100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by ignoramous » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:46 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #100

Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Facebook has its own massive walled off kingdom that exists nearly entirely in apps where they can heavily control ad blocking.

True, hence the rise of DNS based content blocking like pi-hole. Sure, it is trivial for apps to workaround it by using a custom DoH impl themselves, it hasn't been done yet.

Another possibility is to patch the apps, ref YoutubeVanced

Yet another possibility is to run an app within a user-land emulator on the device and block content and deny requests. See: VirtualApp

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

#152

Post by danShumway » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:48 AM UTC

kjeetgill wrote: post #114

Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds completely reasonable to me, and I don't know where it's wrong, but it doesn't square with my experience and I think it's wrong.

If this were true, nobody would be getting mad about ad blockers. But both advertisers and publishers (big and small) regularly complain about ad blockers, and even with a relatively small portion of users installing a blocker, multiple journalism sites have started adding paywalls. This paranoia isn't restricted to small sites either -- Google's even listed ad blockers as a potential revenue problem in investor disclosures.

A couple of potential causes: maybe it's that impressions actually do matter to revenue in some cases and we haven't completely moved over to conversions yet, or maybe it's that advertising increases consumer spending even without direct conversion rates, or that most publishers are engaged in fraud and ad-blockers make it harder to do that. It might even just be that publishers/advertisers are all stupid and haven't realized that ad blockers don't matter, but I think that's unlikely.

What seems plausible to me is that most of the people who block ads are not as immune to advertising as they claim. If they didn't block ads, they would occasionally click on an ad and provide a conversion. I would not be surprised to see that exposure to advertising increased overall spending, and didn't just redirect it to specific companies. I could be wrong though, maybe it's something else. I'd be interested to see research on that kind of thing.

Regardless, it is very difficult for me to square the world you describe with a world where a huge fraction of news sites I visit are including banners that tell people to whitelist ads, or anti-adblocking technology outright, or are just giving up and switching to subscription models. I can't think of an explanation for that other than, "ad blockers decrease revenue", and I think that having an explanation for that behavior is a prerequisite to making a believable claim that ad blockers aren't hurting revenue right now.

I mean, Google's not dumb. They would not have wasted time on the acceptable ads initiative if they didn't feel like they needed to.

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

#153

Post by danShumway » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #74

Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some banners ads are not all of advertising. You’re affected by numerous channels and mediums that would pick up the slack (and already have) from adblocking on the web.

Does that matter?

If advertising moves off of the web onto other channels and mediums, then necessarily the economics of the web would still change, right? Taking revenue away from a single medium will still alter the economics of that medium.

Mozilla isn't trying to change the economics of the entire market, they're trying to change the economics of specifically web content.

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

#154

Post by danShumway » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #144

sebastos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of seems like a troubling insight at first glance, but it doesn't pass basic sanity checks imo. You could make the same exact argument about any other type of industry. Watch: >The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putti…

I think what you're missing is that discretionary spending is not all spending, and marketing budgets are a percentage of all spending. When I go to CNN.com right now, I see ads for Tide pods and Toyota SUVs. That ad spend came from our supermarket and car payments, which you can't redirect to tipping websites unless you want to stop eating and driving to work. My argument is basically that no web monetization plan t…

General shoutout to anyone who's less lazy than me: has there been any good research on whether or not advertising increases discretionary spending, and if so by how much?

The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. If people are buying Tide pods instead of generic laundry detergent, it seems to me that the advertising isn't just shifting money around, it's actually increasing spending. But it could just be bad instincts, I don't know of any actual real research on the topic.

Another way of phrasing this -- if Apple stopped advertising iPhones, some Apple users would shift over to Android, which (ignoring cost differences) theoretically would just mean they gave the same money to someone else. But would there be another contingent that stayed on iPhone and just stopped buying new hardware every year? How large would a contingent like that be?

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

#155

Post by fastball » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

zallarak wrote: post #22

Interesting that Ripple affiliates are sponsoring this.

Ripple is sponsoring this.

They gave ~$250m (in XRP) to Coil[0]. Coil is now giving $100m to people to monetize the web.

Gotta do something with that sweet, sweet ICO money.

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-is-giving-away-1-billion-xrp...

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

#156

Post by fastball » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:38 AM UTC

troydavis wrote: post #125

Here's how Coil ended up with $100 million to fund this grant ( https://fortune.com/2019/09/16/grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coi... ): > As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple's operations—to settle financial transactions. … and here's why R…

Don't forget that Coil was started by the Ex-CTO of Ripple.

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

#157

Post by rcpt » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:38 AM UTC

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…

A big problem with micro payments is that the effort that goes in to figuring out if that article is really worth the $0.27 to read it is often worth more than $0.27

http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme...

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

#158

Post by yoz-y » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #2

Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a "donate to Mozilla" banner. The case for "reshaping the economics of the web" would have been a bit more compelling without that... (My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)

I find this weird. I believe most people who donate to mozilla want to do it to keep the lights on for the browser development.

Now they are simultaneously asking for donations and giving 100 mil away. Non profits donating money to other causes seems wrong to me, I think it would be better if they offered an option Humble Bundle-style to split the money and let the donors choose

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

#159

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:21 AM UTC

sebastos wrote: post #138

cameronbrown wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument breaks down when you consider the thing that allows newspaper/web ads to be profitable is the cost of delivery effectively being reduced to zero, whereas a book still has massive printing costs that cannot be scaled as well (thousands of the same books vs. millions of the same newspapers/page views)

B-b-but what about ebooks?

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by longears » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

I know credit card processors are hostile to "adult content", but as a human being with a sexuality that's part of who I am, I'm saddened that even "literature" related to sexuality is banned.

The grant says it's seeking "makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more"[1]

But Coil forbids "Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services."[2]

[1] https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ [2] https://coil.com/terms