171–180 of 201 posts
That's probably not what Google has in mind, though. This presumably requires that the user have a Google account and be logged into Google to get ad blocking. So Google gets to snoop on the user and sell the information they collect.
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…
It would probably be easy to distinguish between the paying visitors and the regular ones. So you can also show paying visitors more content?
What would the Googlebot do with that?
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.
So, this is the opposite of people paying to reduce ads. This is actually a scheme to promote more ads.
People who want to donate to creative work should donate to projects that treat us well by forgoing ads and privacy-invading tracking. Google Contributor is a donation system exclusively for projects that engage in these anti-features. It's a ransom / pay-to-stop-being-annoyed, which means it is rewarding sites for annoying you in the first place.
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…
Patreon really has been fantastic for individuals and small groups whom people actively want to support. From tons of small creators paying their rent to the bigger successes like Jim Sterling and RedLetterMedia. This seems targeted at larger, semi-faceless websites which may only be able to survive with tiny contributions from a mass audience. Imgur is probably the best example of that; it's infrastructure that peop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Manually donating is indeed a problem, but if you want to send a subscription donation, you don't need Google Contributor. And anyway, you should donate to the sites that forgo ads in the first place — they are the ones that deserve it.
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
Or exactly like Gratipay (formerly gittip) https://gratipay.com/
Finally someone took the initiative. I guess I'm glad that it's a company as big as Google. There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
This severely breaks down when you find a site you disagree with. Say you go on some anti-vaccines blog just to find after reading through a bunch of articles that they are a part of this program. Can you take your money back? Or what about a political campaign site for your rival? Or the Westboro Baptist clan?