
Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience - jrwiegand
https://firstlook.firefox.com/proxy/v4/
======
rchaud
It's about time somebody tried this. $5/mo. is fair; I don't need a million
sites to be in the catalog, but I would like a bit more variety eventually.

People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off,
publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait
articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.

I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed
News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site
on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the
regular Bfeed.

~~~
jimktrains2
> It's about time somebody tried this.

I mean , isn't this essentially the idea behind patreon? You batch the
micropayments payments into single transactions on the credit card network to
reduce the marginal cost of the fixed fees?

Didn't Google already do something similar with new subscriptions?

Didn't flattr do this a decade ago?

It's not a new idea, and as I ranted elsewhere, is only even required because
of the fixed fees on credit card transactions.

~~~
rchaud
I've never heard of Flattr, whereas I think most people know Mozilla or at
least have heard of them through Firefox.

I'd expect Mozilla to be more invested in the "pay with $, not ads" approach
compared to Google. Mozilla owns Pocket, which has been relatively good at
finding longreads type material on the net and rendering it in a reader-mode
view, so I think they're a better cultural/philosophical fit.

I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content
providers individually. That's not what I want.

~~~
jimktrains2
> I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content
> providers individually. That's not what I want.

Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to
pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to
go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.

What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get
that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is
the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to
batch them.

The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people
may not like fot whatever reason.

------
dewey
In case you are also wondering how that works and what's supported.

Based on
[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring-
alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/) it looks like it's a collaboration
with [https://scroll.com/](https://scroll.com/) and supports sites like:

\- Vox

\- The Atlantic

\- Buzzfeed

\- Gizmodo

\- Slate

~~~
swebs
Wow, all of those are considered far left sources according to
mediabiasfactcheck.com, except for The Atlantic, which is only center left. I
don't want to pay $5 a month to only hear one side of the story.

~~~
pjc50
And who is this mediabiasfactcheck.com? Is it bias all the way down? It
appears to be some guy called Dave Van Zandt.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check)

> "Until October 2018 MBFC rated China's Xinhua News Agency as "least
> biased",[205] but the rating has since changed to the somewhat more
> reasonable "left-center bias".[206] Xinhua has been criticized by Reporters
> Without Borders as being the "world's biggest propaganda agency",[207][208]
> and is regarded by Wikipedia as a source "to treat carefully""

Are you _sure_ that Buzzfeed is to the left of the Communist Party official
outlet?

~~~
belorn
Do you prefer the study from harvard?
[https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud](https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud)

They define buzzfeed as center-left.

------
SanchoPanda
I got the following when I tried the link to subscribe:

Thank you for your interest in Firefox Ad-free Internet!

This product isn't available yet, but we're working on it. Would you please
click the Next button to take a short survey to tell us what you think? At the
end of the survey we'll get your (optional!) e-mail address so that we can let
you know when the Firefox Ad-free Internet beta launches. If you don't want to
give feedback, click here to skip to the sign-up page.

Click the 'Next' button to take the survey.

~~~
lol768
If you skip the survey you end up on scroll.com:

> Thank you for participating in this survey! We would like to invite you to a
> free trial of Firefox Ad-free Internet, a name we used in this survey for a
> partnership with our friends at Scroll. You can sign up today at
> www.scroll.com Thank you very much for helping to make the internet a better
> place!

~~~
SanchoPanda
That clarifies it quite a bit for me, thank you.

------
Touche
This is sort of unfortunate news to me, as I take this as a sign that they
won't do adblocking by default. I think this is a mistake; users want ads to
be blocked. Especially on mobile, where it's more important from a perf
perspective. Brave has ads blocked, Opera has ads blocked. If Firefox wants to
follow the lead and be a privacy focused company like they say, then they need
to block ads.

~~~
sergiosgc
Successful ad blocking would kill the advertisement revenue stream. This
revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills
content.

I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money,
not via ads. Give me that option.

Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads
pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.

~~~
C4stor
Ads pay a lot more than that on quality websites such as the Scroll ones. 50c
per thousand page is so low I can't see how you find it fair. We're talking
lets say 1000h of work, and your fair price is 50c ?

~~~
stevenwliao
If they read 3 articles a day, they've decided that quality journalism across
multiple publishers should cost 50 cents a year.

------
outime
Note the following:

* This is yet not available.

* It's not "Ad-Free Internet" but more like "a dozen websites ad-free".

* They expect a monthly payment - which is fine, but the first thing I imagined from the title was a built-in blocker in the browser but this is quite different.

