
402: Payment Required - nmcfarl
https://medium.com/@humphd/402-payment-required-95bc72f06fcd
======
ChuckMcM
This is fine as far as it goes, but RPM on a blog post is what $1.50? $3.00?
So to replace your ad revenue you need to charge 1/3 of cent, not the "15
cents" that was shown in the mock. That would be $150 RPMs which would make
Google blush.

There is a fundamental disconnect in how writers value their writing, and how
readers value their writing. Trying to understand the economic forces that
drive information value will really help writers understand what is, and
isn't, valuable prose to readers.

Too many people are stuck in the mindset of "buy a book/article" etc, but the
web is 99.99% one and done. So nobody wants to pay 15 cents for something they
will never read again, and may not even like the first time. But have them pay
a third of a cent? Sure, if they go back an re-read it 100 time's they will
have paid you 30 cents for it. The value would be emergent rather than
demanded.

Until journalists can internalize that, this conversation will remain
unresolved.

~~~
JacobJans
This comment is wrong on many levels.

1\. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the
websites I operate.

2\. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have
loyal readership that keeps coming back.

3\. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for
that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay
1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is
absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article
cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of
reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your
numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in
3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.

~~~
Namrog84
30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though.
There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less
reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want
the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web
isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or
mirror the content somewhere else for cheap.

I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many
others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article.
I'd likely go somewhere else

~~~
PinguTS
But not, if you write in a language that is not English but a native language
to the country you are living in, like German, French, Spanish, Portugeese,
Italy, Polish, …

Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French
(Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like
in the US.

If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like
Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the
audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.

------
wtbob
> Apple’s new content filtering and São Paulo’s Clean City Law both use code —
> one via the law, the other through software APIs — to enable the creation of
> ad-free public spaces.

Except that content filtering isn't about the creation of ad-free _public_
spaces, but rather ad-free _private_ spaces. There are (or should be) only two
parties to a web request: the client and the server. Neither Apple, nor the
State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is legitimately a party to my session.

The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I
am free to configure it however I want; the server, of course, is free to try
to determine whether I'm actually viewing its ads or not, and may refuse to
serve my requests if it chooses.

As for micropayments, I love the idea but people in general seem to be
extremely resistant to them. For one thing, they definitely don't want
unbounded monthly charges. That could be solved by having a set amount of
money, divided up by the sites one visits—but the service that does that would
be a privacy nightmare.

~~~
s73v3r
"There are (or should be) only two parties to a web request: the client and
the server. Neither Apple, nor the State, nor Google, nor anyone else, is
legitimately a party to my session"

The ad is arguably part of the content, as it's what's paying for you to see
it in the first place.

"The reason that I'm free to use an ad blocker is that it's my browser, and I
am free to configure it however I want"

That is a very selfish view, one which ignores everyone else except yourself.
What if your company decided that you're not worth paying, but still wanted
your work?

~~~
Retra
Let's say I'm offering you food. If someone else paid me to feed you horse
manure, would you have an obligation to eat it? No, because it's not food. It
doesn't become food just because some _other_ party is paying me to feed it to
you. You certainly aren't coming to me because you wanted horse manure. You
don't have a deal with me regarding horse manure. _I_ have a deal with the
third party, and that has nothing to do with you.

~~~
s73v3r
This is completely ignoring the fact that ads are how the content you enjoy
gets paid for, and part of the social contract is that, since people won't
pay, that the content will be paid for by ad views.

~~~
simoncion
This discussion never ends in changed minds. Best to abort it before you waste
too much time.

Remember that there is a camp who thinks that _they_ can do what they wish
with the data sent to _their_ computer -including refusing to process said
data-, and there is a camp who feels that one has a _moral_ imperative to
process _all_ data sent by a website to one's computer.

These camps rarely see eye-to-eye.

~~~
s73v3r
It's not a moral imperative to process all data, it's a moral imperative to
pay others for the product of their labor that you're benefiting from.

~~~
simoncion
> It's not a moral imperative to process all data, it's a moral imperative to
> pay others for the product of their labor that you're benefiting from.

There's a _very_ reliable method of ensuring that one who labors and posts to
The Internet gets paid: refuse to deliver the fruits of the labor to others
prior to payment.

If camp #2 _actually_ thought as you claim they do, they would advise all
Internet-publishing laborers to eliminate the ad-blocking worry -and keep the
dishonest among us honest- by putting their creations behind a paywall.

------
hapless
No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed
in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human
psychology.

Every single example provided by the author takes one of two formats. Either
you pay a monthly bill for "all you can eat," or you make discrete payments of
$1-$2-$10. These are the models that work.

It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that _it 's not worth my
mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel._

It is not a question of whether it is built into your phone, your browser, or
any other platform. It's what's built into your _brain_. "Pay as you go" is
incompatible with the observed preferences of consumers.

I'm sure that most sites that rely on advertising would have rather been paid
directly by consumers, such that they would not have to rely on ad networks or
other third parties. But consumers don't want to spend a penny or a nickel at
a time. It's not worth the mental transaction costs. Ad views were the only
realistic way to squeeze a penny out of a page view.

