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Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism? (2020) (wired.com)
11 points by walterbell on Aug 29, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Ironic seeing as Wired try and push more then 40 cookies on me. Maybe they should follow their own advice.


Can you imagine a world where people stuck post-it notes on everyone they passed? Soo we would all be thickets of moving mounds of post it notes - great hate - slowed progress. Similarly the cookie baggage we accumulate - great hate - slowed progress. Sure the free content has to be paid for. What if the ISP's charged $5/month. Then divided that into micro-pence = 5 million of them. They know the URL you clicked - 1 micro pence per click. At end of month pay those micro-pence to the URL. Baggage is zero as you carry nothing, they count and collate a list = no baggage carried. You could also allow session cookies to reduce the login burden. It is possible that such a system would reduce traffic to self finance? Comments/critiques?


Nothing wrong with the idea but getting agreement of all publishers would be the biggest hurdle.

We have already seen how a small subscription model has worked out with other forms of media. Which is that you end paying as much, or more, for the same content than you did previously.


My POV was the standard fee, divided and spread among the rest. Paywalls would have their own fee and bypass this. In effect a fraction of a pence, summed over your total views of each site, with the $5 split amongst them.


tldr: NPO (dutch BBC like) ditched GOOGLE AD services creating a proprietary solution (www.ster.nl) that racked a lot of more money (during 2020) only with contextual tracking


They didn't entirely replace Google Ads, etc. They proxy it stripping out the user identification:

> Like Google’s product, the new system is automated. When a user visits an NPO page, a signal automatically goes out to advertisers inviting them to bid to show that user their ad. But there’s a crucial difference: With Google and most other ad servers, advertisers are bidding on the user. With Ster’s new ad server, advertisers are blind—they receive no information on the user. Instead, they get information about what the user is looking at. Pages and videos are tagged based on their content. Instead of targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.




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