A fraction of $3/mo? From a company that abandons projects left and right? I'll stick to Patreon, thanks. I'm making about $800 on a productive month now despite there being a pretty small audience for comics about a lesbian robot with PKD problems. I set "no ads for anyone" as my goal for like $50/p, which was still making far more than I ever did from ad impressions. Most people only contribute a buck or so a page but the door is open for a few generous folks to give me more.
Horses for courses - for high volume sites this would be awesome. My immediate thought was "Great - at last Wikipedia can get rid of the annual begging bowl". It could also be a great solution to the news site paywall debate. I'd love to seamlessly reward the sites I visit often, and if Google can automate this, more power to their elbow.
Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their advertising revenue if it takes off too well - I wonder what their cut of revenue is like compared to their advertising business? This model pays them (and the content producer) per impression rather than per click.
Patreon really has been fantastic for individuals and small groups whom people actively want to support. From tons of small creators paying their rent to the bigger successes like Jim Sterling and RedLetterMedia.
This seems targeted at larger, semi-faceless websites which may only be able to survive with tiny contributions from a mass audience. Imgur is probably the best example of that; it's infrastructure that people appreciate, but few want to pay for.
I could be missing something but this seems orthogonal to Patreon. Patreon is great specifically for things that aren't meant to generate lots of pageviews, and thus could never get by with ads.
This seems more like a "like ads but better" thing. Google appears to be saying, "Until now, you paid the advertiser by buying their products, they paid us, and we paid the websites. Let's keep doing that, except without the advertiser." Which is obviously great for Google, though I'm not sure how much it benefits anyone else.
I've been interested in Patreon for a while. Do you think there is a space on it for people running websites? I've only ever seen it used by webcomic artists.
Exactly. This idea only needs to be moderately successful for a standalone company to stick with it. It needs to be hugely successful for Google to remain committed to it.
I'd go as far as saying Google are negligent (or malicious) for trying it. They might kill any startup doing the same thing, and then they will inevitably shut this down.
At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
You are looking at this from the point of view of the user (where ads are not a big deal in exchange of consuming the content for free), but step for a moment in the content creators' shoes. While Ads can still be profitable, they grow less and less efective year after year; almost every other monetization model possible is superior for an internet product nowadays. You can easily run a blog with millions of hits per month and still not make enough to work on it full time. It's shitty if you are the content creator and can only monetize via ads.
I would prefer to look upon advertising as a stepping stone. We needed the advertising ecosystem when the Internet had a bunch of neat ideas and didn't really know how to monetize any of it. Now we're starting to get far more robust payments systems and a more solid understanding of how to offer value add in exchange for money.
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
When I visited wikipedia today, there was a small widget that let me set up a monthly payment. I have never donated before, but I liked the idea of a small monthly amount so I signed up for 3 dollars. Hopefully, they get to keep more of that money by cutting out Google. Bonus: no tracking.
Except non-awful advertising doesn't appear to be a stable equilibrium. Inventory is essentially infinite; publishers see ever-declining margins; we see ever more intrusive advertising. Plus the usual stories about people getting what they want -- lots and lots of clickbait. Yuck.
This is actually about pushing Google ads! The idea is clearly that sites are required to have Google ads normally in order to participate in Contributor!
So, this is the opposite of people paying to reduce ads. This is actually a scheme to promote more ads.
People who want to donate to creative work should donate to projects that treat us well by forgoing ads and privacy-invading tracking. Google Contributor is a donation system exclusively for projects that engage in these anti-features. It's a ransom / pay-to-stop-being-annoyed, which means it is rewarding sites for annoying you in the first place.
On the development side implementation was very easy. All it takes is a meta tag with a bitcoin address and you're good to go. I built it into a social blogging site I've been working on, so that when you visit an article the bitcoin address used for tipping is the author's. Here's a post I wrote explaining it:
I would love to see something like this for the actual software that runs the web. Things like OpenSSL, PGP, FessBSD and the other critical software that makes it all possible but almost all users will never visit there webpages. There would need to be some other way to allocate the funds, maybe by checking some form of header metadata to see what software websites are built on.
"As a reminder of your support, you’ll see a thank you message - often accompanied by a pixel pattern - where you might normally see an ad."
