Live data from Hacker News

100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

foundation.mozilla.org

251–260 of 277 posts

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

#251
post #244

Couldn't have they used that money to make Firefox consume less battery on mobile? At least on par with Chrome?

Funded by coil

It's true that the money is not coming from the Mozilla Foundation, but as Coil is trusting the foundation with 100 M$ to make good use, the foundation could have asked 'hey, how about some money (from the 100 M$ or not) for our software, since it's what we are primarily known for?'

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

#252
post #243
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'm not going to pay for every stupid little thing I do on the internet. And I'm sure there have been attempts at stuff like this, but who really wants this? I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc. I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when…

> when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.

Do you feel this way about using the toaster, shower, every light switch, turning on the TV, marginal usage of rechargeable electronics, etc? You already make "micropayments" for a million tiny, less-discrete usages of electricity, but have learned to adapt to only getting feedback and adjusting usage at a monthly cadence. Why do you assume this couldn't also be the case for Internet usage?

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

#253
Back in the early days of the internet I used to believe that monetization, or micropayments, was one of the key unsolved problems. Now I'm starting to wonder if it is the problem, that monetization is the root of all evil on the internet, such as advertising and limbic capitalism, social media and surveillance capitalism, the spammers and scammers and cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, the re-intermediation of new monopolies, and so on. Maybe it would be better if people were still working on free content for love not for money, and/or working on sites and apps that provide a useful service in return for a simple subscription or fee.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is doing exactly this with BAT on Ethereum but automating the whole thing. You can donate to any website, but you'll also auto-contribute if you choose to have that enabled.

I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.

Major publishers are already in bed with Apple News, which is preinstalled on iPhones and iPads. Brave is my goto mobile browser, but it's slow on desktop and its market share is practically zero.

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

#255
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc. The economics would be better with a stored balance…

> Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. You're off by a factor of ten here, it would be 4.5 cents, not half a cent.

I certainly am! Unfortunately, it's too late to edit to show what I meant.

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

#256
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.

Major publishers are already in bed with Apple News, which is preinstalled on iPhones and iPads. Brave is my goto mobile browser, but it's slow on desktop and its market share is practically zero.

Yah been thinking about trying Apple news. Brave browser really isn’t taking off, that’s why plugins for chrome, Firefox, safari would be better.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

About $50/month for a family plan should be fine for a completely add free internet. How that fee is distributed across the different sites I visit is an administrative issue.

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

#258

Some seriously over-engineered solutions being offered in this thread, which I guess is understandable considering the cohort. And I'm glad that people smarter than me are looking at this from every angle. But here are the things that I know/feel to be true: 1) Back when advertising subsidised content was a straight up proposition nobody really minded about ads outside of finding them mildly annoying. It's how the mo…

I agree with many things except point 2)

> 2) What most irks people about the current ad-tech based business model isn't the advertising, it's the data mining behind it.

I think most people are not even aware of some bigger implications of data mining except some banners following them for months. After being irked with generation of popup ads that you have to chase buttons to close it now most are irked with ads that autoplay video, sound and you cannot easily stop it. We are also irked with all those ads tracking technology eating lots of your ram and cpu power - modern websites are excessively fat and bloated mostly because of all those tracking scripts.

There is also another problem that ads business model generates - lower quality content, fake news, clickbait headlines, articles that stimulate flame wars, youtubers talking taking about something for 15 minutes even though you could summarize it in 1 min, game devs designing addictive games for kids. Basically fighting for your eyeballs time, keeping you glued to the screen as long as possible. This is not scalable because time you have during the day (24h) is fixed and wastes lots of people time that they could be use to make something more productive with their life.

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

#259
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can reallocate. Only top tier brands use ads, and the price of the advertising is part of the premium you pay for the brand name. For a lot of products, there's no functional difference with their cheaper alternatives. So, this brand premium is in fact discretionary spending that you could reallocate.

This is kind of an academic point. "Reshaping the economics of the web" probably shouldn't involve assuming all consumers will want to change what brand of laundry detergent they buy so they can read more blogs.

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

#260
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 think Twitter is missing out on a big opportunity for micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. More content from more content creators would also attract more users. Content stealing and reposting would be a bigger problem, but you can somewhat address it with text and image match…

For Twitter there are bots for various cryptocurrencies which you can mention in an answer to a tweet, leading to the original tweeter's wallet being filled. Unfortunately most systems are not decentralized (custodial cryptocurrency wallets) and of course there's no consensus on using a single cryptocurrency.
Post reply on HN