~~~
CPLX
That's flatly untrue. I've got a good example: SMS

When texting started it was almost universally $.25 or $.10 or so per text.
One would definitely be aware of that fact when communicating with friends but
you get over it because it's useful.

Wait I have another example, $0.99 songs via iTunes. That was the model that
created the largest music retailer in the world from whole cloth.

It's not that complicated, all it would take is for someone (gee I wonder who)
to standardize the price (or price tiers) and have a quick modal OK to
continue on to the article for one credit, or equivalent.

~~~
Already__Taken
You're describing things that were inconvenient and made convenient with a
nominal transaction cost.

You couldn't just buy one track before. Now you can for $.99. You couldn't
send a text message at all before.

Try $.10 per email and see what traction that gets.

~~~
CPLX
Sure and I used to watch SNL for free over the air, now I pay $8 a month for
Hulu. Things change.

The market, like all markets, is defined by people's willingness to pay and
their next best alternative. Make the transaction cheap and nearly
frictionless and it might be the choice with the highest utility.

------
gorena
Why is the "independent web" in all of these articles exclusively referring to
people trying to make money with ads? I make software and put it on the web
for free. There are millions of Github repositories like this, are they not
the "independent web"? I post pictures on various sites, under CC0. In high
school, I made games and put them on the web, always for free.

It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(

~~~
s73v3r
People like to eat food and pay rent. Not everyone can afford to give away
their hard work for free.

~~~
toomuchtodo
What if their hard work is determined by the marketplace to have no value?

~~~
s73v3r
Then people won't use it.

But knowing the internet, people will claim up and down that it doesn't have
any value, _while still using it._ And then call the person greedy for wanting
to feed their family.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at
all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

Like Taylor Swift on Spotify.

~~~
s73v3r
You're paying for Spotify with ads.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Just barely. I hit mute when they come on. I'd rather miss the next song than
listen to an ad.

~~~
s73v3r
Then pay for Spotify.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Like I said above:

> Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at
> all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

------
gue5t
"I would argue that your browser should be helping you safely, securely, and
easily make purchases of content and services across the web."

It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a
global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient
virtual-reality strip mall.

We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire.
Infrastructure and upkeep costs are why ISPs are actual businesses. The right
answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-
to-peer content distribution, which spreads costs much more evenly _while_
decreasing latency by bringing data closer to edges of the network. You
support Wikipedia-over-IPFS by flipping a switch in your settings to help host
it, rather than doling out a handful of USD to the incessant baleful banners
of Jimmy Wales' face.

Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal
income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware.

~~~
fraserharris
It's tragic that the author's highest desire [is to be able to pay for
content].

We already pay for [network connectivity].

Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of
social welfare].

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of
communism]._

Indeed, those dirty reds and their communist system of... voluntary patronage.

But, then again, maybe you're right on UBI. It has been espoused by known
communists like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and F.A. von Hayek.

~~~
fraserharris
You are correct. I've corrected it to socialism. Its a forced redistribution
of wealth. My point is the gaping logical flaw in the original post. How is
this the top comment?

~~~
gue5t
What precisely is the logical flaw? My line of thought was that it's
productive to delineate the costs borne by those who wish to create and share
digital objects into two categories: costs of designing/making the thing and
costs for producing copies.

The latter can easily be defrayed with appropriate network technologies, which
is along the lines of the original intent of the Web as a platform for sharing
information; the former requires some change in how we fund creative work.

I think it's productive to address them separately, as their relative scales
are vastly different for digital objects compared to physical ones. Since the
incremental costs of producing additional copies of physical objects are so
high, it's easy to absorb design costs into the price paid for each copy, but
for digital objects this makes much less sense.

