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

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

#191

Post by eitland » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:42 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #150

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 may be true. But I have no clue where those marketing expenditures go. I do recall reading about major firms realizing that most of their marketing expenditures more or less accomplished nothing. From a bottom-up perspective, I've read that ad income is typically on the order of $0.01-$0.10 per page view. As a more or less middle-class American, I'd be willing to pay that. Or at least, I would if ad blockers sto…

My thoughts as well. Between GDPR making current ad models harder to pull off and more risky and the fact that ads are getting less effective I think I might see an advertising bubble:

Here are my thoughts, comments on why this is wrong are welcome: the market for online ads seems to have been growing more than consumers disposable income for two decades.

Much of that might have come from cannibalizing other forms of advertising, but sooner or later it can't grow anymore as a new equilibrium has been reached between TV ads and online ads and consumers don't have more money to spend anyway.

I remember an old blog post from Google or something showing a whiteboard with crazy thoughts: what if we could have a mirror behind the earth to reflect sunlight and make the day longer? Then people could spend more time searching => more ad impressions => more revenue.

I feel we are at that point now, only consumers have enough time to browse, they just can't buy more than they already do (and some markets might be even beyond that point, fueled by credit card debt etc.)

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

#192

Post by cameronbrown » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:48 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #163

cameronbrown wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any action taken by an individual or organization with the intent of influencing another individual to execute a commercial transaction. That definition pretty much boils down to every interaction between businesses and individuals, ever. Any kind of negotiating or sales or communication..

Correct. Like I said, it's pervasive to the extent that we just assume it's the only way it could be, but it's behind every terrible thing. I know this first hand, I built these systems. The end state is to know and predict everything you do, and then sell you something about it. Whether its a product or an experience or a feeling. That's where it all leads - you lose your agency. Getting rid of online marketing or n…

I've worked with small businesses - the small one to thirty person plummer or photographer or decorator type. What you're asking for is fundamentally impossible. Business and entrepreneurship is a human process where two entities find a transaction that benefits them both.

Of course this breaks down when shady actors manipulate in bad faith, but that's the price of freedom. To put a ban into place as extensive as you're suggesting would be to regulate speech as far as I'm concerned.

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

#193

Post by lawn » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:49 AM UTC

stormtv wrote: post #47

BubRoss wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.

It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as…

You don't have to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation, especially not if we're talking about dollar amounts. Credit card transactions work exactly the same as 0-conf, and we seem to accept them just fine.

> Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable.

Which happens at around 20 MB. Improvements like Graphene, Xthinner and blocktorrent will drastically reduce the orphan rate allowing for much bigger blocks to be propagated fast enough for the orphan rates to not climb in a relevant fashion.

> Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.

Or Bitcoin needs many more lower fee transactions to compensate. In a couple of decades.

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

#194

Post by PeterStuer » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:52 AM UTC

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…

I do not agree with your premise. The amounts that companies make of blatantly selling out your data to be abused is often much lower than I would be willing to pay. I pay for YouTube Premium primarily to get rid of the adds. I stopped using Facebook in 2017, but if I used it I would gladly pay the single digit dollars per year they seemed to make of me.

Now where i do agree is that even with people paying for content and services directly, advertizing would creep back in, because it would always be a potential supplementary revenue stream just sitting there tempting the content or service providers. This is where we need strong regulation such as the GDPR enforced to stem this general race to the bottom.

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

#195

Post by lawn » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:54 AM UTC

FreeHugs wrote: post #8

BubRoss wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.

The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more: 1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. 2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy. 3: It is less private then cash. 4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.

> You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.

Users don't have a problem installing apps on their phone.

The rest are valid problems, with #2 and #4 being directly linked to low adoption.

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

#196

Post by buboard » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:00 AM UTC

Want to help publishers? Fund a competitor to google that either doesnt track users, or does it in an ethical way. With monopolistic google disappointing both advertisers and publishers by raising prices and keeping most of the profit, there is an opportunity in the market that wasn't there 10 years ago when most of their competitors gave up.

Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures, and publishers in particular cannot escape that.

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

#197

Post by zamfi » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:04 AM UTC

buboard wrote: post #196

Want to help publishers? Fund a competitor to google that either doesnt track users, or does it in an ethical way. With monopolistic google disappointing both advertisers and publishers by raising prices and keeping most of the profit, there is an opportunity in the market that wasn't there 10 years ago when most of their competitors gave up. Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas,…

> Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today's regulatory and fee structures [...]

Can you say more about this?

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

#198

Post by noxer » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #75

droffel wrote: post #6

Earlier 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)

Forget Monero it can't scale for micro payment. Currently it does like 1 Tx every few seconds. We can assume it could handle a few Tx per seconds. And with proper hardware upgrade it could probably handle some dozen Tx per second. Anyway all of that is far far away for usable if people want to do micro payments to websites they read.

Stellar is way faster the XRPL even more so (1500Tx/s) but even then it can not be used to stream money. You dot want to go to a site and instantly donate 0.001cent you want to donate only if the content is good and the best way to measure that is by time. Hence Coil steams the money as long as you are on the site. That only works trough ILP not direly on ledger (on-chain). IPL can stream money from any kind of wallet. So it would work with Monero as well but its unlikely to gain traction as its key feature (anonymous) is rather useless in this case. and Tx are slow and expensive compared to XLM or XRP.

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

#199

Post by buboard » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #181

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…

> [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets] Assuming you meant all spending, this cannot be true, because all marketing budgets are paid out of people's spending. You are paying for advertisements, they are included in prices of goods and services you buy.

marketing pays itself to an extent through increased revenue and scale. Historically, companies have spent more or less the same percentage of their revenue on marketing. It seems they find an equilibrium

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

#200

Post by meerita » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #123

meerita wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who’s doing that? And nobody needs to tell anyone else why they should or shouldn’t do something. Everyone can make their own way and living.

Sure. I never put that power of choice. I was just stating my opinion. The market will regulate everything without us stopping others to keep doing things for ads.