Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.
Welcome to the ad-free internet
21–30 of 334 posts
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#22Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off.
The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.
The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.
One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#23Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
I dream of the day that I can pay 0.25 to read just one WSJ or NYT or WP article that I found interesting. I think they don't want to do this though. Not because it is not possible.. but because they prefer that I get the whole darn thing AND consume the ads (or at least that's what they tell their advertisers).
They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#24This is nothing new but the article hits hard. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is after my attention but a good chunk of the economy seems to depend on it. There has to be a better future than this?
The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody is on my bike ride grabbing my attention, and at least for now, my DAW is safe
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#25Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
There have been various attempts to do this but no network effect has been large enough to make it work. And by network, I mainly mean you’d need a network of popular sites to get it started.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#26The ads would disappear if people rejected the services and sites showing a crazy amount of ads. I haven't seen an ad for more than a decade because I curated my devices around ad blocking. I still don't understand the fight against ads. Do not use social media already and use adblockers for YouTube and Twitter. People do not know how to use the internet and still use the services which means they are okay with the ads. They are not bothered. It is not our problem to solve other's problems if these are not problems to them. Similar to cigarette smoking.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.
Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol
Right. I've been a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud for almost 10 years now - which means I've paid them upwards of $6,000 by now - even though I only use 3 programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) and even then I only really use base-level functionality that's been present in those titles long before they became subscription-only: if it weren't for (normal and understandable) platform-obsolescence (high-DPI support, support for new formats/codecs, etc) then I'd still be happy with a boxed edition of Creative Suite I could have bought for $1200[1] back in 2013
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130808023019/http://www.amazon...
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#28Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off. The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who'v…
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.
Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.
I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.
FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…
Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.
For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#29Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
They probably have some success with the subscription model, because there are probably people who want to read the Economist to get a competitive edge in their business (owners, investors, etc.) They probably haven't even considered that most people who bounce off of their paywall are not just cheapskate version of these owner/investor types, but are an entirely new class of user that they could monetize if they could provide the right payment structure.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#30People access a webpage for content, not noise.
Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people.
Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise.
Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone will be happy.
Paywalls might work for some, but the key here is being ethical. Respecting the user.
The user will reward you if you respect it. It may even respect the brands that respect its attention.
As with everything, the problem here is greed. I wish more ads were respectful. I would take them more seriously if they were.