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Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

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Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#411

Post by supercanuck »

manigandham wrote: post #400
supercanuck wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are stretching the definition of the word free. Me looking at something is not a form of payment. The payment is coming from the advertiser. The advertiser is paying the content producer, THAT is the business transaction. Whether I choose to view the ad and make those advertisements have value is not my concern. Those ads are the REAL value and worthy of my payment. Otherwise viewing the NYT is like watch…

Your attention (via looking or interacting) is the form of payment. This attention is given to the advertisers who pay the publishers who produce the content. If you went elsewhere, there's no issue. But when you breakdown the billboard and still see the sunset (assuming the sunset is copyrighted and original content) then you're changing the value exchange unfairly.

You can't feed a family on people viewing stuff. Money needs to change hands. The billboard operator charges the advertiser. There is no obligation on the part of the viewer to look at anything.

Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo.

The content providers are selling real estate. Thats it.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#412

Post by austenallred »

ergothus wrote: post #405
untog wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those organisations have paywalls, yes, but they still depend overwhelmingly on ads for funding. If they lost it all tomorrow their paywall earnings would come nowhere near filling that hole. And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.

...and having online ads didn't improve the reporting, so it earns me no particular allegiance to maintaining the status quo.

If they didn't have online ads they would pretty much be out of business and there would be no reporting.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#413

Post by untog »

ergothus wrote: post #405
untog wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those organisations have paywalls, yes, but they still depend overwhelmingly on ads for funding. If they lost it all tomorrow their paywall earnings would come nowhere near filling that hole. And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.

...and having online ads didn't improve the reporting, so it earns me no particular allegiance to maintaining the status quo.

I don't really understand the point you're making here. Who suggested having ads improved the reporting? It made the reporting available to you at a lower (or free) price.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#414

Post by mikekchar »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #255
austenallred wrote: post #46

I've been a contributor member for several months now, because I firmly believe in two things: 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better. So here's what people need to know about Google contributor: 1. I pay for the highest level available. 2. I love not seeing ads. 3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common…

> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to ea…

I tend to agree with you. Of course I started using the internet in the late 80s. At that time, the absolute best things on the internet were Usenet FAQs. These days it is really hard to find things of that quality because you are overrun with people trying to make a buck.

I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)

And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).

The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.

I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#415

Post by jkaunisv1 »

jsnell wrote: post #149
elorant wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why on earth are you going to those sites? I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other. That's literally what this is. No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us…

No, it's the model where Google is giving money to the sites you visit, in proportion to the level you visit them. Since you claim not to visit the sites that are "shitty content creators", you're not going to be supporting them in any way. So what exactly is your real objection? Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the…

Well, I'm just one person, but: I pay for my email on Fastmail, I buy all the games (largely indie) I play through HumbleBundles or Steam, I donate to streamers on Twitch, I buy print copies & merch direct from comic artists I found online, and I buy music from bandcamp. I'm planning on supporting a number of artists on Patreon as well. I go meet those creators at cons and form a personal connection. Those are the content creators I want to keep alive.

I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.

If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#416

Post by jacques_chester »

dragonwriter wrote: post #187
jacques_chester wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the price of advertising goes up, Google will be incentivised to water down Contributor. An equilibrium might form, but in the long run it probably won't be "ad free". Google can't get away from the contradiction. > I'm not sure that's a "walled garden" in any meaningful sense. Hence "semi-walled". It's walled in the sense that only Google's ads are affected. They can somewhat reliably track users on sites that be…

> If the price of advertising goes up, Google will be incentivised to water down Contributor. The Contributor model, as I understand it, intrinsically scales costs (or effects) to the cost of advertising, with participants effectively bidding against advertisers for their own views. So, no, they wouldn't be incentivized to water it down if the price of advertising goes up, rather, the fact of Contributors success wou…

I still disagree that Google won't water it down, or raise the price of Contributor. But I'm obviously talking my own book and they theirs, so YMMV.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#417

Post by jacques_chester »

exelius wrote: post #193
jacques_chester wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse. I agree. I solved this problem with a 3-party protocol (user, provider, authenticator) that can't be subverted by either the user or the provider. No user interventio…

As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers are legit and which are fraudulent. Even distributed across a whole bunch of transactions, the cost is likely too high when each transaction is a fraction of a cent. That's just a show-stopper for microtransactions. The technology is the easy part for microtransactions…

> As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers are legit and which are fraudulent.

If payment is proportional to usage, then a linkbait/clickbait scheme won't work. The point is to reward genuine repeat visits to a site you like.

If the profit is too low, fraudsters simply go elsewhere.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#418

Post by [deleted] »

coldpie wrote: post #201
jacques_chester wrote: post #148

Google Contributor can't work, for two reasons. 1. As soon as it becomes too widespread, Google will nerf it. They rely almost entirely on advertising for their revenues. There's just too much money for them to not water the scheme down in future. Remember when cable TV was going to be ad-free? 2. It only works inside Google's semi-walled garden. This is true of every microsubscription scheme so far built (Spotify, A…

> I have a patented protocol Fuck you.

[deleted]

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#419

Post by ised »

lighthawk wrote: post #114
austenallred wrote: post #46

I've been a contributor member for several months now, because I firmly believe in two things: 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better. So here's what people need to know about Google contributor: 1. I pay for the highest level available. 2. I love not seeing ads. 3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common…

> or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it. Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that wi…

"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."

And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.

Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).

There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.

And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.

Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.

It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.

Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.

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