None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The only way that would change is if online advertising went away overnight, and instead of companies redirecting that to other forms of advertising, the prices of all consumer goods went down so it stayed in our collective pockets.
This kind of seems like a troubling insight at first glance, but it doesn't pass basic sanity checks imo. You could make the same exact argument about any other type of industry. Watch:
>The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putting ads inside the dustjackets and all along the shelves.
But this obviously isn't true - Barnes and Noble is a thing. Or you could even consider Kindles and the ebook market examples of how this isn't true. It can be far _superior_ in terms of revenue to offer a product that people pay for directly, as opposed to baiting them into a space with ads in it.
I think the mistake came in when you compared all of the marketing budgets combined, (call it M), with all of the discretionary income combined, (D), and took it as axiomatic that D << M. But... how could that possibly be true? Most companies will not be operating at a loss, which means their annual marketing budget will be some fraction of their gross revenue. From what I can tell from some googling, at least ~60% of that revenue, averaging over all corporations, is coming directly from... consumers' pocketbooks.
Some more googling tells me that marketing spend from US companies was ~$200 billion in 2018. US consumers spent $14 trillion. So the whole premise strikes me as questionable. Am I missing something?
Alternatively if advertising became significantly less effective companies would spend less money on it. That's the upside of Ad-blocking which could theoretically make a huge impact.
Adding to this, in the same way that privacy specialists struggle to convince the public of the supreme importance of security and privacy, it's difficult for superusers to appreciate the general public's feelings about the trade-offs of advertising—in other words, the general public might never care.
(Mozilla's campaign is a form of activism by superusers, for superusers.)
You are assuming that any effort will be trying to break the advertising paradigm in favour of a direct payment one.
The article/grant doesn't seem to be about that. Whatever the business model, this seems to be more about breaking platform capture than breaking business model. The alphabook platforms particularly.
Ultimately it's a big field. We have direct payment models (netflix, spotify, iTunes, kindle...), ad-suported models and quite a lot of online content production where monetisation is secondary to distribution.
I think it's a good time for this initiative. YouTubers (for example) with millions viewers can (a) make very little money (b) chaffe at various policies, either money or content related and (c) generally have far less power vis-a-vis alphabook than their audience size implies.
Meanwhile, podcasts, a much freer medium, is both more profitable and quality oriented because of the platform openness.
...open doesn't mean no advertising. The main thing it means is decentralised, or centered around content creators.
This a a good idea. YouTube is no longer necessary. If it suddenly disappeared, online video content would quickly recover fully around alternatives. They contribute the least value while extracting the most.
The web was fine without these commercial companies. Not like their content added a ton of value to the web. The news is mostly propaganda anyhow, belonging to various wealthy parties that want people to pay for their propaganda... If they funded it completely out of pocket, that would be a more honest approach to these "businesses".
The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that users had tools to publish for free and willingly put them in silos.
There is maybe 1% of content that needs saving. The rest of it is the same sort of drivel that you get from tabloids and I say making that stuff economic non-viable is a good thing. The elites though care about making it work because otherwise the democratic media is "fake news", meaning news heavily slanted to what people want to believe rather than what they are told to believe. If you want that, then they should pay for it. Not the people through taxes as Bernie is proposing... or this scheme.
Other than that we have good models like BBC or PBS on how to do independent government and publically funded programming.
In fact if we re-engineered the web so that there was no data sharing between various systems on the frontend, something like everything has to be served from the same canonical domain, and put it in law that you could not share data between various private companies on the backend without heavy regulation and oversight that would be a better web. I mean prism is already sharing all this data, why don't we put controls on that?
It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet.
A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.
That would make the world so much better for indie developers.
Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.
Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.
I mean just buying something without giving them your email or filling out a ton of fields would remove a ton of friction.
I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.
Brave is doing exactly this with BAT on Ethereum but automating the whole thing. You can donate to any website, but you'll also auto-contribute if you choose to have that enabled.
There's probably a different cryptocurrency for each user on HN, certainly enough for people to argue over until the end of time.
Perhaps it's as simple as this:
1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links.
2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto.
3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation.
4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive)
Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.
The answer to this was meant to be Bitcoin, hence the title of the whitepaper "Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system". Unfortunately there is a lot of money being spent to keep that goal from being realized.
If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.
I think Twitter is missing out on a big opportunity for micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. More content from more content creators would also attract more users. Content stealing and reposting would be a bigger problem, but you can somewhat address it with text and image matching algorithms and user reports.
