> Believe it or not, the Content Services team at Mozilla is thinking about way more than just "plunking ads into Firefox". Like, what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large, and browsers themselves offered built-in mechanisms to support advertising that respect privacy & performance? Yeah, that's a bit of a change from browsers' traditional neutrality. But, it could be a better deal for publishers and users together.
I'm curious as to how that could ever be done. I feel that it's almost impossible without somehow getting user information. I feel the trend is that ads are going to continue to be tuned to people and aspects about them. Maybe fully homomorphic encryption can do that without violating privacy but that's a long way off.
> Here's another idea: Almost a year ago, I heard the notion of "Subscribe 2 Web" at Mozilla. The gist is that you're worth about $6.20 per month across publishers via advertising revenues. What if you paid that much into an account yourself every month and used a mechanism built into your browser to distribute that money? Yeah, it's micropayments, but I find it interesting that these folks came up with a specific dollar amount that doesn't sound terrible.
It exists. It's called Contributor by Google: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/. If anybody needs an invite please let me know.