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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

#111

Post by manigandham »

mr_toad wrote: post #102
manigandham wrote: post #92

There'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…

> are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford So advertising doesn’t work on these people? Seems unlikely. That would imply content providers are giving stuff away, and wasting bandwidth on adds they know will never work. Seems more likely to me that the advertising does work, and people aren’t getting content for free. They’re paying for stuff they don’t need, with…

No, free in this context meaning they aren't paying upfront with cash. So yes, ads do work, and they allow people without other means to monetize their attention in real-time.

They also own their attention and are perfectly capable of spending it however they want, on whatever they want, without any approval of what they need by you or anyone else.

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

#112

Post by meerita »

manigandham wrote: post #77
meerita wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think indie developers shouldn't rely on advertising at all. It's like being adventurer and rely on carrots as food for adventure. You need to find the proper food to do adventure. Same with the developers. Indie developers must do software and provide a service or anything that is valued by a consumer. Anything else is just a waste of time.

Having ads doesn’t mean the context has no value. Otherwise why are you visiting any site with ads?

Indeed. But ads shouldn't be the reason you write software or write about software development.

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

#113

Post by kbenson »

donohoe wrote: post #105

Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good). What happens? Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing. Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's o…

> What happens?

What happens if you do that without enough market share is that the browser gets detected and banned/redirected with a message about it being hostile to the people making the content. To some degree, they would be correct.

If chrome, Firefox and Safari all did that all at once, many web properties would go under before the dust settled. It would probably cause a recession with how many people it affected, if not an outright depression, as it reverberated throughout the economy.

There's a reason some things happen slowly, and why puahback against the better future isn't always a bad thing. Too much change all at once is far more destructive overall than if spread out over time (for the exact same reason having two cars need major repairs the same month can put a family in dire straits).

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

#114

Post by kjeetgill »

Retric wrote: post #37
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…

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.

I'm not sure where you got this idea.

Ad-blocking might hurt in some future with hypothetically high enough percentages of traffic.

Right now they make ads more effective (marginally). By self selection, a population with relatively low click-rates has removed themselves from having any money spent on them. This helps Google and Advertisers since right now, the volume of available impressions is plenty high, the name of the game is targeting better.

If anything, ad blockers just hurt select publishers who can potentially see a large volume of their potential ad traffic blocked.

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

#116

Post by austhrow743 »

dangrossman wrote: post #63
gumby wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]. I don't understand this statement. The companies marketing to people with discretionary income presumably get their revenues from that discretionary income. So mathematically their marketing budget would have to be smaller than the revenu…

> presumably get their revenues from that discretionary income This is where you made a mistake. Their revenues comes from spending on necessities, not from discretionary income. Proctor & Gamble's $7 billion a year in advertising is coming from our buying soap and laundry detergent and toilet paper, not what you have left over for movie tickets. The $30 billion a year in medical marketing is coming from insulin and…

I don't think that distinction is precise enough for this. Sure soap is a necessity, but if you buy some premium fancy soap from P&G that had a lot of marketing budget contributing to its high cost rather than the supermarket brand plain soap, then plenty of that soap money was discretionary.

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

#117

Post by Rafuino »

xvilka wrote: post #115

They could help also to build/improve the OpenCollective[1] that is a completely free and open-source[2] alternative to Patreon, aiming mostly for the open-source projects. [1] https://opencollective.com/ [2] https://github.com/opencollective/

Perhaps this project will receive a grant then to help it improve?
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