
Life After Content Blocking - robin_reala
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/31/life-after-content-blocking/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+monday-note+%28Monday+Note%29
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btbuildem
Not sure if this describes Google Contributor, but I've been thinking about
this as a solution:

Build an ad network that serves blank ads - content that does not try to
capture the user's attention, on the contrary, tries to blend into the
background of the host site.

Have users sign up for the service, paying whatever nominal amount into their
account balance. Whenever a logged-in user requests a page somewhere on the
internet, the service outbids all the other ad networks to make sure the user
sees the blank ad instead. Whatever fraction of a penny that cost gets debited
from the user's account.

If I understand the ad mechanism correctly, this will allow 1) users to filter
out ads while paying for content, 2) hosting sites to collect a small payment
and 3) the service to take a tiny cut to contribute towards operating
expenses.

Anybody care to poke holes in this?

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yaur
Ghostery/abp is cheaper.

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btbuildem
Suppose the cost is $1/month and you buy the right to tell STFU to all the
anti-adblock arguments?

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ascagnel_
I'd imagine this would also have the net impact of pushing up the cost of
display ads, so you may also start to see a shrinking inventory if this
happens. It's probably a net gain for all users in that scenario.

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amyjess
I remember people talking about micropayments for articles when the dot-com
bust happened in 2000. It didn't happen, because people aren't going to keep
making purchases when browsing the news or their favorite blog or what have
you.

Sure, we have some more infrastructure in place now than we had 15 years ago,
but we're still not going to put up with (for example) Google Pay or Apple Pay
confirmation dialogs every time we click on a link to a news article. And
don't think they can just bury the confirmations: app stores have gotten into
huge trouble in the past for not providing enough security surrounding IAPs,
and we had enough stories of children unknowingly running up their parents'
credit cards with IAPs that the FTC had to get involved. We're not going to
see anything that lets you unknowingly run up a credit card while browsing the
web.

Social media has probably done more to make paywalls more difficult than
anything that existed in 2000, too. If you post an article to social media,
your friends are going to complain when they click a link and find out they
have to pay to read the article. Thus, people don't submit hard-paywalled
links to social media so as not to piss off their friends, and hard-paywalled
sites find their mindshare and thus their relevance evaporating in favor of
sites that don't do this. To get around this, paywalled publishers like the
New York Times poke holes in their paywalls for Facebook referrers, because
they'd rather lose a bit of paywall revenue then get shut out of social media
and see their mindshare drop like a rock. So many people nowadays get their
news from links posted to social media that the NYT must be taking a huge hit
from their Facebook exceptions. It's a catch-22: they directly lose money by
poking holes in their paywalls for Facebook, but they'll also indirectly lose
money through loss of relevance if they tell everyone who wants to share their
articles on Facebook to pound sand.

Honestly, the best case scenarios are:

\- Patreon-style crowdfunding models, where enthusiasts pay content creators
before the content is created, and then it's available to everyone with no
strings attached.

\- Content is offered as a loss leader in order to get people onto the website
in order to buy the _real_ moneymaking product. What the real product is,
that's up to marketing departments to decide, but it's not the content, and
it's not the ad space.

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iwillreply
There is a service I read about in the Netherlands, called Blendle - that
charges micropayments for articles read from news sites.

I've never used it personally, but their 1-year-later writeup:

[https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-
experiment-w...](https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-
with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc)

References allowing seamless refunds, for content that the reader doesn't find
up to quality. With clickbait articles getting higher refund rates.

"At Blendle we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much
higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some
of them are basically clickbait in print."

While referencing for content as a whole "On average, in only 5% of the cases
a user asks for a refund."

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vkb
I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, both on my own, and when
we diagram these models out in business school, and I haven't been able to
come up with a model where both content-producers and consumers win. Their
needs are directly at odds with each other.

This is probably because we are thinking about this the wrong way. The news
sites today are engineered to catch your attention. But the market rewards
companies who keep it. The New Yorker, The Economist, and NYT come up again
and again on this site and others as examples of "the only news source I pay
for" because of their quality content. Simply put, they don't make you feel
stupid when you read them.

The problem is the amount of attention required to keep someone's attention is
much less than the amount required to catch it, which is why BuzzFeed exists.
What do people usually read on their lunch breaks? HuffPo. Until that changes,
the landscape will be what it is.

I'm extremely interested in how Aeon.co will make those choices. They manage
to consistently produce interesting, relevant, long articles but have no ads
(yet). In an interview from 2012[1], its cofounder says, "Our business model
is to spend the first year or so investing significantly in the magazine in
order to build up a strong following or community of interested people –
readers, writers, artists and photographers. Once we have established that
reach we will start to build opportunities for generating revenue. We are not
sure what forms these will take and are watching closely how other
publications are doing so – from micro-payments for articles, to higher levels
of service for subscribers, live events, and online fora." This quote tells me
that even those in the industry have no idea and everyone is still making it
up as they go along.

[1][http://www.frostmagazine.com/2012/10/brigid-hains-on-the-
lau...](http://www.frostmagazine.com/2012/10/brigid-hains-on-the-launch-of-
aeon-interview/)

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skybrian
I'm hoping Google Contributor gets more traction:

[https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

~~~
gress
Yes, all forms of monetization of content on the web should belong to Google.

/s

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pornel
Flattr tried to do something like that, but they're not big enough to break
chicken-egg problem.

Google already owns a lion share thanks to adsense and doubleclick. If I
understand correctly this lets you pay to disable Google's ads, so it's pretty
neat: I've heard many people say they'd rather pay than be the product, so now
they can, on millions of sites already (apart from that "Contributor is not
yet available in your country." :)

~~~
gress
In no way does this stop people being 'the product'. For that to be true it
would have to stop google amassing personal data on you, and stop them
deliverering advertising to you everywhere.

This goes nowhere significant towards that goal.

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hellbanTHIS
We might see the creation of syndicates where you pay $10 a month for access
to Collection of Sites A and $5 for Collection of Sites B, etc.

Maybe A will have major newspapers as members and B will have most small town
papers, and C will have tech blogs and D will have right-wing political blogs,
or something. The fee gets divided up between the members based on page views.

~~~
ascagnel_
That's the cable TV model, and everyone hates it. At the end of the day, you
probably only need a few of those sources but will end up paying for most of
the collections since you'd want one in each collection (world/national,
local, tech, sports, politics, etc).

