
Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me - saimiam
We recently launched an adblocking product which saves you data on your cellular and Wifi plans. As we were working on Datajoy, we also understood that for creative people, adblocking sucks big time. The more people block ads, the less ad revenue websites make.<p>Well, we at Datajoy figured we would try to play fair by paying for content we currently view for free. We are calling it the &quot;F-U, Pay Me&quot; model (FUPM).<p>You can set yourself up to receive payments from users of Datajoy with minimal effort (NO profile creation necessary!) by following the instructions on the FUPM page (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datajoy.us&#x2F;fupm.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datajoy.us&#x2F;fupm.html</a>). As our users visit your site, we will PayPal you for every visit at 1c&#x2F;visit on the 1st of every month.<p>Once you do that, it would be great if you could come back this post and let us know that you have set yourself up for FUPM. Thanks!
======
timvdalen
Sounds interesting, but I don't really get where the money is coming from. I
don't see any paid plans for Datajoy.

~~~
saimiam
As of now, we are funding the payouts ourselves. Not scalable for sure so when
it starts pinching the pocket, we'll have to figure out how to continue paying
content creators.

~~~
gtardini
i like the concept very much, but what's your idea for a sustainable future
revenue model?

~~~
saimiam
We are looking into a few possibilities

1\. Users pay a standard, fixed monthly rate into a pool from which we pay
site owners. We hope this works like insurance where sporadic users underwrite
power users and everyone wins.

2\. Bring in Wall Street and public universities to underwrite the internet.
Hitherto, the internet has been the domain of ad companies. For example, the
stock market would benefit greatly from knowing the true health of companies
but they are currently shut out since ad companies have a lock on raw data.
Similarly, imagine the sheer scientific horsepower we can unleash if any Ph.D
student could just firehose raw (depersonalized) internet data to identify
patterns.

3\. Present hype aside, a Coin may actually work to underwrite an ad free
internet. Instead of blue skies ideas like replacing http, a browsing based
Coin is a real option.

------
michaelmior
It would be nice if there were some prefix or suffix to the file name to avoid
collisions. Not that I know of other reasons to create such a file now, but I
could see it happening in the future.

~~~
michaelmior
On a related note, I'm confused why the hash is even required. Why not just
name this file datajoy.txt or some other static name?

It's also a shame that the email has to be the only content in the file. For
documentation purposes, it would be nice if subsequent lines would be
guaranteed to be ignored so some documentation could be added on why the file
exists.

~~~
saimiam
We just wanted to make sure domain owners were setting up a guaranteed unique
file name which was unlikely to be needed by some other service.

Also, we wanted to minimize the amount of logic needed to start making
payments which is why we ask that the HTML file name be a well known hash
function and the content be a single email address.

If this content payment protocol gains traction, we would like to use some
form of the ACME protocol which Let's Encrypt uses to verify domain ownership.

~~~
michaelmior
Why would allowing extra content in the file complicate the logic? Either way
you're reading the first line of the file for an email.

Anyway, I don't want to sound totally down on the idea in general. It's an
interesting approach and I'd be happy to see this work!

~~~
saimiam
Good point @ reading only the first line. Letting people add comments can't
derail the parsing too much.

------
mrguyorama
How is Datajoy better than competitors like ublock?

~~~
saimiam
Adblocking is essentially a commodity where companies use community curated
blacklists to block ads.

Our USP, though it isn't truly unique, is that it is a network level
adblocker. No more installing 3-4 apps on each device on your network. Just
point your router to our DNS and you're done. In one swoop, can safeguard
entire networks - think schools, coffeeshop, airport wifis.

We want to bring innovation in a few areas -

1\. Technical - Identify and blacklist adservers in near real time

2\. Business - become a one-stop subscription service where ad supported
websites can make money from DJ(Datajoy) users without forcing them to
subscribe to each site. FUPM is an early prototype of where we want to take
the internet - don't bother with profile creation and subscriptions. Just tell
us where you want to be paid and we'll pay you for every visitor we send to
your site.

Edit1: forgot to add that we want to do business as a public benefit company.
Our vision is to become the Mozilla of adblocking - let others like Adblock
distort their original mission by inventing "Acceptable Ads" to make money.
We'd like to keep ourselves focused on zero ads along with "Acceptable Use" of
the internet.

------
quickthrower2
That has to be a big chicken and egg problem.

~~~
saimiam
Not sure what you mean. If no one sets themselves up for payments, we don't
lose any money while also continuing to block ads.

Maybe I'm being dense but I don't see the chicken/egg issue.

~~~
quickthrower2
Maybe I misunderstood the model. But i would guess you'd need lots of relevant
sites offering to sell access to their content to make it worth a reader
signing up.

But for the sites to use your system they'd want to know there are lots of
readers signed up so they'll make a reasonable amount of money.

~~~
saimiam
Oh, i see what you mean. In some distant future when a lot of people are using
Datajoy(DJ) to block ads, content creators will (hopefully) want to let in DJ
users despite them blocking ads.

The usual solution to a chicken/egg problem is to aggressively solve for one
side of the equation and hope the other side is forced to engage. In the case
of adblocking, the users of adblockers are actively seeking tools to block ads
which means the content creators will be motivated to engage with adblock
providers. Does this make sense?

~~~
quickthrower2
Yes I see. That makes sense. Thanks