I think indie developers shouldn't rely on advertising at all. It's like being adventurer and rely on carrots as food for adventure. You need to find the proper food to do adventure. Same with the developers. Indie developers must do software and provide a service or anything that is valued by a consumer. Anything else is just a waste of time.
> Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.
If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%
Simple? Anonymous? Sounds like a perfect money laundering scheme.
All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about.
Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely.
The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.
My idea was just to have this integrated into your ISP bill.
I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out.
So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.
I started working on this exactly 2 weeks ago, so was pretty surprised to see this post by mozilla just now!
Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea)
Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!
Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
I'm not going to pay for every stupid little thing I do on the internet. And I'm sure there have been attempts at stuff like this, but who really wants this?
I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc.
I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.
Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a "donate to Mozilla" banner. The case for "reshaping the economics of the web" would have been a bit more compelling without that...
(My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)
There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1]
Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it.
Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data.
Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good).
What happens?
Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing.
Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's original reporting you can wipe off 90 of them and still be fine.
Those that have a foot-hold, brand, or better reach survive through affiliate marketing (see WireCutter), donations, or subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, etc.)
I'm not saying there won't be casualties in this approach but you lose the alt-right and other reality-bending publishers pretty quickly.
I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.
The current answer is to bundle. Use a subscription for content that is then split across sites/content by time/attention/some other measure.
However the problem then becomes which bundles you subscribe to, and that can easily cause fatigue and a race to the bottom as seen by all the current video streaming services now. Even worse, none of it has proven completely profitable or sustainable either.
> As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple's operations—to settle financial transactions.
> Coil, a platform dedicated to reimagining monetization on the web for creators and their fans, today announced a 1 billion XRP grant from Ripple's Xpring. The money will be deployed towards driving adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) by growing Coil's monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP.
> …
> The platform enables creators to post public and exclusive content on Coil, which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators can web-monetize their own websites by adding a simple tag. Those who want to support creators using Coil can join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no membership fees for creators.
Obviously Ripple is inherently motivated to see XRP adopted, but also, an active micropayment/content payment ecosystem might strengthen their claim that XRP is a utility coin and that their ICO wasn't an unregistered securities offering. Some background on this question: https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-...
> Ripple claims that XRP has utility—like currency—in its use as a “bridge currency” for international payments. But, as discussed above, more than 60 percent of XRP is owned by Ripple and none of that XRP is used for anything at all, other than to be sold in the future to investors. Moreover, as for the XRP that was already sold or otherwise distributed by Defendants, the vast majority of it is not used for bridging international transactions, but for investment purpose. Accordingly, Defendants’ claim that XRP has a utilitarian purpose is nothing but a red herring attempt to avoid the application of securities laws.
The purpose of the 50% they still hold is public know since the very first days. They SHOULD use it to push the adoption of the XRP Ledger. Period. People hate Ripple for selling/donating their XRPs, funding great stuff like Coil with it that obviously somehow uses XRP but that is exactly what they HAVE to do. Heck the whole company was made for that. The XRPL devs made a better Bitcoin and wanted it to be used. How evil from them. /s
The whole security thing is nonsense. Someone bought XRP high and sold low got made and sued. Pathetic. He didn't even bought them from Ripple.
I used to use flattr and thought the concept was sound. Until I saw that most of the creators I wanted to sponsor never bothered to sign up and collect their money.
Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives?
I figure with all the "block chain" interest we'd have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing "direct" microdonations to a website's "wallet"
I liked Coinhive but despised that 99% used it for malevolent things. I do like the idea of letting my computer do some proof of work for a few seconds to unlock an article. It's like doing a micro payment with your electricity bill, anonymously and without any setup.
Here I thought Mozilla had made it possible to do micro transactions in the browser. That Mozilla had started a bank backed by 100 million in Bitcoin, allowing zero-fee off-chain transactions between content creators and consumers.
I don't understand why Mozilla doesn't implement a native web3 wallet directly in Firefox. This would help onboard people more easily to Ethereum & EVM-compatible decentralized networks. People wouldn't have to install MetaMask or download another desktop wallet/browser app.
So, if I read this right, they want privacy-focused tech hipsters to vie for $20M a year to create open source fintech startups that will beat global banks and payment companies on transfer fees while simultaneously improving all social classes' access to the internet.
Here's my solution: chargebacks. You surf a site, and see a preview of some content. To get the full content, you click "buy", and the site communicates with your own preferred online payment processor (OPP) to confirm a payment. The OPP checks your balance and replies if you have the balance requested, and the site then serves up your content. At the end of the month the OPP settles up with each site for what's owed. If you want to get fancy you can implement a whole rules engine so each site can set up subscriptions for users so users can limit how much each site can charge them. You support multiple subscription models so users can pay by a monthly contract or per-click. If everyone keeps their money in the OPPs (ala Paypal) the OPPs end up making tons of money by investing the balance that hasn't been transferred out yet.
