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

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

#201

Post by noxer » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #27

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.…

I mean just buying something without giving them your email or filling out a ton of fields would remove a ton of friction. I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.

You have to register at Coil.com You pay with CC or whatever you like to Coil. Your browsers streams money as soon as you visit a site that implements web monetization over IPL. The site doesn't need any info from you it has the address to stream to in the HTML of the site. So your payment is theoretically anonymous ofc the site can still see your IP, fingerprint your browser etc.

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

#202

Post by buboard » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:15 AM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #197

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?

having thousands of customers paying $0.1 per day is a huge accounting hassle. Trying to account e.g. for EU VAT is a maze of galactic proportions for a small startup. So you 'll need an intermediary who will get a cut of that income. And then you 'll occasionally be getting weird looks from banks because apparently that business model looks suspicious ( i've had my bank deny me services because we do virtual currency sales in game - through an intermediary).

There is also no frictionless way to do it: payments should ideally be integrated in browsers, and people should be able to pay anonymously by preloading their browser with small chunks of money, again anonymously. Maybe there is a way to make this mechanism both anonymous and legal (for tax purposes) , but i don't think anyone has cracked that yet.

Advertising circumvents all these requirements, and creates an indirect channel that transfers value from the user to the publisher. And advertising is here to stay: businesses always have and always will will keep spending a similar % of revenues for advertising. It's not advertising that's wrong with the internet, it's tracking.

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

#203

Post by diffeomorphism » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:18 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,…

Would 100 million be anywhere remotely close to enough for that?

Bing, with all the money and power of MS behind it, has about 5% market share. Yahoo has about 2% market share. Baidu has about 15% but also total assets of 40 Billion US Dollars.

> The best ideas

What are those?

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

#204

Post by reubenmorais » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

carapace wrote: post #121

sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super ironic too, considering they are working on blocking in-page JS popups like this and there's an addon to report them. https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter

Also ironic asking for donations on a post about giving away $100,000,000.

The funding comes from Coil.

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

#205

Post by buboard » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

diffeomorphism wrote: post #203

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,…

Would 100 million be anywhere remotely close to enough for that? Bing, with all the money and power of MS behind it, has about 5% market share. Yahoo has about 2% market share. Baidu has about 15% but also total assets of 40 Billion US Dollars. > The best ideas What are those?

> Would 100 million be anywhere remotely close to enough for that?

I think money is not the biggest hurdle. The problem with most ad networks is they copy google: most of the adsense alternatives for example are simply googles's ad partners that use google's ad exchanges. I think the ad space instead needs a "stripe for ads", a company that will quickly catch up with what publishers want, create solutions and push advertisers to use them.

The alternative ideas include anonymous micropauyments.

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

#206

Post by manigandham » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:28 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #153

manigandham wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if that actually happened, but the comment was that ad blocking could do it.

In reality, ad-blocking is already priced in and slowly being recovered. All it did was create a new addressable segment of tech-savvy/ad-resistant consumers. The slack is now recovered in first-party walled-garden platforms, native advertising, "influencer" and other underground techniques.

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

#207

Post by noxer » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:30 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…

Ripple never had an ICO - check your facts

Ripple doesn't hold 60% they hold 50%

The purpose of the 50% they still hold is public know since the very first days. They SHOULD use it to push the adoption of the XRP Ledger. Period. People hate Ripple for selling/donating their XRPs, funding great stuff like Coil with it that obviously somehow uses XRP but that is exactly what they HAVE to do. Heck the whole company was made for that. The XRPL devs made a better Bitcoin and wanted it to be used. How evil from them. /s

The whole security thing is nonsense. Someone bought XRP high and sold low got made and sued. Pathetic. He didn't even bought them from Ripple.

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

#208

Post by airnomad » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

They would do better if they spent 100M on ads to promote Firefox downloads.

Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you'll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose.

And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc.

What's going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn't mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions.

But the trouble is - they don't have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.

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

#209

Post by aurbano » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

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.…

I started working on this exactly 2 weeks ago, so was pretty surprised to see this post by mozilla just now!

Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea)

Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!

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

#210

Post by hutzlibu » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 9:35 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #110

hutzlibu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it not adress it? It is also about changing the mindset of people. Make it easier -> make it more common to voluntarily pay for thing you value -> more projects are financed that way -> more people see it is a way to make a living -> better content -> more people willing to pay, especially seeing the difference to normal ad madness

Nothing in that feedback loop will allow people to spend money they don't have. A big chunk of the money you spend on groceries, car payments, insurance, medication, etc is going into those companies' marketing budgets, and that ends up as the ad revenue that finances the web today. You don't have that money to give to website owners directly instead, as you've already spent it on those goods.

Marketing makes people buy plenty of things they don't really need nor want. If people choose not to be exposed to tailored ads so much, they would have this money to spend for other things, like paying directly to support what thes want and not the long route indirectly and ineffectivly via ads.