I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services.
Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.
Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.
Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.
That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.
I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.
I absolutely hate the idea of serving garbage byte to users - even if it is only 500 kB worth.
The internet already has enough useless cruft. CNN loads 4.9 mB of data with no adblockers. Fox News loads 2.6 mB. MSNBC loads 4.2 mB. The Guardian (US Edition) loads 4.3 mB. Padding a site with 500 kB (or really any amount of bytes) is unfair to mobile users without unlimited data plans.
A user who visits your site twice per week and navigates to 5 different pages on your site each visit receives about 12 mB of garbage bytes per month.This isn't that big a deal if only one site is doing it, but imagine if that's how all sites did it?
If people would support the site all the garbage would disappear for everyone. If a dollar for a byte is a bit too high, you could place a ceiling at $5000 - it would be around 100 bytes for a dollar.
It would be an alternative to ads. Ads are a padding plus unfairness and dishonesty. They also track you and run code on your machine. This would be just a padding.
A creator has to eat and people don't have to use his site. Those that like it and would want to make it even better can pay.
And don't forget that a first step was to create a _lean_ website. 200kB + 500kB padding would still be more than 2 times less then any website you mentioned. For this to work the website would have to prove from time to time how it would work without useless bytes. You could also serve less useless bytes.
However it could still work with added latency instead of bytes. Example: 50ms every 100kB.
I can see where you're going with this, but it seems unreasonable to clog everyone's pipe with garbage bytes. A simple usleep() before sending the response should have the same effect.
You're right. Selling latency may be more reasonable. Certainly cheaper for a creator.
Useless bytes have a few properties however. You can do more silly things with them. People like to do something unreasonably silly from time to time.
You can treat useless bytes as virtual goods. You could serve: unicode code points, animal names, or even sentences from public domain books. Then people can explore the catalog and have a tiny bit more personalized experience, than just buying 40ms.
They can also serve as a manifest against ads, because they are honestly useless bytes with a safety hatch.
Exactly. For me it's analogue to Patreon: Why would anyone give money on Patreon? To finance a creator for everybody?
If you would sell all the useless bytes you would serve the clean version of your website.
Ads are useless bytes. But a bit dishonestly useless. You can block them to some extent. Some will not get served to you. However there are still some ad divs or native ads that are uselessly sent to you in case of ad blocking.
I propose sending honestly useless bytes, but give people ability to strip them out for money.
Then everyone can be happy. People can support a creator. People can get a better product by paying. A creator can eat.
Why add extra garbage to websites when there's already a whole industry built around serving garbage? Just let users pay for removal of ads for everyone (instead of just for themselves), that would be novel and useful.
Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.
Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.
Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.
That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.
I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.