I am advocating a humanitarian system of patronage of the arts, yes. I think
it's worthwhile to have faith in the ability of people to self-actualize when
their basic needs are met, and I'm hoping we can thereby support creative
endeavors of modest scale, like writing articles for the Web. A coercive
system like communism has been shown to not work for various reasons, but
socialist basic income on top of a relatively free market seems viable.

~~~
fraserharris
You are creating a delineation to in order to obfuscate that you want to
deprive content creators the _option_ of charging you directly for their work.
The unit costs of digital copies are irrelevant when the alternative,
patronage, doesn't covering the fixed costs of designing/making. Instead, you
want society to bear that cost because ... anything on the internet should be
free.

------
mankins
Working within the existing HTTP spec is an idea worth pursuing. Of course I'm
biased because my startup is in the process of doing just this by implementing
a 402 server. [http://www.fairtread.com/](http://www.fairtread.com/)

While the status code is a good place to start, you really need Accept-
Monetization and the corresponding Content-Monetization headers to fill out
the picture. We propose these to work the same way that Accept-Language and
Content-Language headers work. Essentially the user passes along the
monetization methods they allow, and when there's a mismatch on the server, a
402 error occurs...along with instructions on how to fix that.

The ideal system would allow multiple ways to pay for content, and would
include advertising as a "free" option.

~~~
throwaway4421
Building on HTTP 402 looks like a good path forward, but some tough love: the
name fairtread.com looks like "fart read" or "fair read". The 't' gets lost in
the middle because "read" makes more sense than "tread" in the context of
paying to read web content.

------
drivingmenuts
We need to also then figure out how to handle a situation where a purchaser is
unsatisfied in some way with the paid-for content. How do you refund their
money (regardless of the amount)?

It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments,
but they still have your money.

~~~
LaurentVB
Do you ask for a refund when you bought a newspaper and, after reading it, you
don't like what you read? Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on
the app store and you stop using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your
need? I think it probably depends on the amount you paid, though...

~~~
coolnow
>Do you ask for a refund when you bought a newspaper and, after reading it,
you don't like what you read?

No, because i know what to expect from different newspapers and in the very
very rare cases where i buy them, i do that only after skimming the front and
relevant pages.

>Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on the app store and you stop
using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your need?

Yes, all the time.

What's your point?

~~~
LaurentVB
Asking because it seems unusual to me, and I think those situations are really
similar to what GP was referring to: "I paid to see what you had to say, but I
don't like it so I'd like my money back". I can think of a lot of similar
situations (movies, digital music, books, ...) where I wouldn't consider
asking for a refund _after_ I have consumed the content, whether I liked it or
not.

------
oneJob
Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux
on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to
a new form factor because it has been succesful in the past or because there
is a sulerficial similarity rarely ends up being a good design decision. Often
when it works it is not at all for the reasons one initially presumed.

UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set
as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this
that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web
site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to
proceeding with the use case?

To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet
with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but
that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry.
Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify
is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays
Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel
there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists,
that’s another story.

The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its
physically parts. It will have many solutions.

I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly
what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and
personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet
at the moment.

------
rubbingalcohol
This seems like great advocacy for
[http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/](http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/)

My first concern is the lack of (popular) payment providers that enable
microtransactions. If you want to pay $0.15 for a web page, and there's a flat
30 cent + 2.9% processing fee on every transaction, the model doesn't work.

Second concern is using primarily commercial payment providers nothing to
break the oligopolies created by payment gateways, which is what makes these
transaction fees so high in the first place. I would love to see
cryptocurrency support baked into any implementation of browser payments, as
microtransactions and user freedom are both well supported.

~~~
pjc50
Why are there transaction fees when seemingly all you're doing is updating a
value on a ledger? Fraud. Investigating transactions involves humans, which
gets expensive.

Global-shared-ledger cryptocurrencies aren't suitable for this case: a global
record of every web page the world views is far too huge a quantity of data.

------
melling
We don't want ads and we don't want to pay for anything. Unfortunately, I
don't think we've worked out the economics for that model.

~~~
jordigh
Who says we don't want to pay? Some of the most profitable newspapers are
completely paywalled and have been for years. Someone wants to pay. I will
gladly pay myself.

But I will only pay for ad-free content.

Remember how cable TV used to have that promise? You pay for your TV and you
don't have ads. I remember that back in the day my cable provider would
broadcast listings of today's programming schedule to cover up ads in the
source transmission. Now you pay and you watch ads. If we do pay for websites,
I hope we pay for no ads.

