181–190 of 201 posts
I have been using Contributor for a while and I am extremely excited about it. No more can you claim to be the product, you're the customer, bidding against the ad networks to show your own ads to yourself. Just brilliant.
On the surface this sounds great, but I also get the feeling this is solving a problem that doesn't exist. The billions of website that exist on the web should be proof of that.
This looks interesting. Not sure who would be putting money into this, to be honest, but it seems like a fair idea since there are so many companies out there asking for donations to keep running. I can imagine someone like Wikipedia making a small fortune off of this if it takes off.
Google would like everyone's donations to be exclusively given to sites that use Google ads and not to sites that forgo advertising like Wikipedia.
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…
Google wants the power to tell sites that they have to use Google ads before they can get these Contributor donations. That's the whole point. So it will only hurt honorable sites like Wikipedia that forgo ads.
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Sure, but what effect does that "experiment" have on the other companies that are dedicated to the idea? It doesn't matter what Google calls it. Google could crush those companies and still eventually consider this opportunity too small to be worth their while.
Hmm, then what can Google experiment with that doesn't carry the risk of harming a preexisting smaller company? I guess only things like self-driving cars that nobody else is doing?
Examples:
Could they really not have transformed Google Reader into something valuable?
Did they really promote Google Wallet for Digital Goods sufficiently to expect any sort of success from it? (I used it and the UX and fees were the best around; promotion was non-existent)
Did Google Helpouts get enough of a push, either?
This new thing is great if Google are going to get behind it and stick with it until it's successful. Their current track-record suggests that they will not.
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…
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.
Is 1-3$ enough? If we had to invoice "the internet" and OSS to users instead of financing it with ads, wouldn't it require something starting above 1. $40/month for the charity websites and 2. $600 per machine (the equivalent of the cost of Windows) for OSS software?
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Yes, please. Because they seem to be one of the few companies who make things that don't suck .
That's subjective. I don't recall a single product from them that came after search and didn't suck. But the real problem with them is these solutions are being pushed down people throats whether they like it or not similar to what Microsoft was doing in the 90s. This is just another example.
No one seems to do any kind of pushing. You're free to not use GMail or Google Maps or whatever; people use it because it sucks less than alternatives.
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> 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 real…