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
Finally someone took the initiative. I guess I'm glad that it's a company as big as Google.
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
Whenever you think "nobody is doing this", you should start by assuming you're wrong. You really think that in this giant global world, nobody has thought to build a standard way to support sites with donations? There's already a handful of sites with decent history already. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean nobody was already doing this.
I would only use this if the first time I appeared on a website it asked me whether I wanted to add it to the list of sites I wanted to explicitly support.
That may seem intrusive, but otherwise this is going to (further) encourage content farms ripping off Wikipedia or just posting random material and optimising the hell out of its rankings (yes I know Google actively tries to stop this, but it just doesn't work well enough).
It's really important to distinguish money coming directly out of my pocket at someone else's whim, and advertising, where I need not purchase anything if I'm not interested.
This severely breaks down when you find a site you disagree with. Say you go on some anti-vaccines blog just to find after reading through a bunch of articles that they are a part of this program. Can you take your money back? Or what about a political campaign site for your rival? Or the Westboro Baptist clan?
I was thinking the same thing. I'd like the choice to rebalance my donations at the end of the month. Stackoverflow (if it were a charity) is immensely useful to my business while BuzzFeed isn't. If donations are proportional to clicks and time spent, the we maintain an incentive for clickbait and low-value content.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, blocking ads isn't going to make a whit of difference to tracking. Unless you aggressively block cookies and javascript as well, you're up large on the radar.
Ideally, something like this could still contribute to the sites visited while the user has an adblocker enabled or JavaScript disabled. I would be quite happy to chip in to help sites display fewer ads, but it would be tedious to whitelist all of the participants just so they can get their contribution from my visit. In principle I am very interested in consciously supporting those who create the content I get completely for free (since I don't even view the ads), but for it to work for me it would need to be very low-hassle.
We just launched almost exactly what you describe. It is called FairBlocker. An ad blocker with a monthly subscription fee (of your choice), which we then split up among the sites where ads are blocked.
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: [email protected]
Well, if the script would be embeddable from Google's domain, I think it would be easy to whitelist it. Of course it raises some issues with tracking. One could conceive a self-hosted version, but I'm not sure how Google would avoid scammers then, reporting "fake visits".
I feel like this is one of the things that caused Wave to die -- it was only something useful if many people are using it, and they didn't let many people use it.
Google's model rests on the assumption that all the ads on the site will be Google ads, and as such this scheme comes with a fairly heavy incentive for content providers to carry Google ads only.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
Its really important to be talking about this - the fact that current revenue streams are almost all based around advertising in media creates a bit of a race to the bottom - the more clicks you get the more money you make, so the only intrinsic motivation is to get more clicks (especially if you're a public company). Everything else is secondary even if its not marketed as such.
If the primary goal of a site or project is to make money, then clearly advertising is the way to go. If the goal is something else, like providing a community service, then there are reasonable models. I could see bundled microsubscriptions being pretty popular - you set it once and forget it, they get funding to keep doing what they're doing and everyone is happy. Patreon for artists is a good example of this.
I hope the internet starts going in the opposite direction that MMO's have been going, switching towards subscriptions for higher quality content from fremium user maximizers. I'm certainly willing to pay for that - I'm much more likely to trust an organization that doesn't take advertising/"user as the product" money than one that does.
I just launched a similar concept to bundled microsubscriptions, which I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, called FairBlocker. Its an ad blocker with a monthly subscription that we split up among sites and pay out to the publisher (aggregating microsubscriptions from all our users). Another way to go after a similar goal.
Should Google be collecting this revenue for the content providers? Or could the individual content providers not collect this revenue themselves without having Google take a cut.
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
>How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
Oh, you mean the ones who are already big enough to generate large amounts of revenues (based on their advertized partners) ? My first thought was that this would be a good way to support smaller websites instead.
[+] [-] mcone|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365
[+] [-] egypturnash|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxylad|11 years ago|reply
Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their advertising revenue if it takes off too well - I wonder what their cut of revenue is like compared to their advertising business? This model pays them (and the content producer) per impression rather than per click.
