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
It's highly dependent on implementation. It's too much mental load to determine if that article you just read is worth $0.02 or not. Brave has a model where creators are automatically tipped, based on usage, which makes more sense imo.
why is that different from say...a movie youre going rent on apple TV or in the theater?
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…
You're just reinforcing the point that we're in too deep for it to be a comfortable transition.
Not really. I understand your complaint, but what you're saying would kill entrepreneurship. How else can companies compete if they're not even allowed to go 'hey, I think we've got a better solution at a lower price'.
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta The gp post is correct. When given the option between an ad, adblock, or tipping, people overwhelmingly choose option #1 or #2. They then complain about ads, if they chose #1, and about adblock naggers, if they chose #2. And, of course, all three sets of people lose their mind when they run into a paywall. There is no non-legislative solution to this problem.
Google contributor most likely was a failure because they didn't do anything about promoting it. I only learned about it on hn and after it was already dead.
Here's an idea that just came to me. Feel free to shoot holes in it. It's based on my assumption that users do prefer things without ads, and might want to pay for it. So how about a search engine where, if you pay for it, it ranks sites without ads at the top. And if you click a link to an ad-less site, that site gets some of the money you paid to the search engine. Maybe combine it with a social network that works…
A major question, for me, is: how does it get started? What would motivate someone to create a website without ads, for the purposes of what you're suggesting, when the scheme is in its infancy? What would motivate a website to remove ads, when the scheme is in its infancy?
Plenty of websites already have no ads. Wikipedia, for example. Many blogs too.
But even with ads, you'll still be listed. But ad-free sites get a higher ranking, making that a more viable decision for some.
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's not exactly how it works. I don't price my products depending on marketing. Marketing is a % of my profit I'm willing to spend, to try new things.
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.
I can't forego buying food and housing and medication so that I can reallocate "what I pay for advertisements" to tipping websites. If there's less advertising inventory available on websites, P&G is going to reallocate that spend to some other form of advertising, they're not going to drop the price of the shampoo and toilet paper I buy from them. The money's not in my pocket to spend, it's in theirs.
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 conten…
Facebook's ad revenue for 2018 was $55.8 billion from 2.7 billion MAU. That means each user is worth $20.67 per year. In reality, not all users are worth the same, and as an English speaker, you're probably worth at least double the average. So, figure $40 a year to remove ads from Facebook, not single digits. Now what about the other 10,000 websites you touch each month?
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.
Most marketing is for necessities, to steer which brand you decide to buy, not to make you buy a category of product you wouldn't buy otherwise. You need soap, they just want it to be Dawn soap. You need laundry detergent, they just want it to be Tide detergent. Etc etc. You're not going to stop buying food, soap, medication, gas, etc so that you can direct that money to tipping websites instead.
This is the same as saying "Define Pornography." You're asking for a bulletproof formula that doesn't exist. That doesn't mean we can't take a pretty good bite out of it. How about this: Any action taken by an individual or organization with the intent of influencing another individual to execute a commercial transaction. No billboards, TV commercials, newspaper advertisements, hyperbolic statements about products. I…
Without a formal definition it's impossible to legislate or enforce.
Take HN - arguably this whole forum is an ad for YC. Would this fall under your definition?
A major question, for me, is: how does it get started? What would motivate someone to create a website without ads, for the purposes of what you're suggesting, when the scheme is in its infancy? What would motivate a website to remove ads, when the scheme is in its infancy?
Plenty of websites already have no ads. Wikipedia, for example. Many blogs too. But even with ads, you'll still be listed. But ad-free sites get a higher ranking, making that a more viable decision for some.
That doesn't matter unless the existing pool of ad-free sites can supply good results for a reasonable proportion of the actual web searches being performed. I doubt very much it can.
For the idea to work it'd mean that there'd b incentive to have a website on a particular topic be ad-free vs ad-based competitors. How does that incentive start in the first place?