I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.
- do these people understand the principles of making good products?
- is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models?
After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing.
I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc.
Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...
I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire network to be updating ledgers with ~millions of records per ~$1000 moved. the fundamental tech of crypto leans towards slower, higher value transactions than high volume, small transactions. Lots of efforts have been made with some coins to bring down the bar of "high value, low volume" to meet everyday consumer usage rates and values - but a transaction history at the scale of every ad impression for every person is a tough ask and would perpetually be in an uphill battle against energy costs.
Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is that the service would need to be centralized, and likely treated as cash by not keeping track of history. Centralized company creates "web credits", user spends $5 for 10,000 credits, these credits are consumed when they visit websites. Websites collect a few credits from each user, and cash out with the centralized company. The issue is that since it would cost more to track and store all the transactions than the value of the transactions themselves, you have to fully trust the company to properly manage the balances.
I started building it and since I would be handling, exchanging, and storing real currency - it seemed subject to a lot of regulations. It is like a combination bank and casino.
i've thought about finishing the project and using disclaimers that buying credits legally owes the user nothing, and collecting credits legally owes the websites nothing, and operating on a trust system - but any smart person would see the potential for a rug pull on that and i figured there would not be much interest.
The alternative route of adhering to all the banking regulations to get the proper insurances needed to make the commitments necessary to users and websites to guarantee exchange between credits and $ seemed like too much for 1 person to take on as a side project for free
A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for five years? Okay, that's around $100 in cost. If you're taking a 1% fee then the storage cost is 1% of your fee.
If your credits are worth 1/20th of a penny, and you store history for 18 months, then that drops the amount of data 17x.
(And any criticisms of these numbers based on database overhead get countered by the fact that you would not store a 10 credit transaction as 10 separate database entries.)
I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.
the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk
Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.
And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.
There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.
> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking
But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to
that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked
at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person
publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well
having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.
The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.
Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...