An average user generates about $70 a year in ad revenue for all sites they visit. Why is nobody providing an account you can fund which gets debited per page impression.
If 1,000 page views nets about $6 then my balance goes down by $0.006 for each page with no ads.
Maybe I still have the option to view ads instead of pay where I want to and a content provider has the option to show them instead of receive hard cash.
What is wrong with this idea?
The problem is nobody will process the payments.
I get that payment processing costs money but only if you treat each transaction like an actual payment, prefunding an account and having a 3rd party move balances on the ledger from payer to receiver is 'free' once the money is in the system.
trips
It would be clumsy and cost more to create and maintain the middle man (exchange system and protections it would need to afford to the user to prevent abuse) than the money it would be exchanging for the sake of advertisers.
If you meant for one site, say YouTube or Twitch for example then yes setting up a "pass" account attached to your user account in order to bypass adverts would be easy and beneficial.
YouTube Red is a thing, I know. These were merely examples.
>What is wrong with this idea?
I've never paid nor will ever pay to see a webpage.
Sorry, it's just I don't have proof the content I'm looking for really is behind the paywall. I should be able to pay, see the content really is there, get a refund, and then decide whether I want to make the purchase or not. This is redundant, since I have already seen the content I wanted to see.
Therefore, micropayments are a redundant concept if customer-correctness is in mind.
>seeing ads online
Jews
>What is wrong with this idea?
You can remove ads for free.
>we
kys
Ads would be fine I'd they were static, scriptless, non intrusive, and didn't try to be shit like fake download links or something. Adblocking of any kind is a necessity to keeping your computer secure. Tell ad companies to shape up or I won't fucking turn mine off.
>imagine having a device in your pocket which costs you $1000
>so (((they))) can deliver ads to you worth $70 per year
>he fell for the $1000 phone
Flattr?
This. It's been like since 2007 that I saw an ad from my own PC without actually looking for one for whatever reason.
Speak for yourself, i'm not okay with any ads at all. I don't need to be marketed to, it's all just attempts at manipulation.
OP, your plan is noble but flawed. Adding a barrier to entry to viewing websites would backfire on them (and they know it). If people start getting charged to browse, they know people will start to wonder...
>is looking at this shitty clickbait article really worth 0.2c? is it even worth my time?
They want us to be passive mind-numbed consumers, and they need any revenue from their websites to be totally passive to end users.
I get what you say about barriers to entry but if it were optional: ads by default, $0.006 if you are registered then you would find prior willing. You would have the whole adblock population still but you are better placed to block that traffic if you are offering an alternative.
How the fuck would that even work while at work? Is my boss supposed to set aside a few hundred dollars every month so people can shitpost on youtube during break? What if the employee has a real need to use the internet, is he supposed to get prior approval to visit a max of ten websites so he can order parts or something?
This whole thing sounds stupid and blockable ads are clearly superior.
>paying money to browse the fucking internet
lmao I already pay my ISP $70 if you think I'm going to shell out another $10-15 a month to browse websites you're out of your fucking gourd.
Brave browser with bat is trying to do this. Created by the creator of Javascript.
No clue. Maybe it wouldn't at work. Maybe there is a way.
Optionality. Some people would prefer to pay less than a cent to not be tracked.
I'll take a look
Okay suppose you built a viable micropayment system where someone could pay a hundredth of a cent to view a webpage.
Do you think that the website publisher would then proceed to say "Oh, good, that makes us as much as we were making with ads, we'll just remove the ads then and keep making the same amount of money"? No, they will not, they'll continue running ads, because why make X dollars when you could just as easily be making 2X dollars?
See also: Cable television. If you ask an actual boomer (as opposed to a 30yo meme boomer) they'll tell you about how in the late 70s and early 80s when they were trying to get approval to build pay-television systems, the selling point was that by paying a monthly fee, you could have television without ads. (and thus Nice Things like a news organization that wasn't worried about what it could say about the advertisers paying for it) This was, indeed, how cable TV was for a few years. Then, guess what, they thought "Gee, if we ran ads too we could make even MORE money!" And rapidly cable became just as ad-infested as broadcast TV.
The only way to get rid of ads is to make displaying them to your viewers/readers/audience no longer a viable way to make money. You could in theory do this with widespread (like, 98%) adoption of ad-blocking technology, across all common devices, but more probably it'd have to be some kind of GDPR on steroids that deliberately made running ads too much of a regulatory-and-compliance hazard for anyone to risk doing it.
>What is wrong with this idea?
The fact that at the first opportunity or through a gaslighting campaign they'll claim the microtransactions are just for access rather than for replacing ads, and then put up ads anyway for "supplemental income" to "keep the site running."
isn't firefox going to block all ads and tracking by default in a few months?
how will/would that affect the market
You don't pay for an ISP? I fucking hate the latency of public wifi.
Well they've caught on to that. That's why all the content of all the websites is turning into ads. Now you're seeing the advertising whether you block the banners and popups or not!
Huh
OP here. I agree this carries risk but look at things like the streaming music market. Over time they have managed to monetise that market which was riddled with piracy. I personally think the problem is that anyone with enough weight on the argument has a vested interest in this not happening.. Google, FB.. there is no way they want users to be able to pay for content directly at the same values that they pay for it.