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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

#211

Post by executesorder66 »

tqi wrote: post #57
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If online advertising went away overnight I'd extend that to all advertising and I think we might be out of this mess permanently. It seems like an insane concept, because advertising is a part of modern life, but I think it's the only way to effectively kill the surveillance/influence peddling hydra. Otherwise, all these efforts just redirect ad dollars to other forms of systems of influence which may be similarly a…

What counts as advertising?

Everyone can have their own definition, and allow me to present my own.

Advertising is any unsolicited communication about a product/service.

That covers ads on webpages, billboards, TV ads, radio ads, youtube ads, someone yelling at you in the street about their product/service.

I didn't look for that info, so I don't want it. You and your product/service can fuck off.

"Advertising" that I do not object to is where the "customer" actually looked for it. Here are some examples of that: Displaying a list of products/services that you provide on your _own_ website that people can look for. Entries in the Yellow pages or something similar. Like for example (unpaid) search results.

If I am looking for a plumber, then I can look in the Yellow pages and see a list. And I won't get pissed off because it's what I wanted. Or I can google plumbers, and get a list of websites in the search results, and then click on the links and view their websites where they describe their products/services. I also won't get pissed off by this, because I was looking for it and no one shoved it down my throat.

I agree with AndrewKemendo that advertising (as I have described above) is insane and needs to go away. It has no place in a civilized society. There is literally no difference between advertising (as per my definition) and spam. I would go so far as to call it harassment.

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

#212

Post by brillout »

frogpelt wrote: post #122

I wonder if a Spotify for the Internet would work. Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage. Mozilla would be in a good position to introduce that type of service and track consumption.

This would be so neat but a problem is how do you distribute money in a fair way to creators? Spotify can give X dollars to a song author for each minute a user has listened to his song. You cannot easily do that with web content.

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

#213

Post by dalbasal »

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…

You are assuming that any effort will be trying to break the advertising paradigm in favour of a direct payment one.

The article/grant doesn't seem to be about that. Whatever the business model, this seems to be more about breaking platform capture than breaking business model. The alphabook platforms particularly.

Ultimately it's a big field. We have direct payment models (netflix, spotify, iTunes, kindle...), ad-suported models and quite a lot of online content production where monetisation is secondary to distribution.

I think it's a good time for this initiative. YouTubers (for example) with millions viewers can (a) make very little money (b) chaffe at various policies, either money or content related and (c) generally have far less power vis-a-vis alphabook than their audience size implies.

Meanwhile, podcasts, a much freer medium, is both more profitable and quality oriented because of the platform openness.

...open doesn't mean no advertising. The main thing it means is decentralised, or centered around content creators.

This a a good idea. YouTube is no longer necessary. If it suddenly disappeared, online video content would quickly recover fully around alternatives. They contribute the least value while extracting the most.

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

#214

Post by troydavis »

noxer wrote: post #207
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…

I’m not and don’t claim to be an expert. That’s one reason I don’t have (and didn’t give) an opinion about the lawsuit.

Regarding the lack of an ICO, you’re correct. Others have called XRP a perpetual coin offering[1] since Ripple clearly raised money from investors, but you’re correct that’s not an ICO by name.

The rest of my comment was just direct citations, so direct your sarcasm at them.

[1]: “Ripple Hit With Class-Action Suit Over ‘Never Ending ICO’”: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-04/ripple-hi...

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

#215

Post by rjtavares »

wutbrodo wrote: post #149
dangrossman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Tide pods and Toyota SUVs > eating and driving to work. This confused me for a second before I realized it was intentional. Good one

Inserting humour in a HN comment and making it highly upvoted is an artform in itself.

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

#216

Post by Schoolmeister »

aurbano wrote: post #209
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…

Even though it isn't without controversy, Brave browser has this exact feature through use of its BAT token [1].

Basically, you earn BAT either by directly depositing money into your wallet, or by viewing "privacy respecting ads" (herein lies part of the controversy), which let you earn 70% of the ad revenue as BAT. These tokens are then distributed over the content creators who have signed up for the program. The exact distribution depends on how much attention you gave each creator.

[1] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

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

#217

Post by philipps »

I can’t help but think that this is an example of jumping to the wrong solution too quickly. Is the problem that the web doesn’t contain as much high-quality content anymore as before; or that independent content providers are having a hard time making a living. I don’t enjoy the web as much as I used to, but I am pretty sure that in the early days almost nobody was making money off the content they created. So maybe the problem is discoverability rather than compensation. It would be helpful to see a little more of the analysis that Mozilla has done to define the problem.

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

#218

Post by jameshart »

bill_rr wrote: post #80
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 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.

I think you’re right, there is definitely room for consumer-funded content in the market - and I wish you the best in your endeavors.

But I think suggesting an ad-free future is a leap, not least because paid content platforms need to do marketing. Why do you have a Netflix subscription? Because you heard they had some good shows? how do you know what shows they have before you subscribe?

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

#219

Post by mcv »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #164
sebastos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all just spending though. Tide is trying to get you to pay a little extra for the name brand over the generic. Instead of a Toyota SUV you could have picked up a used beater - or kept driving the car you have for a few more thousand miles. Netflix wants you to shell out extra "discretionary" money to watch some TV shows you don't need to see. And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money t…

I think on demand TV works great, you want to watch a movie hit the remote and the cost will be part of your monthly bill. If something similar existed for the web it would be great

I think the big thing is trust in the market. Consumers tend to be conservative in which parts of the market they trust. They don't want to pay for something if they have no idea if they're going to get their money's worth. With existing markets, or any market that lots of people are using, people trust that it's okay so they join. With something new, are you going to pay money to access something if you don't know if it's any good? Moving towards free+ads is always easier than towards payment up front.

That said, Netflix is incredibly successful with something new, but that also took years. Netflix worked hard on the reputation that they had the best, most interesting new TV shows that you couldn't get anywhere else. But it takes years to overcome that inertia.

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

#220

Post by mcv »

danShumway wrote: post #154
dangrossman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think advertising increases discretionary spending, it just redirects it.

When smoking ads were banned, profits for cigarette companies went up, because they didn't have to spend money on marketing anymore. Addicts still kept buying them anyway. Previously, smoking ads were to get people to buy your brand rather than some competing brand.

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