Comment by OtherShrezzing
11 days ago
Someone should use this to create a new browser. A human user drops $100 into the browser, and each website offers a per-page-view rate, gradually deducted from the $100. In exchange the user doesn't have to suffer through advertisements.
Google had an experiment called Google Contributor where you could buy all your own ads. This effectively had the experience you're describing (prepay and get no ads until it runs out). They tried it twice, so someone wanted it to work. I was always curious why they shuttered it.
Tiny selection of web sites, restricted to the US, absolutely no marketing.
Probably because people didn't want to pay. It's easy and cheap to say "I'd pay X to access website without ads!" ...but when it came to it and people had that option, essentially no-one did it.
This is because most of the time paying is not an option. And even when it is, there is a lot of friction to actually do that, even with streamlined payment services such as Stripe. The advertising business model and technology that powers it is so well established that a "free" service is much easier to manage for publishers and to access for consumers.
There's also the psychological aspect. People are used to advertising in every other form of media, so seeing it online is acceptable. People expect online services to be "free", and few really understand the business transaction they're a part of, or the repercussions of it. Even when they do, many are willing to make that transaction because they value the service more than what they're giving up to access it, and they have no other choice.
So it ultimately boils down to offering the choice to pay with currency, and making it frictionless for both consumers and publishers to use. And educating consumers about the real cost of advertising.
The unfortunate reality is that advertising has become so profitable that in order for the payment system to work, companies would have to price their services higher than any consumer would be willing to pay for them. Or they would have to settle for lower profits, which no company would actually do. This is why you see that even when a service has a payment option, they still inevitably choose to _also_ show ads. Advertising money is simply irresistible to most people, and few have the moral backbone to resist it.
I contributed ~$30 during both experiments. The most interesting aspect was seeing which sites consumed most of the spend. It also felt good to see the contribution to smaller sites.
Paying for my own ads felt similar to shopping at a local bookstore: I paid extra for the culture I wanted to see. There's a market for it, but, you're right, it probably wasn't big enough to justify its existence at Google.
<GoogleRant>
Does Google need a reason to shutter something?
</GoogleRant>
And we are back to: how much would you pay for a website before you access said website for the first time?
The Web Monetisation protocol solved this by doing a prorata based on how long you spent on the page.
What if I save the page locally on my machine? Or archive it?
3 replies →
Brave already does this with BAT[1].
It's a shame that it will never gain traction. Partly because of the cryptocurrency stigma, some missteps by Brave Inc. that have tarnished its credibility, and partly because of adtech's tight grip on the web.
[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
A problem this doesn't solve is that people are trusting LLM summaries so much that they aren't even visiting the pages linked as sources. The pages-scraped/visitor is something like 1,500 pages scraped to 1 visitor. Compare that to years ago when google advertised that for every 2 pages they scrape, you get 1 visitor. If no one read content, people aren't incentivised to write content, publishers and bloggers alike.
I've been suggesting exactly this for some time. A button in the browser to pay the asked value to view a page, and if the page is free to view the button instead turns into a donation button for voluntary donations.
Everyone seems to hate on Brave for trying something like this. Granted they use shady cryptocurrency instead of a one time fee, or subscription model, but what the hell...