Comment by ucaetano
8 years ago
> By this logic, the biggest force in the universe preventing micropayments by linking media to the tawdry, corrupting mechanism of advertising, is Google.
No, it is users being willing to pay. The vast majority of users are far more ok with being shown ads than paying the equivalent of the cost of the ad to have it go away.
The vast majority of users are far more ok with being shown ads than paying the equivalent of the cost of the ad to have it go away.
What if the ad were not in the picture at all, and you had low friction micropayments? There are YouTube channels which eschew advertisements and get most of their money from Patreon instead. There are other channels that have been demonetized against their will and have gone this route as well. It's workable, and yet, Patreon is far from the lowest friction it could achieve.
If there was some party able to make micropayments work, and able to make them not ever work, it would be Google.
> What if the ad were not in the picture at all, and you had low friction micropayments?
Again, people don't want to pay for content. Between one website asking you to pay $0.10 to view an article, and another offering it for free but showing ads, people will pick the free one.
And Google has been trying: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/google-co...
But it is really hard to convince people to pay, when they can get it for free.
You wouldn't pay 10 cents though. You'd pay 1 one thousandth of a cent.
I could absolutely image people being willing to pay 1 one thousandth of a cent to read an article.
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And Google has been trying:
Not quite the same thing. It's one thing to be extorted by ads in order to pay. There's a lot of content for which advertisement doesn't work, so there's no extortion to shut off ads. Google doesn't want to facilitate that content for some reason. It wants to squash it.
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What if automatic micropayments were made on content request? Directly from the browser.
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Blendle tries but is struggling. It does not seem to work, not enough subscribers, unhappy papers ( uhh, advertisers ).
Thing us that our easiest way to pay online are credit cards.
But credit cards suck for the kind of small payments the web warrants.
Also, what is the chance that we would pay and get shown ads anyways?
For me it is not ads, full stop, that are the problem. but distracting/disturbing ads unrelated to what i am reading at the time.