~~~
narrowrail
I got cable in 1980 (HBO and all), but I remember ads being shown when I
watched cable (except HBO) at that time. Was the ad-free cable before 1980?

~~~
jordigh
If you are talking about the US, I am not. Cable in Mexico would hide ads.

------
ck2
All the web has to do is figure out why people will spend $1 at a vending
machine for tiny terrible snack that is completely unsatisfying but won't
spend $1 on a mobile app that they would use every day.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are several highly relevant and clearly apparent reasons:

1\. Snack food is _very_ highly consistent. As with other mass-market goods,
it's entirely homogeneous. You know precisely what you're getting. Information
goods are virtually by definition _not_ homogeneous. Virtually all successful
sales models for information goods are based on some level of subscription or
branding (frequently by author, venue, or publisher/publication, particularly
periodicals).

2\. The typical vending-maching payment mechanism has no extended-tail risk.
Deposit a few coins or bills, receive your product (yes, I suppose there are
debit/credit based vending systems). _Every time I make a debit or credit card
payment, particularly online, I 'm creating a risk of future account fraud._
That's something I weigh heavily, _have experienced in the past_ , and quite
simply do not consider worth any putative convenience benefit. Paying cash is
a very reliable stop-loss risk mitigation strategy.

3\. Privacy. Particularly for information goods, leaving a perpetual trail
that _I specifically_ paid for _specific items of content_ is ... highly
unappealing. I don't pay for my _physical_ books with credit (or use
"loyalty", a/k/a Snoop Card programs). It's why I don't and won't use Kindle
or similar apps (I _do_ read eBooks, but open, untracked formats, on other
devices).

Oh, and I really don't buy much from vending machines. Prefer fresh foods or a
good street vendor if I can find one.

------
Mz
I don't see this flying because putting this info into my web browser means
that lending someone my smartphone or tablet empowers them to _spend my money_
, practically without thinking about it. Yeah, no. I think things like Patreon
and tip jars just make more sense.

~~~
yakult
It's worse than that: considering that browsers are never completely secure,
especially against user stupidity, it means it empowers random websites to
spend my money.

------
nmcfarl
Here's an old hacker news discussion about the 402 code's slot in the spec
which is fairly interesting:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236)

------
NH_2
> Of course not everything on the web needs to cost something, and I’m not
> arguing that every site charge for its content, and go behind paywalls.

I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more
sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how
these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a
user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News
still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad
revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100%
of the 402 payment?

------
Kenji
"At the point where you want to read one, you are presented with a Buy now
with 1-click button. Clicking it does just what it says, and suddenly, instead
of being denied access to that book’s content, you can read it."

What a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has ever downloaded something knows how
confusing and difficult it is to press the right button (instead of some ad or
virus or whatever). The idea that one single click could reveal my identity to
the site owner AND wire my money to them is truly frightening.

~~~
saint_fiasco
In the articles' vision of utopia, people pay for downloading things, so
putting misleading ads not only becomes unnecessary, but actually harmful for
the content provider's bottom line.

------
hellbanTHIS
There is no way people are going to pay for individual articles, what might
work though is letting people customize what kind of ads they see.

For example I want to see car ads, movie trailers, new gadgets and I want to
see what's on sale at grocery and hardware stores with 10 miles of the zip
code I give it. No video, no animation, no tracking, no targeting, no fucking
Taboola. And if an ad pisses me off I want a "never show me ads from this
company again" button.

------
IgorPartola
There are not many sites I would pay for that are purely content. I think HN
is one of the few that could get away with charging $5/month and not lose me
as a reader. The biggest problem is that most sites can't transition from free
to subscription without losing most of their customers. Even a site that
proves to be extremely useful could not do that without a competitor popping
up that'll offer the same service for free.

------
larssorenson
There is also the situation of security to consider. Although browsers have
made great strides in improving security, if we start including our payment
information directly in the browser it could lead to potentially interesting
situations. If a malicious entity escapes the sandbox or some memory reading
vulnerability, they could figure out the payment information. Of course
there's also XSS and CSRF which could potentially allow a malicious entity to
silently authorize payment by the user for their own website, all of which
would have to be considered not only by the websites implementing the 402 API
but also the browser. Sure we're already working to fix these problems for all
other data and account purposes, but if history is any indicator then I don't
think we're ready just yet.

------
pbnjay
I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a number of years (even coded
a micropayment solution which was terrible). But this article reminded me of
that and just gave me a thought:

    
    
      What if you flipped the burden to online commerce providers? 
    

For example, stripe provides a small toggle so that your integration can add
an extra 0.1% to all transactions (so your $49 SaaS offering pays an extra
$0.049). In exchange you get a small JS code to embed on your marketing blog.

I'm not crazy about the bitcoin bandwagon, but this seems like a good entry
point for distribution. Multiple providers other than stripe can deposit to
the same bitcoin address stored in your browser, and then that bitcoin address
is paid out according to the sites you visited that had "opted in" to the
revenue sharing.

------
yc1010
That is all well and good if you can use Paypal (As per screenshot in article)

Some of us can not use Paypal (and are not being told by paypal as to why
after being banned) so have to use bitcoin, bank transfers, prepaid cards and
cash for day to day transactions.