~~~
SimeVidas
Firefox already has built-in tracking protection, which blocks trackers and by
extension most ads.

------
dreen
This looks like it's a bundling of Scroll into Firefox, probably with
different UX. It seems dishonest to me if you're gonna say "Ad-Free Internet"
and "We share your payment directly with the sites you read" and really only
do that for 12 domains. The internet is much bigger than that. Find a way to
do this for ALL sites!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
To be fair to them, they have to start somewhere. If they had to get every
single site on the internet onboard as a prerequisite (as you seem to be
suggesting) they'd never launch anything.

~~~
dreen
Yes I agree, it's impossible to cut a deal with every website. So a completely
different solution is needed.

edit: maybe I am being too harsh... maybe this is a starting point to
something bigger. Let's hope!

------
gowthamgts12
It looks like if you're a publisher you've partner up with Mozilla for this.
Isn't this becoming a little dependent on Mozilla?

Publishers are already dependent on Google and if Google wants to screw them
over, they can. How is this different from that?

~~~
islon
It's not perfect, but I'd rather trust mozilla than google.

~~~
robertAngst
I'm the other way, google is probably the best company in my lifetime. Its
recent Apple exploit 0day, I'm a bit skeptical of the programming.

Google has the resources to make better products.

~~~
dangerface
> Google has the resources to make better products.

True but for the past 5 years or so they have been interested in making more
money not better products.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
And yet I've had to switch all my Lubuntu devices to using Chrome because
Firefox can't seem to manage to remain open without eventually locking up the
entire system.

~~~
glenneroo
Did you try filing a bug report?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
If I had filed a bug report I would have then had to gather logs and other
such things to get the developers whatever information they need to fix it,
and frankly I just don't care about helping them fix it enough to bother with
that. I didn't choose it for these devices it was just the default. For my
purposes it was just much easier to switch to a browser that wouldn't hang the
system if it was left open for a few hours.

Edit: I appreciate the downvotes, as though answering this question with
honesty is undesirable behavior. Keep up the good work /r/svwebdev!

~~~
glenneroo
For the record I didn't downvote you, and I agree being honest doesn't deserve
this response, but I would guess it's related to the high amount of devs here
who are probably upset that you took the time to complain, yet don't want to
take the time to at least check if a bug report exists. In some respects I
agree, in that, if we want change the world and fight the "good fight" against
the near-monopoly Google has on browsing, we need to band together and
everyone do their part.

"All my Lubuntu devices" makes it sound like you have a lot of devices, thus
increasing the likelihood of being easy to reproduce. There might even already
exist a bug report which you could contribute to.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It seems so easy to reproduce, just install Lubuntu and run the Twitch
dashboard for a few hours. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already a bug
report, a cursory search of bugzilla shows several hundred bugs containing the
words like "hang" and "freeze".

And, again being frank, I don't care enough to bother with scouring that for
one that seems related enough to add to it, and then again reproducing the
problem and collecting the appropriate logs and etc. And if experience is any
indicator it'll just languish in their bug database for months or years
anyway. I've got shit to do man, so I'll just use a product that works,
thanks. It is not my responsibility to fix yours.

And I only brought it up because someone mentioned how much "better" a product
Firefox is and my experience differed.

------
heinrichhartman
I welcome this effort! Enabling alternative revenue streams for web content
will be critical to make the place less abusive.

Unfortunately, the big successful players seem to make pretty good $$ by
selling customer data, so they have little incentive to change this.

Mozilla/Firefox is in a unique position to launch an effort like this, since
it controls a decent browsing platform with a significant user base.

I'll sign up the moment this becomes available in the EU.

~~~
err4nt
Mozilla's userbase isn't really that significant, <5% is like ~2/50 people,
where Chrome for example is 2/3 of all people using the internet by
comparison: [https://caniuse.com/usage-table](https://caniuse.com/usage-table)

~~~
r3bl
Those stats are from StatCounter. Literally the second sentence in their FAQ:

> Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally.

Having a low number there is a feature.