Once this is implemented, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will become the default OPP, because they still control all the platforms. Hooray open standards.
To all the people saying some variant of "there's nothing new here", I think you are missing it: Tipping has always been an effort. If it all happened behind the scenes, with no action required on your part (beyond just browsing to a site), then "tipping" can viably compete with ads.
They would do better if they spent 100M on ads to promote Firefox downloads.
Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you'll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose.
And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc.
What's going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn't mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions.
But the trouble is - they don't have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.
Having worked in ad-tech for much of the past decade, I don't really like the idea of ads, but the reality is that advertising is much too effective to simply "go away." The article also conflates "advertising" with "data mining" -- the former is relatively benign; the latter not so much. The effectiveness of Facebook and Google ads are mainly due to (for the most part) information that was voluntarily handed over (likes, search history, etc.), not some evil rootkit.
And even though it sounds like a lot, 100 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Consider that the top YouTubers make around ~$20M a year (this money comes largely via advertising). So your fund would barely cover the top 5. Also, the idea of lowering "the administrative costs of receiving payment for web content" seems kind at odds with a bureaucratic "Advisory Council initially made up of representatives from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons."
I dunno', to me it just seems like posturing. No real solution offered, just some wishy-washy "feel good" proposals. At least Brave (which is my daily driver) took a hard stance against ads and blocks just about everything, while Mozilla just talks a good game[1].
Instead of having payment systems that seem to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to pay, there should be a small number of very well defined friction points (such as: “maximum daily expenditure”) with literally zero friction anywhere else.
By now for instance we should really have a security technology that allows anyone to spend $5 a day any way they want, in any denomination (e.g. literally 2 cents here and 2 cents there), without having to go through ridiculous virtual-cash systems, cards and other hoops. The money should simply be there, and it should be able to go anywhere. If it’s a relatively small amount, it doesn’t require a lot of gate-keeping, e.g. you do not need a customer-refunds infrastructure or fraud protection scheme for pennies. The money can then either reset automatically, e.g. each day, or after some explicit more-secure action, e.g. you log in to something with your face.
I know that it would personally make me spend a lot more if a lot of transactions could “just happen”. Once I got a tap-here-and-pay watch, I spent more. Once I could shop online with a fingerprint, I actually did shop online. When I had to type in credit card details though, I hardly ever wanted to. When “fees” would appear as part of seemingly-small transactions, I hardly ever wanted to continue. Some things just sound like scams (don’t get me started on subscriptions), making me more likely to find an exit.
Advertising is opt-out. Every idea centered around tipping, micro-transactions, cryptocurrency are opt-in. I don't think most content creators are willing to make that jump.
I know credit card processors are hostile to "adult content", but as a human being with a sexuality that's part of who I am, I'm saddened that even "literature" related to sexuality is banned.
The grant says it's seeking "makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more"[1]
But Coil forbids "Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services."[2]
They could help also to build/improve the OpenCollective[1] that is a completely free and open-source[2] alternative to Patreon, aiming mostly for the open-source projects.
[+] [-] dangrossman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebastos|6 years ago|reply
>The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putting ads inside the dustjackets and all along the shelves.
But this obviously isn't true - Barnes and Noble is a thing. Or you could even consider Kindles and the ebook market examples of how this isn't true. It can be far _superior_ in terms of revenue to offer a product that people pay for directly, as opposed to baiting them into a space with ads in it.
I think the mistake came in when you compared all of the marketing budgets combined, (call it M), with all of the discretionary income combined, (D), and took it as axiomatic that D << M. But... how could that possibly be true? Most companies will not be operating at a loss, which means their annual marketing budget will be some fraction of their gross revenue. From what I can tell from some googling, at least ~60% of that revenue, averaging over all corporations, is coming directly from... consumers' pocketbooks.
Some more googling tells me that marketing spend from US companies was ~$200 billion in 2018. US consumers spent $14 trillion. So the whole premise strikes me as questionable. Am I missing something?
[+] [-] Retric|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbuchanan|6 years ago|reply
(Mozilla's campaign is a form of activism by superusers, for superusers.)
[+] [-] dalbasal|6 years ago|reply
The article/grant doesn't seem to be about that. Whatever the business model, this seems to be more about breaking platform capture than breaking business model. The alphabook platforms particularly.