~~~
ceejayoz
Why are you considering rough conceptual mockups to be a finalized list of
payment processors? Hell, as-is it already shows non-PayPal options.

~~~
yc1010
I see Stripe, Paypal, Visa/Mastercard

all centralized companies that do restrict access to their systems for all
sorts of reasons (often not shared with the person being blocked)

all are "pull" methods where your account can be charged in an unauthorized
manner

bitcoin, prepaid cards (such as paysafecard), cash and bank transfers are
"push" methods giving the owner more control and cheaper fees for that manner

Not sure how practical paypal would be if you only want to spend a few cents
(or more interestingly fractions of a cent!)

~~~
ceejayoz
Again, it's clearly a mockup. Complaining about the processors shown is like
complaining Mozilla's going to adopt a light-grey-on-dark-grey color scheme
because they show that too.

You can also get prepaid Visa/MasterCards, incidentally. No trackable
information required.

------
tempVariable
I like it, and I would like to be the first meta comment about the topic.
Please reference my proposition from 10 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10274226)

I actually have been thinking about this for some time and while there are
many things to consider, this is a problem Mozilla could get behind. My
assumption about them is still unsubstantiated, but given enough research, it
is a solution that is in serious need.

I might do a write up on my detailed thoughts on the subject.

------
jlarocco
Good luck with that.

When web advertisements finally die off, I imagine subscribing to one or two
news websites, maybe the NY Times and a local site. Other than that, I'm not
interested in paying for web content.

The funny thing is, the sites I'd be most likely to pay for don't have ads in
the first place.

I really miss the days when people made websites and posted things on the web
because they enjoyed it and were trying to be helpful, and not because they
were out to make a buck on ad clicks. Quality has plummeted so far it's not
even funny.

------
atm0sphere
we really don't need an HTTP status code level paywall anywhere.

------
warcode
In reality I don't think ads are a problem, as long as they aren't annoying,
are hosted by the webpage I am on, have zero trackers and are related to the
content on the page.

Though the best system will always be free primary content with paid "premium"
content. That way if you enjoy the content of the webpage you can support
them, but you aren't required to pay to figure out if you do enjoy it.

------
humble_dev
Maybe internet providers should pay fee to the website owners. Same as cable
tv providers pays HBO or other channels. We could log the time each user spent
on website and then similar to spotify pay proportionally to the website
owners. For each internet connection we could pay e.g. $10 that goes to
content creators.

Ofcourse Facebook and Google would earn most of this money.

------
cognivore
Sorry, I have to say it. If someone isn't willing to pay money for your
content or service then you probably aren't offering anything of value.
Instead you're surviving off of ad based revenue that you're generating while
people are figuring out you are offering nothing of value.

------
JoshMnem
The real story should be: why don't consumers have full root access on their
mobile computers so they can do whatever they want? It shouldn't be
controversial for Apple to let consumers have a little more access, it should
be controversial that no major mobile OS allows full access.

------
PretzelFisch
Any way the solution to this problem will be the same as streaming movies and
music. There will be an aggregator or curator you pay money to for access, and
they will pay pennies to the content creators per view.

------
fredgrott
I submit that subscriptions at the level of micro payments work..at least on
mobile devices..$36 Billion in 2016.

Do it the same way first month is the free trial..want to keep reading each
month than pay the month subscription

------
draw_down
I don't think a law proscribing billboards is particularly analogous to a
content-blocking API.

------
Filligree
Another solution would be Google Contributor.

Why is this not accessible outside of America yet? >_>

~~~
Spivak
> Hey, we took this perfectly fine content and made it worse by plastering it
> with annoying banners and spyware. If you give me $5.99 a month I'll make it
> not shitty again.

This is not a business model I want to support. I'm happy to pay for good
content, but if the supposed "value" I would get from giving you money is not
being annoyed and tracked then you'll never see a penny from me.

There are a few unicorns who have figured out how to have good free content,
have no ads, and make money, like the Thrilling Adventure Hour, and Welcome to
Nightvale podcasts. They get my money because their model is actually adding
value with swag and live shows rather than making their content worse.

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SolarUpNote
Couldn't ad networks move from javascript to server-side?

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danvesma
i don't hate this.

