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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
#92There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1]
Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it.
Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.
I honestly don't know anything about Monero. How does it compare to Stellar, which was recently on HN due to the Keybase airdrop giveaway? (I hold a whole $40USD in Stellar, I do however think it's a good thing. But I think there's space on the net for more than a couple of cryptocurrencies so I'm curious about Monero)
Monero is the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrency in existence right now, by pretty much every measurable metric. It's also the only (in the top 250 by market cap) cryptocurrency that enforces privacy at the protocol level, by default. You can read more about it at the website below.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. Pretty sure it solves that.
I thought XMR had high transaction fees?
Transaction fees have been a fraction of a penny since the Bulletproofs upgrade in October 2018. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees....
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#95I 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.
The current answer is to bundle. Use a subscription for content that is then split across sites/content by time/attention/some other measure.
However the problem then becomes which bundles you subscribe to, and that can easily cause fatigue and a race to the bottom as seen by all the current video streaming services now. Even worse, none of it has proven completely profitable or sustainable either.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Forget the average consumer...it's pretty much guaranteed there will be an outline.com link posted on any paywalled article on HN (along with the usual paywall complaint) and this crowd seems to fancy itself above the average consumer.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#97I see the following models of monetizing content on the web: 1. Gift economy (you give it away, take likes) 2. Goods and Service economy (you charge for it, sufficiently to make a living) 3. Advertising economy (many people want it but not many willing to pay for it) 4. Tipping (not a viable economic model, unless it's made compulsory and a minimum is set in which case it's not tipping) 1 & 2 have been with us since…
What makes advertising a failed experiment exactly?
It's currently the only sustaining model for 95% of digital content and has created at least one trillion dollar corporation. That's the opposite of failure.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!]
OK, you win :) Nice job!
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#99To all the people saying some variant of "there's nothing new here", I think you are missing it: Tipping has always been an effort. If it all happened behind the scenes, with no action required on your part (beyond just browsing to a site), then "tipping" can viably compete with ads.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#100None 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…
Alternatively if advertising became significantly less effective companies would spend less money on it. That's the upside of Ad-blocking which could theoretically make a huge impact.
> Alternatively if advertising became significantly less effective companies would spend less money on it.
What's the strategy for making advertising on Google and Facebook (+Instagram) - where the majority of all online advertising outside of China occurs - significantly less effective?
Google controls search, Android, Chrome and the Android app store (along with of course YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail, three other giant services). Facebook has its own massive walled off kingdom that exists nearly entirely in apps where they can heavily control ad blocking.
Google nearly doubled its sales in three fiscal years, from $74b to $136b. Something that big doubling in that span of time, is extraordinary. They'll probably hit near $160b in sales for 2019. I'll take the bet that a giant that large, entirely dependent on advertising, will continue to figure out how to insulate itself from ad blocking by controlling the territory around it.
Your premise will always be a non-starter so long as the ad giants control their own sprawling acreage (which they will fight to the death to retain, because it is life or death to them). The ad giants have made sure to control their own destiny, they saw the ad block threat plainly a decade ago or more and moved to stay out in front of it.