbrown wrote: post #17
aesthesia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Free" is also a very psychologically special price. Micropayments would make it easier to get over the energy barrier to paying for something, but it's still there. Laboratory experiments (and real-world experience) show that people value the difference between a price of 1 cent and 0 cents much more than the difference between 1 cent and 2 cents.

Which is why spreading £10 over thousands of websites is much easier to sell than £0.01 per article. With the later model people become paralised with choice, and the former model has been successful as the backbone for SMS/data infrastructure almost everywhere.

It would be nice if there were a reciprocal subscription model. All subscribers to the NYT can also view articles of the LA Times or some other site, but reciprocal logins are tracked and funds are divided accordingly. That way, with some limits, each site could set their price, offer the bonus of visiting other sites, and there would not be the huge barrier to entry of requiring a massive player to aggregate things and wield power over publishers they don't want to accept. It's basically the model of reciprocal agreements used by the postal services around the world.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#89

Post by weberc2 »

bill_rr wrote: post #80
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

That first sentence took me a little while to wrap my head around and I don't think it's true or logical. In other words, even if it was true, I don't see why it matters. I'm building a company that plans to charge people to read things. The reading experience, without ads, is superior. It's worth paying for. That means that an ad free future is possible.

Maybe your business attracts customers now because they have a lot of discretionary income to spend on it, but if other services that are a higher priority to your users start to find a subscription model to be more valuable than an ad model (because ad blocking is too effective, for example), your customers will have less discretionary income to put to ad-free reading. Further, all of those ad-subsidized reading sites now become your competition.

This isn’t a pro-ads argument, but an appeal to sober, informed debate.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#90

Post by jriri99 »

Teach parents to teach their kids to foster connections across the globe outside official channels like school which are heavily curated.

Changing economics for us, in our lifetime is a lost cause. Our limbic systems are wired with the emotional bindings of our childhood. It’s hard to let go.

Teach kids to work together directly from as early as possible. Cut out Wall Street middle men and political grifters.

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