
Readability's new service - mcav
http://www.marco.org/3044068415
======
eps
The only pages I am using the Readability bookmarklet on are those that are
impossible to read in their native design. Rewarding authors of such pages
(and effctively excluding well-designed blogs from the rewarding process
altogether) seems counter-productive. Also this gives them a tangible
incentive to _not_ improve the usability of their websites. I'm all for
micropayng for the content, but this solution is backwards.

~~~
cookiecaper
I agree, I only use Readability on sites that are difficult to read in their
native format. It seems that the Readability guys are presupposing that most
users use readability on everything, and that the user would be happy to see
money going to sites the user likes and visits often. However, I don't really
like most sites I end up using Readability on, and they also rarely need any
more money. This will probably last a short time and spend most of its
lifecycle entirely gamed by publishers.

~~~
jacques_chester
Like eps, you've assumed that this application is like the Readability
bookmarklet. It isn't. It's an almost completely different thing.

Here's the model.

1\. Publisher embeds Readability code on their site.

2\. Subscriber reads sites through Readability application.

3\. When the Subscriber visits a known Publisher, Readability records the
visit.

4\. At the end of the billing period, Readability dishes out cash, divided up
according to how many times the Subscriber visited each known Publisher.

I understand this model well because it is almost exactly the same model I
dreamt up in 2008, that Contenture launched with circa 2009 and that Kachingle
filed a business method patent application for in 2007 (as I recall). Not long
ago another such company / site, Sprinklepenny, was up for sale on flippr.

Because I am a big sook, I pretty much gave up on this idea in late 2009 when
I learned about Kachingle and Contenture. Since then Contenture have quit the
field. Kachingle has remained but their site basically seems like a social
network for crazy cat ladies. Flattr have gotten awesome publicity because of
the PirateBay connection, but their model is flawed in that it requires all
parties to pay in.

I am hoping to get back into this space myself this year. My advantage is
technological -- basically a secure tracking protocol that doesn't require a
special application or any buttons to be clicked. Other than that I'm probably
doomed to fail, but fuck it, so was every other successful startup of the last
10 years.

~~~
scraplab
There's no need to embed any code on anyone's site. The whole point is that
Readability automatically detects the main body content from a page and
extracts it.

As a publisher, if your main body content isn't being detected automatically,
probably because your HTML is awful, you can add some classes to the key
elements to fix that. But that's not necessary.

There's also no need to register as a publisher to receive contributions. From
their FAQ:

"Readability keeps track of pages visited even before a publisher registers
with us to view their statistics. If your site has garnered traffic to
Readability, we’re already earmarking money for you."

<https://www.readability.com/faq/#view-plainGuidelines>

However, you will need to register to actually get the funds.

~~~
jacques_chester
Ah, so it's completely mediated by their app. That's a clever way to get
publishers to sign up -- "you could be earning $X right now!"

~~~
eli
Actually, if you check out the NYTimes article: > The company plans to pay
them “regardless of their participation”

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=2&hpw)

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jacques_chester
Seems to be a riff on flattr / kachingle / contenture / others I can't
remember right now. The key difference is that they value-add through the
Readability reformatting service.

I've seen this called a number of things -- crowd funding, social
micropayments. I had the same basic idea (Contenture was closest) back in
August 2008. By carefully hiding the idea I have parlayed my insight into
literally zeroes of dollars.

Personally I call it microsubscription.

One thing that Readability have solved neatly is the problem of trustworthy
allocations by requiring users to go through their application. My own secret
sauce (apart from the business model) is a prototype secure protocol for
tracking users in a fraud- and theft-resistant fashion without relying on a
trusted application -- just a web browser.

While announcements like these continue to fill me with fear and dismay,
watching the rise of Facebook over MySpace et al has taught me not to be such
a giver-upper and to get into it. After the fashion of Messrs Page and Brin I
am planning to do it as an honours project this year. Might as well double up
on the benefits.

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eferraiuolo
When you think long enough about this whole idea of supporting web content,
there are some major requires that arise:

• Support should be direct (whereas ads are indirect)

• People publish all over the Internet, most people don’t own a domain, they
have (hosted) Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub accounts
where they publish content, this content _has_ to be supportable.

• You can’t effectively charge someone fees for their acts of voluntary
support.

• Voluntary, is voluntary, is no subscription, and is the right to choose!

• Easy to use, low barrier to give, no pulling out the credit card for 25¢.

• Support something while browsing the web and on that web page.

• The mechanism/service you use to support content online can’t be the only
winner, consumers and publishers have to be the outright winners!

• The service used _must_ be trustworthy and transparent.

• The service _has_ to work with the Internet, which means it has to work when
only given URLs of web pages to support.

So! We actually did this, and built TipTheWeb <http://tiptheweb.org/> with all
these ideas in mind!

A non-profit that gives 100% of the money tipped by people to the web
publisher of the content, non of that fee or cuts crap, 100%. You can support
something with TipTheWeb by just giving us a URL to what you want to support
and an amount, that's it; no publisher integration required.

We want to provide a positive feedback loop for the web, give publishers a way
to know what their followers actually like, give readers/consumers a way to
directly support what they truly love online and choose how much they want to
give (5¢ — $100 per Tip). We want to encourage publishers to keep it up! Keep
their content freely-accessible to everyone <— _this_ is what makes the
Internet so great.

The Internet is valuable. Good publishing is hard. Selling content doesn’t
work. Advertising is not sufficient. Community-supported web publishing can
work!

