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Welcome to the ad-free internet

economist.com

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Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#41

Post by scrollaway »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #28
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FedNow is helping a lot, but adoption takes time. The middlemen's APIs have to adopt it, test it, then the tools that use the APIs have to do their own round of that, then the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to design, develop and deploy the new features, then the users of the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to adopt those new features, and then you have adoption.

You can see it in action. Plaid for example: https://plaid.com/blog/get-access-to-the-fednow-service-via-...

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#42

Post by fastest963 »

alex_young wrote: post #21

Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.

Genuinely curious what you do when a site asks you to turn off your adblocker? PiHole doesn't have an option to whitelist an individual site like an extension does. Do you just leave the site or do you temporarily turn off PiHole?

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#43

Post by solardev »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #22
littlefish444 wrote: post #9

Does 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…

This doesn't seem that hard to get around, with a bunch of $0.99 games and in-app purchases on mobile stores. iTunes did it too with songs, before Spotify took over. Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month. If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#44

Post by [deleted] »

gmuslera wrote: post #8

Good luck with that. The ones that can afford an ad-free internet are the same group as the ones that can afford the product you are trying to sell. Promoted links, selection/ordering of posts and other mechanisms will be use to lead ad-free people to the ads, in ways that won't look like ads. It's like gravity, there are forces in play that will make things end in the same way.

[deleted]

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#45

Post by wolverine876 »

fastest963 wrote: post #31
littlefish444 wrote: post #9

Does 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…

This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with…

Brave, the browser, started with some cryptocurrency micropayment idea. What happened to it?

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#47

Post by littlefish444 »

fastest963 wrote: post #31
littlefish444 wrote: post #9

Does 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…

This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with…

Hmm interesting.

But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?

It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it). The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#48

Post by marcus_holmes »

Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed.

Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.

Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet

#49

Post by homefree »

littlefish444 wrote: post #9

Does 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 don't want this - it creates very bad incentives around even more engagement bait crap except now I'm directly funding stuff that pulls my attention before I can even tell if it's garbage.

I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.

Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.

The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.

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