------
pointillistic
I think this is a re-branding of Pocket that they own. Same price
[https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1](https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1)

~~~
kzrdude
Sounds like a good idea since they never did communicate effectively about
what pocket is and why I should get it. Even the website is vague, I'm not
looking for an "ad-free space", not sure what that even means. I'm not
interested in renting a room.

------
jimktrains2
I don't understand why credit card networks (and banks in general) haven't
stepped up their game with regards to micropayments (say, under $5). The
marginal cost of any transaction is insignificant, and would be outweighed
even by penny fees. Even if it required some extra steps for the vendor to
become authorized to accept micropayments, and even with strict requirements
around the number or total value of transactions a single card can be used
with a single vendor during a time period, I think it could still work in
everyone's favour.

One of the biggest fees on micropayments are the fixed transaction fees.
Stripe is currently 27‰ + 5¢, which on a $1 transaction is nearly 8%! If those
fixed fees could be made to go away for low-cost transactions, micropayments
would work within the current system. Most people can accept 3% overhead, but
most won't accept 8%.

It just seems like the entire problem is manufactured and not really an issue
that can be solved until the banking systems just decided to solve it by
changing their policies. I'm not even proposing a technical fix, it really
seems to be a problem entirely with the current policies.

Edit: yes, I understand that Stripe is a gateway and processor, not an issuer
or network, and that banks are often issures, but not the network. Yes, I
understand that cards each have their own interchange rates, but many gateways
like stripe have been just "averaging" them to provide low-volume retailers a
fixed, predicable coat per transaction. I'm just saying that if the networks.
E.g. Visa or MasterCard (or even discover or Amex despite being much smaller)
could change their policies and requirements regarding fees for low volume
transactions to remove fixed fees, and the vast majority of the issue with
micropayments would be solved. I trust that the major payment gateways and
browsers could work out a protocol to make use credit-card based micropayments
very quickly and in a way that doesn't require additional third parties,
beyond the payment gateway chosen by the person accepting the micropayment.

~~~
petulla
Hear.. hear.. This was one of the original features Marc wanted to add to
Mosaic. We're so far past that moment and it's still not to be found.

------
fimdomeio
Unless this is expanded to enable any site to join the system, one might argue
it's creating a special web for a few choosen giant media sites which I guess
it's not what mozilla wants for the web.

------
jbverschoor
Yeah nice and all.. But it'll be like tv: Even though you pay for the tv
service, after a while they will simply put in ads again. The incentives for
publishers are simply too tempting.

This is not for me.

------
jelv
So a browser with a build in Flattr / Patreon / Liberapay option. Sounds like
a good option.

------
silon42
Personally, I don't necessarily mind ads, unless intrusive. I mind: \-
tracking \- javascript being used everywhere (IMO, for pure viewing,
javascript should be optional).

~~~
mgbmtl
That's why I like Adblock Plus, even if many find their position to be highly
controversial. i.e. to charge advertisers to be whitelisted as "acceptable
ads" if they respect certain criteria.

When left unchecked, advertisers are to websites what kittens are to
furniture.

~~~
rglullis
You should review your position regarding Adblock Plus. There is nothing on
Acceptable Ads that tries to cover if the ad publisher is tracking the user or
not.

------
matt_morgan
Mozilla has to do this to show they're trying. They're not just about getting
everything free. It will be good if it works, but it also works for them if

a) no publishers sign up

b) no customers sign up

(as long as they try hard to make it happen).

------
curt15
Anyone remember Google Contributor back in the day? How does this compare?

------
d2wa
If you’re interested in this, make sure to check out Flattr and install their
extension. It tracks your browsing over the course of a month, splits your
monthly contribution among participating creators you’ve visited, and then
deletes the collected data. Works for YouTube, domains, Twitter, GitHub,
Twitch, and more. You set the monthly budget.
[https://flattr.com/contributors](https://flattr.com/contributors)

------
nottorp
This is a nice idea, but how do you expand it to global scale? Something
automated perhaps, but the complexity is overwhelming.

I have no interest in Firefox's initial selection, but I'd gladly pay a
monthly subscription to a collection of _my_ local news sites.

How do we go from 5 american "online magazines" to a global network? I don't
know.

------
MrGilbert
I wonder what an average user generates in terms of ad-revenue per month. You
know, the mix of your-favourite-media-provider, your-favourite-news-sites,
your-favourite-social-media.

If that's more or less than $14.99, I'd be willing to pay it for an "ad-free"
internet. This will never happen, I guess, but just thinking about it...

------
camgunz
I'm super into this, and I was tempted to sign up immediately. But then I
realized I have privacy/tracking concerns; does anyone have a line on what
Scroll/Mozilla say on this? I couldn't find anything after a (very shallow)
search.

~~~
rusk
I did go to sign up immediately, only to discover this is pure vaporware!

~~~
camgunz
Wow it's just a survey. That's so non obvious. Boooo, kind of.

