It's about time somebody tried this. $5/mo. is fair; I don't need a million sites to be in the catalog, but I would like a bit more variety eventually.
People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off, publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.
I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the regular Bfeed.
I mean , isn't this essentially the idea behind patreon? You batch the micropayments payments into single transactions on the credit card network to reduce the marginal cost of the fixed fees?
Didn't Google already do something similar with new subscriptions?
Didn't flattr do this a decade ago?
It's not a new idea, and as I ranted elsewhere, is only even required because of the fixed fees on credit card transactions.
I've never heard of Flattr, whereas I think most people know Mozilla or at least have heard of them through Firefox.
I'd expect Mozilla to be more invested in the "pay with $, not ads" approach compared to Google. Mozilla owns Pocket, which has been relatively good at finding longreads type material on the net and rendering it in a reader-mode view, so I think they're a better cultural/philosophical fit.
I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.
> I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.
Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.
What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to batch them.
The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people may not like fot whatever reason.
Contributor was a micro-payments subscription thing were you could buy a subscription and actively participate in the regular ad-exchanges. The idea was that you could support websites by outbidding crappy advertising on Google’s platform and see pictures of cats (or whitespace) instead. It doesn’t take much money to outbid just about every advertising you’d see in a normal month.
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor.html
In principle, I could be interested in this, but they'll need a much better range of partners than what currently shows up on https://scroll.com/ before it looks worthwhile to me. Less of the celebrity/pop-culture gossip, and more real news, please.
Yeah as a non-American I'd love to see WaPo/NyT as part of a $4.99 deal, but I can imagine that they are reluctant to sell access in their home market at that price.
This is the second project I've seen by Mozilla whose page is light on details, with no obvious way to find out more. The first was Firefox Lockwise, https://lockwise.firefox.com/
There's just a button to get it. Well, I want to learn more before I commit to something, and I think others would too.
Wow, all of those are considered far left sources according to mediabiasfactcheck.com, except for The Atlantic, which is only center left. I don't want to pay $5 a month to only hear one side of the story.
> "Until October 2018 MBFC rated China's Xinhua News Agency as "least biased",[205] but the rating has since changed to the somewhat more reasonable "left-center bias".[206] Xinhua has been criticized by Reporters Without Borders as being the "world's biggest propaganda agency",[207][208] and is regarded by Wikipedia as a source "to treat carefully""
Are you sure that Buzzfeed is to the left of the Communist Party official outlet?
"Left" and "far left" are usually considered two different things... And this website rates them simply as left. But the rest of your comment is very pertinent, I do hope they include a wider variety of sources.
What's up with all these comments pointing out that "they are all far left sources" suddenly? Did this thread get posted in some other community and there's an influx of these users now?
The user you're responding to has been on HN since 2013. A lot of people are just really tired of the single point of view that's so prevalent (and pushed so aggressively) in our industry.
I got the following when I tried the link to subscribe:
Thank you for your interest in Firefox Ad-free Internet!
This product isn't available yet, but we're working on it. Would you please click the Next button to take a short survey to tell us what you think? At the end of the survey we'll get your (optional!) e-mail address so that we can let you know when the Firefox Ad-free Internet beta launches. If you don't want to give feedback, click here to skip to the sign-up page.
> Thank you for participating in this survey! We would like to invite you to a free trial of Firefox Ad-free Internet, a name we used in this survey for a partnership with our friends at Scroll. You can sign up today at www.scroll.com Thank you very much for helping to make the internet a better place!
It's one of their trial site things; I doubt they expect people to go directly to it from HN, they expect people to know that these products don't actually exist yet.
Yes, because it's one of their trial sites. It's supposed to look exactly like the real deal, but not actually work. Normally you'd get to it from a blog post or landing page explaining this.
This is sort of unfortunate news to me, as I take this as a sign that they won't do adblocking by default. I think this is a mistake; users want ads to be blocked. Especially on mobile, where it's more important from a perf perspective. Brave has ads blocked, Opera has ads blocked. If Firefox wants to follow the lead and be a privacy focused company like they say, then they need to block ads.
I don't necessarily want ads blocked, especially on sites that I regularly enjoy that I don't pay for with money.
I do want to block the underlying tracking/fingerprinting/profiling etc.
This is why I'm very much against Brave - I don't really see why they have the right to edit or censor other people's revenue models and replace them with their own. That seems.. unethical.
