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Google Contributor

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Re: Google Contributor

#151

Post by hayksaakian »

foxylad wrote: post #100
egypturnash wrote: post #60

A fraction of $3/mo? From a company that abandons projects left and right? I'll stick to Patreon, thanks. I'm making about $800 on a productive month now despite there being a pretty small audience for comics about a lesbian robot with PKD problems. I set "no ads for anyone" as my goal for like $50/p, which was still making far more than I ever did from ad impressions. Most people only contribute a buck or so a page…

Horses for courses - for high volume sites this would be awesome. My immediate thought was "Great - at last Wikipedia can get rid of the annual begging bowl". It could also be a great solution to the news site paywall debate. I'd love to seamlessly reward the sites I visit often, and if Google can automate this, more power to their elbow. Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their adve…

here is a comparable data point:

twitch.tv (video game live streaming website) pays it's broadcasters with advertisements and user subscriptions (50/50 default split on subs)

many broadcasters earn more from their subscriptions (dedicated fans) than advertisements.

with increasing use of ad-blocking software, this seems like the right time for this sort of thing.

Re: Google Contributor

#152

Post by richdougherty »

fenomas wrote: post #145
egypturnash wrote: post #60

A fraction of $3/mo? From a company that abandons projects left and right? I'll stick to Patreon, thanks. I'm making about $800 on a productive month now despite there being a pretty small audience for comics about a lesbian robot with PKD problems. I set "no ads for anyone" as my goal for like $50/p, which was still making far more than I ever did from ad impressions. Most people only contribute a buck or so a page…

I could be missing something but this seems orthogonal to Patreon. Patreon is great specifically for things that aren't meant to generate lots of pageviews, and thus could never get by with ads. This seems more like a "like ads but better" thing. Google appears to be saying, "Until now, you paid the advertiser by buying their products, they paid us, and we paid the websites. Let's keep doing that, except without the…

This would benefit me, because I don't want to see ads, but I also want to support the sites I visit. At the moment I block ads but I feel bad about it.

Manually donating to each site isn't realistic given human psychology; people simply won't do it. Something more automatic is better, even if it's not perfect. So I really like the idea.

Downsides for me:

- only works for sites with Google ads on them, not for other ad networks or for sites that want to be ad-free

- tracking presumably still happens; it would be nicer if there was some sort of protocol to automatically pay sites anonymously

Re: Google Contributor

#153

Post by egypturnash »

Touche wrote: post #108
egypturnash wrote: post #60

A fraction of $3/mo? From a company that abandons projects left and right? I'll stick to Patreon, thanks. I'm making about $800 on a productive month now despite there being a pretty small audience for comics about a lesbian robot with PKD problems. I set "no ads for anyone" as my goal for like $50/p, which was still making far more than I ever did from ad impressions. Most people only contribute a buck or so a page…

Link?

Http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/

Re: Google Contributor

#154

Post by karmacondon »

Honest question: Do online ads have any redeeming value?

No one seems to have anything nice to say about them. Ever. I can only recall two or maybe three times when I've clicked on an ad, and even then I can't remember what they were for. The only ads that have any real utility for me are television commercials that are particularly funny/quotable or remind me that a tv show is coming back on the air.

Can anyone report a single positive experience with online advertising?

Re: Google Contributor

#155

Post by rdl »

This feels like something Google will abandon in 3 years tops, probably more like 1-2 years. I wonder how projects like this work within Google -- is it a reward given to someone who has an idea and has done something great in the past, or is this a curse if you're an engineer and get assigned to what seems like an obviously stillborn thing?

Re: Google Contributor

#156

Post by vo8nur »

jonnat wrote: post #149

I'm truly trying and failing not to see this as an opportunity to pay $3/mo to give Google the right to track and record all my web visits. I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And…

There's a reason mozilla switched to yahoo - Google refused to honor do not track and live up to mozilla's privacy standards. This fits into their tracking strategy and they'll also likely get a big cut being the middle-man.

I've lost a lot of respect for google in general, going from innovator to me-too copy-cat in everything from social media (G+) to cloud computing (GCE).

Re: Google Contributor

#157

Post by _delirium »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
dpweb wrote: post #36

At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet. I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular…

> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet. I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way. There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick…

> I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.

I think it's a mixed bag on that front: we owe some good sites, but also a big part of web spam, to the fact that people believe they can make money through "internet content creation". Beyond the outright spam (content farms, linkspam, etc.) there's also a lot of really low-quality content put online primarily motivated by a hope of pulling in ad revenue.

Re: Google Contributor

#158

Post by darkmighty »

dr4g0n wrote: post #4

So this seems like an automatic version of flattr[1], except you get the perk of no adverts in return. What I wonder though is: what happens if I visit a site that I don't want to support? Can I say no? Otherwise this just invites clickbait even more. [1]: https://flattr.com/howflattrworks

Wouldn't you be providing ad revenue anyway?

A way for this to work would be simply whitelisting sites you want to support on your adblocker of choice.

Re: Google Contributor

#159

Post by boozelclark »

I would love to see something like this for the actual software that runs the web. Things like OpenSSL, PGP, FessBSD and the other critical software that makes it all possible but almost all users will never visit there webpages. There would need to be some other way to allocate the funds, maybe by checking some form of header metadata to see what software websites are built on.

Re: Google Contributor

#160

Post by cpeterso »

karmacondon wrote: post #154

Honest question: Do online ads have any redeeming value? No one seems to have anything nice to say about them. Ever. I can only recall two or maybe three times when I've clicked on an ad, and even then I can't remember what they were for. The only ads that have any real utility for me are television commercials that are particularly funny/quotable or remind me that a tv show is coming back on the air. Can anyone repo…

The only time I've (purposely) clicked on an ad was in Feedly. With all the feeds their users are subscribed to, Feedly have must a very detailed profiles.
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