[+] [-] TillE|11 years ago|reply
This seems targeted at larger, semi-faceless websites which may only be able to survive with tiny contributions from a mass audience. Imgur is probably the best example of that; it's infrastructure that people appreciate, but few want to pay for.
[+] [-] fenomas|11 years ago|reply
This seems more like a "like ads but better" thing. Google appears to be saying, "Until now, you paid the advertiser by buying their products, they paid us, and we paid the websites. Let's keep doing that, except without the advertiser." Which is obviously great for Google, though I'm not sure how much it benefits anyone else.
[+] [-] rinon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurotech1|11 years ago|reply
They are making $952 per episode, which is more than what annoying ads would pay.
[+] [-] Lockyy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoster|11 years ago|reply
I'd go as far as saying Google are negligent (or malicious) for trying it. They might kill any startup doing the same thing, and then they will inevitably shut this down.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr4g0n|11 years ago|reply
What I wonder though is: what happens if I visit a site that I don't want to support? Can I say no? Otherwise this just invites clickbait even more.
[1]: https://flattr.com/howflattrworks
[+] [-] dpweb|11 years ago|reply
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
[+] [-] Mahn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
[+] [-] lifeformed|11 years ago|reply
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
[+] [-] RaRic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zipfle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrangle|11 years ago|reply
So, this is the opposite of people paying to reduce ads. This is actually a scheme to promote more ads.
People who want to donate to creative work should donate to projects that treat us well by forgoing ads and privacy-invading tracking. Google Contributor is a donation system exclusively for projects that engage in these anti-features. It's a ransom / pay-to-stop-being-annoyed, which means it is rewarding sites for annoying you in the first place.
[+] [-] bcolb|11 years ago|reply
That way I essentially am just tipping sites that I want to visit as I visit them. You can also blacklist sites, set tip amounts, etc.
https://priestc.github.io/Autotip/
On the development side implementation was very easy. All it takes is a meta tag with a bitcoin address and you're good to go. I built it into a social blogging site I've been working on, so that when you visit an article the bitcoin address used for tipping is the author's. Here's a post I wrote explaining it:
https://www.backed.io/posts/post/40
[+] [-] eropple|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boozelclark|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigmar|11 years ago|reply
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
[+] [-] nemo1618|11 years ago|reply
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
[+] [-] quadrangle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wbhart|11 years ago|reply
That may seem intrusive, but otherwise this is going to (further) encourage content farms ripping off Wikipedia or just posting random material and optimising the hell out of its rankings (yes I know Google actively tries to stop this, but it just doesn't work well enough).
It's really important to distinguish money coming directly out of my pocket at someone else's whim, and advertising, where I need not purchase anything if I'm not interested.
[+] [-] benburwell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aragot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delsalk|11 years ago|reply
Google being a middleman makes it logistically easy but removes the main reason why I would pay some amount directly to sites themselves.
[+] [-] foxylad|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dikaiosune|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fairblocker|11 years ago|reply
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: [email protected]
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimktrains2|11 years ago|reply
I feel like this is one of the things that caused Wave to die -- it was only something useful if many people are using it, and they didn't let many people use it.
[+] [-] d_j_b|11 years ago|reply
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
[+] [-] taurath|11 years ago|reply
If the primary goal of a site or project is to make money, then clearly advertising is the way to go. If the goal is something else, like providing a community service, then there are reasonable models. I could see bundled microsubscriptions being pretty popular - you set it once and forget it, they get funding to keep doing what they're doing and everyone is happy. Patreon for artists is a good example of this.
I hope the internet starts going in the opposite direction that MMO's have been going, switching towards subscriptions for higher quality content from fremium user maximizers. I'm certainly willing to pay for that - I'm much more likely to trust an organization that doesn't take advertising/"user as the product" money than one that does.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fairblocker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greedoshotlast|11 years ago|reply
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
[+] [-] moey|11 years ago|reply
Now bitcoins...that would work.
[+] [-] declan|11 years ago|reply
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
[+] [-] logn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolaskruchten|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Filligree|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|11 years ago|reply
Oh, you mean the ones who are already big enough to generate large amounts of revenues (based on their advertized partners) ? My first thought was that this would be a good way to support smaller websites instead.