------
WAHa_06x36
That survey they throw at you if you try to sign up is just complete and utter
garbage, and asks you questions that both contradict each other, are in the
wrong order, and ask you things you can't possibly have a good answer for at
this stage.

------
eitland
Signed up.

That said, this is a practical implementation of some patterns that belongs on
[https://userinyerface.com/game.html](https://userinyerface.com/game.html) ;-)

~~~
SanchoPanda
Did you sign up to be notified or were you able to subscribe to the paid
service?

~~~
eitland
To be notified.

------
buboard
Everybody is talking about journalists but what about the rest of the web? I
regularly read the best opinions and tidbits on forums like hn and blogs. Who
is going to fund those?

------
d2wa
This won’t do much good for all the small publishers you visit every day,
though. It’s only for a select few large publishers.

------
tshanmu
this would be great if it works as advertised! :D

~~~
steve_taylor
It’s an MVP. It doesn’t have to work.

~~~
assafmo
So what does viable mean?

~~~
dpwm
It's conceptually viable; it's just not materially viable yet.

In all seriousness, I seem to remember that there was a practice of testing
for viability using very similar means – basically, are people interested
enough to click through, then collect emails.

So perhaps this is a path to demonstrate viability by questionnaire.

------
ing33k
so Firefox will play the gatekeeper role now ?

------
juliushuijnk
Alternative: [https://launch.blendle.com](https://launch.blendle.com)

------
hereme888
If they offer free trials so I can evaluate its worth to me personally, maybe
I'd try it. Otherwise I'll keep fighting every website I visit with my massive
list of ad-blockers and privacy tools. At least the latter option is free. And
if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't
do it.

~~~
maccard
> At least the latter option is free.

This is _exactly_ why websites are as bad as they are right now.

> And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I
> won't do it.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you want to support an alternative
source of funding for content, then this appears to be a great positive step
towards an internet without tracking and invasive advertisements, promoted by
the only alternative to Google in the browser market.

If you want to take a philosophical stance, you should reject the tracker and
leave websites that don't adhere to your strict criteria.

~~~
hereme888
Ya I guess my statements were extreme. Probably written late at night.

------
mikkelam
If the same service could be used for paywalled news sites as well, this could
be great

~~~
SanchoPanda
4.99 would not even cover the NY Times or WSJ alone.

~~~
mirimir
That's because their prices are ridiculously high. Sure, I want access to NY
Times. But maybe I'll read 1-2 articles per day. Not the whole damn paper.
Same for any other site.

~~~
SanchoPanda
Blendle has been offering this service for years, though I believe they
recently are backing away from it. I used it for a while several years ago,
but I found using small transactions frequently to be very uncomfortable (as
in off-putting, not so much inconvenient).

~~~
mirimir
I vaguely recall Blendle. And checking, they want ~€2 per article, which is
way too much. Consider that a digital subscription to The NY Times costs
$250-$500 per year.[0] That's 365 days, with numerous articles published per
day. But for argument sake, divide by 5000. That's just $0.05-$0.10 per
article.

0) [https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-
subscription-3480](https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480)

~~~
SanchoPanda
It was in the range of US$0.25-0.75, when I used it, but wouldn't you expect
an a la cart offering to be more expensive than a bundle? The advantage is you
dont have to pay that larger full year fee.

------
OrgNet
Are you going to get a report each month of where the money went?

------
trqx
> This app works best with JavaScript enabled. At least the page seems ad-
> free.

------
carapace
> This app works best with JavaScript enabled.

------
jasode
As others stated, the submitted title of _" Ad-Free Internet by Firefox"_
overstates what this actually is: pay $4.99/month for ad-free experience on a
handful of media publishers' websites[1].

(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)

The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as _" ad-free
internet"_ so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.

[1] [https://scroll.com/sites](https://scroll.com/sites)

(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT,
Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of
$4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct
digital subscriptions.)

~~~
Fernicia
It's surely fair to use the page title as the HN link title.

~~~
jasode
Ok, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to
search for _" ad-free internet"_ and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12
Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have:

    
    
      "<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"
    

It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text
people actually see just says _" Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you
hate"_.

EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs
because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.

~~~
matt_morgan
It's the page title. It appears e.g. in the tab heading (but yours may be very
small).

~~~
luckylion
Mine are also very narrow, but yeah, it's weird that they only set it with JS.

    
    
      <title data-react-helmet="true"></title>
    

is in the source.

------
ekc
If only they'd check their pages for typos before posting. (No ending
punctuation on the last block of text.)

