It's all just spending though. Tide is trying to get you to pay a little extra for the name brand over the generic. Instead of a Toyota SUV you could have picked up a used beater - or kept driving the car you have for a few more thousand miles. Netflix wants you to shell out extra "discretionary" money to watch some TV shows you don't need to see.
And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money to read a a website, then people might do that too - if they deemed the content worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Millions of people already pony up $1000 for the latest smartphone so they can read stuff online at all hours of the day. I really don't think the web creators should be this worried about whether or not people actually want their stuff. They desperately want it; in fact, most people are probably literally addicted to it.
Of course, maybe you're trying to draw the distinction between paying for a good and voluntarily making a donation. If that's the case, I'm with you - the latter idea is a loser. But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. I think a lot of people think they learned this fundamental truth that people don't want to pay for things to read on the internet, when what they really learned is that people don't want to be interrupted and asked for their credit card details. But if you can make that process seamless, people will happily fritter away thousands clicking through links.
> But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it.
People would maybe do it, but ads wouldn't go away because there's x times more money to be made in the ad business than people micropayments.
The main issue with Brave's funding model is that it relies on consumer goodwill. While people might be willing to spend $0.02 to read a news article, they're less likely to allocate $10/month to funding online content creators "just because". There has to be some sort of incentive for most people to spend their money; if they can get the same experience for free, only a small minority will ever bother to pay.
So the question is, how do you provide consumers with such an incentive without charging for the content itself (as that can be problematic for the reason you mentioned), without offering "an ad-free experience" for paid users (as Brave blocks ads by default regardless of whether users pay or not), and without requiring users to incur the mental load of trying to decide whether the paid experience is worth it over the free one?
I often hit the free limit on say articles on New York Times and similar sites. After seeing the article title I am often interested enough to click on it to read it. But the count of free articles is full so I can't read the article. Now if it said "If you want to read this article there will be $0.50 charge in your next month's internet bill, I would probably go ahead and click and pay it in the next bill.
Problem is I don't want to open an account with just every possible newspaper and magazine on the web. What is needed is some common mechanism for most if not all content providers.
Maybe $0.50 is too much. Maybe $0.25 would be more like ok.
Your point about having a single account is correct, but the sheer amount of decisions when browsing the web would quickly become overwhelming.
Say that in an hour you browse two articles from the NYT, one from the WSJ, five Wikipedia pages, one click on a BuzzFeed listicle, and one blog post from Joe's blog.
Is the NYT article worth $0.50? $0.25? What about the WSJ one? And surely Wikipedia is worth as much as a NYT article. But the BuzzFeed one is definitely worth less. Maybe $0.05? It was moderately entertaining after all. And what about Joe's blog?
Having to do dozens of these micro decisions per hour is exhausting, and is the whole point behind having a system that allocates funding automatically. It's not optimal, but it avoids decision fatigue.
I'n thinking that the content-provider obviously would set the price, I would decide whether to click if it is 25 or fifty cents.
I don'think it would be more exhausting than being in a bar and putting coins into the jukebox.
Automatic funding sounds interesting, was it explained in the article somewhere? Or is the point that we should use 100 million to develop a working automatic funding algorithm since no such thing exists yet?
I think the big thing is trust in the market. Consumers tend to be conservative in which parts of the market they trust. They don't want to pay for something if they have no idea if they're going to get their money's worth. With existing markets, or any market that lots of people are using, people trust that it's okay so they join. With something new, are you going to pay money to access something if you don't know if it's any good? Moving towards free+ads is always easier than towards payment up front.
That said, Netflix is incredibly successful with something new, but that also took years. Netflix worked hard on the reputation that they had the best, most interesting new TV shows that you couldn't get anywhere else. But it takes years to overcome that inertia.
And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money to read a a website, then people might do that too - if they deemed the content worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Millions of people already pony up $1000 for the latest smartphone so they can read stuff online at all hours of the day. I really don't think the web creators should be this worried about whether or not people actually want their stuff. They desperately want it; in fact, most people are probably literally addicted to it.
Of course, maybe you're trying to draw the distinction between paying for a good and voluntarily making a donation. If that's the case, I'm with you - the latter idea is a loser. But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. I think a lot of people think they learned this fundamental truth that people don't want to pay for things to read on the internet, when what they really learned is that people don't want to be interrupted and asked for their credit card details. But if you can make that process seamless, people will happily fritter away thousands clicking through links.