Comment by doug_durham

You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?

> writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income

Nor, generally, should it. Sitting down one or two Saturday afternoons a month to write a blog post shouldn't be generating the income of a FTE.

Print media did also include e.g. coupons with discount codes with which advertisers could learn which lead led through a sale.

Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine.

I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not.

Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me - like at all.

The main “problem” with contextualized advertising is that the people producing the content get a larger share of the ad spend.

Targeted ads concentrate control over the market into a few players, which can do things like acquire competitors or run them out of business with loss leaders.

With AI, the supply of ad real estate will go to infinity, so the only thing that will matter is the quality of the places the ads run.

This would be a good time to ban targeted advertising, or for the content producers to form a cartel that only purchases contextual ads.

That cartel will probably be even worse than what we have now, since it’s going to be 2-3 mega conglomerates like Disney, and they already have handed editorial control over to the White House.

Hopefully the invisible hand of capitalism will somehow fix this.

> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better?

If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.

> what if ... everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?

Except in practice we see the opposite.

There's something interesting going on with companies when they want to get paid directly versus by ads: they demand 3x - 4x or more for subscriptions or pay per view versus what they make from ads.

Easiest place to see this is ad supported non-linear TV in the years you could get without ads, or with ads. You pay significantly more to not see the ads, than they make from the ads.

Perhaps this is justified because ad-free subscriptions reduce the audience size for ad buys, but when you look at the numbers watching with ads versus paying, it wouldn't seem like the "no ads" buyers make a dent in whatever pricing tier.

In the 90s when we were young and naive, we imagined a library card model, with a library fee and then you have fractions of a cent cost to read a post, and using (hand waving) technology to uncouple viewing history from payables to content creators. That, or the British TV license model, an Internet license of some kind.

It's curious to me the ad networks haven't gotten together to preemptively offer this. Arguably Brave tried, but from an adversarial (to the ad companies) stance. It would work better from the inside with a simple regulation: if you serve ads for ad-supported content, you have to participate in the library card system at CPM rates no greater than you receive for ads to skip the ads for card holders.

The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source for the content owners.

it takes a lot of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss of a $5/month recurring revenue stream that might last for years.

I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.

You're presupposing that these blogs are producing content worth paying for. The unfortunate truth is that the overwhelming majority of blogs (99.9%+) are not.

> Would you pay per view?

Yes, but only after viewing, of else I'd pay for "editorial" or AI generated slop which would be generated like link farms pointing to Amazon etc.

And that's the chicken-and-egg problem ...

In theory that could be resolved by registering for free at reputable sites and then paying per view with micropayments. Or by a scheme where one would register and only pay when I actually did read stuff, not with the currently en-vogue monthly fee for each and every site.

How do you track the views?

Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.

Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly ads or topping it up manually, which then gets distributed to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose, transparently in the background while they browse.

It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is precisely the right model that could work at scale to eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for everyone.

This is exactly what I want. I don't really care to subscribe to most written media (I do in some cases) but once in awhile an article grabs my attention and I would shell out to read it.

Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed.

I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view - if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every click.

Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for different reasons.

Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting anyway.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

I read from too many different sources through aggregators like hackernews. With a network you'd probably still have too many subscriptions.

Also wonder if it will really work out, i open too many articles that are pretty bad when you start reading them. So i quit after 1 or 2 paragraphs.

Now if you get the first 2 paragraphs for free, contents writers will start to optimize for good first 2 paragraphs, and afterwards quality will drop. Also, many blog posts or news articles don't have more than 2 paragraphs of good content.

Eh, that's too expensive unless the recipient can authorize refunds for non-spam emails.

But yes, I always thought some form of network syndication would emerge on the Web, where creators could register for their share of aggregated periodic payments made by users.

Still not sure why that's not a thing. I would pay $50/month to a syndicate in return for never having to deal with paywalls on any sites affiliated with them. But only as long as the vast majority of sites participated, and that is probably the showstopper, I guess. We'd end up paying 20 different 'syndicates' for absolutely no good reason, just as we now have to deal with 20 different streaming services.

This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem yet. But maybe one day

Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.

I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out with them.