~~~
vampirical
You say "100% of claimed Tips". How much initiative do you take to inform
publishers that they've received a tip and should sign-up and claim their
money? What do you do if a publisher who has received tips declines
participating?

The idea that I could donate money which the publisher hasn't agreed to
receive and you could end up keeping it if the publisher doesn't decide they
want to be a part of your service rubs me the wrong way.

~~~
eferraiuolo
We hope to always error on the side that will benefit the user in these cases.

Telling web publishers they have tips waiting for them is tricky business,
i.e. Don't want to be spammy. We hope to develop some interesting ways to
notify people that they have tips; but tippers have been filling this void by
mentionig on services like Twitter that they've tipped someone for something.

For now, if a tip goes unclaimed by the publisher for 6 months, it's
automatically canceled, and the money is returned to the tipper for them to
use to tip something else.

We don't currently have a way for someone to block or decline tips for a
particular website, but we've talked about adding this type of feature;
someone could claim their site, then say they don't accept tips there.

Bottom line, we don't have any intentions of keeping people's money that goes
unclaimed, we rather return it so they could fund other tips with it. People
can also help support our operations by tipping us, TipTheWeb; eating our own
dog food.

~~~
vampirical
Thanks for clarifying :)

I don't know that I agree with the refund strategy as the way to handle the
issue but it's good to hear you guys come down in a good place
ethically/morally on the issue (as you say, the most important thing with this
sort of site is trust).

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vampirical
Hmm interesting to see Arc90 making a bigger move in the space, especially
partnered up with Instapaper. I've been curious why they hadn't done much more
since the simple readability bookmarklet was so well received.

I wonder if they'll run in to any copyright issues now that they're actually
re-serving full article content from their servers and not just reformatting
in the user's browser. I've been playing with a service with some server side
readability functionality built in and the issue came us as a concern in my
planning. Even with full attribution and considerate seo practices, it seems
possible some publishers may take exception to full reproduction. There are
existing services like viewtext.org that would be infringing by the same
standards, but I assume it'll take fairly major notoriety or traffic to
attract the ire of the papers. Or is this clear cut fair use?

------
repsilat
> ...give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by
> using the Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways)

I'm glad "in other ways" was added there. To me Readability serves two
purposes - To make long-form content nicer to look at, and to make awful
websites bearable. I can understand people supporting providers of long,
interesting articles, but I'd hate to accidentally donate to a site covered in
obtrusive ads because I thought there might be some interesting content hidden
somewhere.

------
limmeau
If the Instapaper app causes a Readability payment to the visited website,
isn't that against Apple's new "no in-app purchases without Apple getting a
cut" rule?

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mike-cardwell
So as a website owner I get paid each time a paying readability user views my
website in readability?

If I get my pages to load a second copy of themselves inside a hidden iframe,
except including the extra readability bookmarklet js, will that allow me to
"game the system" by getting every visitor to my site to view (in the
background) my site via readability...

I would never do this. It was just a thought...

------
eli
More details in the NYTimes:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=2&hpw)

Isn't this just begging to get sued by some publisher who _really_ doesn't
want to participate? IANAL, but it seems like they'd have a decent case.

~~~
modernerd
I suspect that they'll have to allow publishers to opt out if they wish to, in
the same way that Instapaper does: <http://www.instapaper.com/publishers>

I don't think it likely that many publishers will opt out, though. They'll
still get ad impressions for the initial page load in addition to the kickback
for the visitor's readability click.

~~~
eli
Statements like, The company plans to pay them "regardless of their
participation." make me think otherwise

~~~
modernerd
I didn't read that as 'the company will pay them even if they explicitly don't
want to be paid'. I read it as, 'the company will attempt to make contact and
pay them even if they haven't yet signed up.'

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jergason
I often feel like my reading on the Internet is more hurried and distracted.
Part of that is due to the medium, but I wonder if part of it isn't due to the
writing style of writing for the Internet. It will be interesting to see how
writing on the Internet changes if this takes off.

------
quellhorst
My old readability bookmarklet isn't working now.

~~~
beaumartinez
Really? Mine (yet) works fine. I'm using Google Chrome 8; my bookmarklet is:

 _javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=true;readStyle='style-
apertura';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-
wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='[http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability....](http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x=+\(Math.random\(\)));document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='[http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability...](http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css;_readability_css.type=text/css;_readability_css.media=all;document.documentElement.appendChild\(_readability_css\);_readability_print_css=document.createElement\(link\);_readability_print_css.rel=stylesheet;_readability_print_css.href=http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-
print.css;_readability_print_css.media=print;_readability_print_css.type=text/css;document.getElementsByTagName\(head\)\[0\].appendChild\(_readability_print_css\);}\)\(\);*)

~~~
beaumartinez
Why all the downvotes? I only wanted to point out that the old bookmark worked
fine for me. Is it due to the JavaScript I posted (in an attempt to help a
fellow commenter) "breaking the page"? If so, perhaps that is more the
website's design's fault rather than mine. (I'd edit the JS it into a gist if
I could but the editing time has passed; additionally, I can't delete the
offending comment.)

Perhaps next time you could point out why someone has been downvoted as well
so as for them not to repeat their mistake again?

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience!

~~~
sjs
I think it's because this page has been rendered unreadable now. The irony of
this comments page having poor readability is not lost on me :)