Ultimately it's a big field. We have direct payment models (netflix, spotify, iTunes, kindle...), ad-suported models and quite a lot of online content production where monetisation is secondary to distribution.
I think it's a good time for this initiative. YouTubers (for example) with millions viewers can (a) make very little money (b) chaffe at various policies, either money or content related and (c) generally have far less power vis-a-vis alphabook than their audience size implies.
Meanwhile, podcasts, a much freer medium, is both more profitable and quality oriented because of the platform openness.
...open doesn't mean no advertising. The main thing it means is decentralised, or centered around content creators.
This a a good idea. YouTube is no longer necessary. If it suddenly disappeared, online video content would quickly recover fully around alternatives. They contribute the least value while extracting the most.
[+] [-] devoply|6 years ago|reply
The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that users had tools to publish for free and willingly put them in silos.
There is maybe 1% of content that needs saving. The rest of it is the same sort of drivel that you get from tabloids and I say making that stuff economic non-viable is a good thing. The elites though care about making it work because otherwise the democratic media is "fake news", meaning news heavily slanted to what people want to believe rather than what they are told to believe. If you want that, then they should pay for it. Not the people through taxes as Bernie is proposing... or this scheme.
Other than that we have good models like BBC or PBS on how to do independent government and publically funded programming.
In fact if we re-engineered the web so that there was no data sharing between various systems on the frontend, something like everything has to be served from the same canonical domain, and put it in law that you could not share data between various private companies on the backend without heavy regulation and oversight that would be a better web. I mean prism is already sharing all this data, why don't we put controls on that?
[+] [-] FreeHugs|6 years ago|reply
A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.
That would make the world so much better for indie developers.
Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.
[+] [-] droffel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|6 years ago|reply
I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.
[+] [-] d0gbread|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloopernova|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps it's as simple as this:
1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links.
2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto.
3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation.
4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive)
Has anyone done step 1 yet?
[+] [-] greycrasan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncletammy|6 years ago|reply
If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
Coil, the co-sponsor of this grant, is a company founded by the ex Ripple CTO and trying to do that.
[+] [-] cpeterso|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleMeat|6 years ago|reply
Nobody uses them.
[+] [-] meerita|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snthd|6 years ago|reply
https://taler.net
[+] [-] jedimastert|6 years ago|reply
If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%
[+] [-] nine_k|6 years ago|reply
All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about.
Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely.
The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.
[+] [-] 205guy|6 years ago|reply
I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out.
So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.
[+] [-] aurbano|6 years ago|reply
Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea)
Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryacko|6 years ago|reply
It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.
[+] [-] Canada|6 years ago|reply
But that's just not the way it is. Nothing anonymous can be tolerated.
[+] [-] donohoe|6 years ago|reply
Might be about timing. Maybe this time it could be different.
[+] [-] BubRoss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrlala|6 years ago|reply
I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc.
I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.
[+] [-] jsnell|6 years ago|reply
(My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)
[+] [-] manigandham|6 years ago|reply
Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn't otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it.
Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820
[+] [-] donohoe|6 years ago|reply
What happens?
Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing.
Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's original reporting you can wipe off 90 of them and still be fine.
Those that have a foot-hold, brand, or better reach survive through affiliate marketing (see WireCutter), donations, or subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, etc.)
I'm not saying there won't be casualties in this approach but you lose the alt-right and other reality-bending publishers pretty quickly.
[+] [-] mizay7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manigandham|6 years ago|reply
However the problem then becomes which bundles you subscribe to, and that can easily cause fatigue and a race to the bottom as seen by all the current video streaming services now. Even worse, none of it has proven completely profitable or sustainable either.
[+] [-] troydavis|6 years ago|reply
> As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple's operations—to settle financial transactions.
… and here's why Ripple made the original (~$265 million USD) grant to Coil (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ripples-xpring-make...) in August 2019:
> Coil, a platform dedicated to reimagining monetization on the web for creators and their fans, today announced a 1 billion XRP grant from Ripple's Xpring. The money will be deployed towards driving adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) by growing Coil's monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP.
> …
> The platform enables creators to post public and exclusive content on Coil, which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators can web-monetize their own websites by adding a simple tag. Those who want to support creators using Coil can join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no membership fees for creators.
In May 2018, the first of several lawsuits was filed that allege XRP is a security: https://www.coindesk.com/investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-gui.... They're seeking class-action status to represent everyone who bought XRP. Matt Levine briefly mentioned Ripple while covering the broader question of how the SEC would classify coins: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-15/the-se....
Obviously Ripple is inherently motivated to see XRP adopted, but also, an active micropayment/content payment ecosystem might strengthen their claim that XRP is a utility coin and that their ICO wasn't an unregistered securities offering. Some background on this question: https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-...
Here's what that lawsuit alleges (http://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/716bee..., as amended Aug 2019):
> Ripple claims that XRP has utility—like currency—in its use as a “bridge currency” for international payments. But, as discussed above, more than 60 percent of XRP is owned by Ripple and none of that XRP is used for anything at all, other than to be sold in the future to investors. Moreover, as for the XRP that was already sold or otherwise distributed by Defendants, the vast majority of it is not used for bridging international transactions, but for investment purpose. Accordingly, Defendants’ claim that XRP has a utilitarian purpose is nothing but a red herring attempt to avoid the application of securities laws.
[+] [-] fastball|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxer|6 years ago|reply
Ripple doesn't hold 60% they hold 50%
The purpose of the 50% they still hold is public know since the very first days. They SHOULD use it to push the adoption of the XRP Ledger. Period. People hate Ripple for selling/donating their XRPs, funding great stuff like Coil with it that obviously somehow uses XRP but that is exactly what they HAVE to do. Heck the whole company was made for that. The XRPL devs made a better Bitcoin and wanted it to be used. How evil from them. /s
The whole security thing is nonsense. Someone bought XRP high and sold low got made and sued. Pathetic. He didn't even bought them from Ripple.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|6 years ago|reply
Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives?
I figure with all the "block chain" interest we'd have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing "direct" microdonations to a website's "wallet"
EDIT: looks like coil is kinda of like flattr
[+] [-] Kiro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sabinus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisitnownow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|6 years ago|reply
Here's my solution: chargebacks. You surf a site, and see a preview of some content. To get the full content, you click "buy", and the site communicates with your own preferred online payment processor (OPP) to confirm a payment. The OPP checks your balance and replies if you have the balance requested, and the site then serves up your content. At the end of the month the OPP settles up with each site for what's owed. If you want to get fancy you can implement a whole rules engine so each site can set up subscriptions for users so users can limit how much each site can charge them. You support multiple subscription models so users can pay by a monthly contract or per-click. If everyone keeps their money in the OPPs (ala Paypal) the OPPs end up making tons of money by investing the balance that hasn't been transferred out yet.
Once this is implemented, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will become the default OPP, because they still control all the platforms. Hooray open standards.
[+] [-] issa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airnomad|6 years ago|reply
Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you'll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose.
And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc.
What's going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn't mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions.
But the trouble is - they don't have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.
[+] [-] dvt|6 years ago|reply
And even though it sounds like a lot, 100 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Consider that the top YouTubers make around ~$20M a year (this money comes largely via advertising). So your fund would barely cover the top 5. Also, the idea of lowering "the administrative costs of receiving payment for web content" seems kind at odds with a bureaucratic "Advisory Council initially made up of representatives from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons."
I dunno', to me it just seems like posturing. No real solution offered, just some wishy-washy "feel good" proposals. At least Brave (which is my daily driver) took a hard stance against ads and blocks just about everything, while Mozilla just talks a good game[1].
[1] https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
[+] [-] makecheck|6 years ago|reply
By now for instance we should really have a security technology that allows anyone to spend $5 a day any way they want, in any denomination (e.g. literally 2 cents here and 2 cents there), without having to go through ridiculous virtual-cash systems, cards and other hoops. The money should simply be there, and it should be able to go anywhere. If it’s a relatively small amount, it doesn’t require a lot of gate-keeping, e.g. you do not need a customer-refunds infrastructure or fraud protection scheme for pennies. The money can then either reset automatically, e.g. each day, or after some explicit more-secure action, e.g. you log in to something with your face.
I know that it would personally make me spend a lot more if a lot of transactions could “just happen”. Once I got a tap-here-and-pay watch, I spent more. Once I could shop online with a fingerprint, I actually did shop online. When I had to type in credit card details though, I hardly ever wanted to. When “fees” would appear as part of seemingly-small transactions, I hardly ever wanted to continue. Some things just sound like scams (don’t get me started on subscriptions), making me more likely to find an exit.
[+] [-] pjzedalis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longears|6 years ago|reply
The grant says it's seeking "makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more"[1]
But Coil forbids "Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services."[2]
[1] https://www.grantfortheweb.org/ [2] https://coil.com/terms
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://opencollective.com/
[2] https://github.com/opencollective/
[+] [-] zallarak|6 years ago|reply