It is the users who are censoring the pages by choosing to use an ad blocking browser. I don't think the fact that Brave is offering an alternative revenue stream taints their browser's ad blocking capabilities. It is a feature that is available on almost all other browsers, natively or through a plugin.
"Other excessive bloat" often includes malware. Less seriously, it also includes autoplay video and scams.
If ads were safe (i.e. text-only, no JavaScript, no video) and the publishers actually vetted the products, I wouldn't block them. I don't care that a physical NYT has ads. It's the algorithmic sale and distribution of ads that broke the model.
I work in ad technology for a publisher. We put in a lot of effort to make the tech fast, lightweight and secure for our visitors - we hate bad ads too. We screen our partners, use whitelists and monitor what JS is running on the site.
This being said - things sometimes slip through the cracks. Somebody with a browser-based 0-day will pay huge CPMs to insert their ad and own thousands of machines. We can't
prevent this - if you have any ideas on how, I'd love to hear it.
I don't think reviewing code for malware scales, especially in a competitive industry like online ads. You have to automate it, and automation isn't foolproof.
You can either: 1) disable JS in ads entirely, or 2) give all users an option to pay for an ad-free site.
Since few publishers do either, I'll continue to use my adblocker and simultaneously pay the publishers I think we can't do without (e.g. ProPublica).
I agree that getting directly payed by users is a much better outcome. But the reality is that people don't want to pay us directly (in the US markets; we charge directly in other markets and it's working beautifully)
Perhaps Javascript ads should be banned by law. It would be easier to enforce compared to investigating what the corporation actually does with the info that it collected from the user.
Can you define often? It seems quite rare actually for a malware to be distributed online without user intervention, with the recent Firefox 0-day being one of theses cases and only touched a small proportion of people.
The web is quite secure already and sure ads network is a good vector but so is Hacker News, Reddit and Facebook, which nobody cares about (have you ever not clicked on a link on any of theses platforms and looked at the URL first?).
I seriously hate that argument of security, it's just wrong.
When you visit a serious web site, like t-online.de or spiegel.de, with an up-to-date iPad and you're getting popups with porn or gambling offers that cannot be closed (they can, but reopen instantly), when you cannot use the back button anymore, and the only way to regain control of your browser is to either reboot the iPad (that's what many normal people do) or you force-close Safari... then you've caught malware from a big ad network that t-online.de or spiegel.de use.
Happened regularly about a year or two ago, certainly more often than every month, haven't seen it since, though.
> have you ever not clicked on a link on any of theses platforms and looked at the URL first?
That's not what happens.
> I seriously hate that argument of security, it's just wrong.
Maybe you should contemplate the possibility that you're wrong.
> to regain control of your browser is to either reboot the iPad (that's what many normal people do) or you force-close Safari...
That's seems more like a browser issue, but none the less, any links on Hacker News could do the same.
I don't consider that malware to have to close an application, just like I don't consider a malware a link that rick roll me (which still force me to close a tab ;) unless I want to stay on Youtube).
> That's not what happens.
Aren't we talking about running malicious JS? Any link you click can contains malicious JS, yet you click on that link without thinking about it, but when it's an ad that may contains malicious JS, you block it altogether.
I don't understands really what you means by not what happens.
> Maybe you should contemplate the possibility that you're wrong.
I contemplate each time I'm discussing with someone about it. I still haven't got any evidence about it.
Each time I ask someone that does it for "security purpose", when they don't answer by "do your own research" (which I always try when they say that even if it's absurd to have nothing to defends yourself), the best example they always have is either link to some report with stats that doesn't define malware, or the Forbes case of when one of their ad was a fake Java update. If that's malware, then here we go, HN now serve malware too: Click on that URL to update Java: https://forbes.com
If we were arguing blocking Javascript for security purpose, now that does make sense (still pretty unlikely, but based on news, it seems to happen much more).
It doesn't matter. It could be 1 out of every million hits, but it's still a source of malware. Most of us don't upgrade to the latest browser version the minute it's released, which makes us vulnerable.
> ads network is a good vector but so is Hacker News
Uhh... what are you talking about? HN has minimal JS, and they wrote it. Some ad networks are injecting JavaScript into your browser that they have never seen before and didn't write themselves.
I may trust, let's say, NYT not to serve me malware with code they wrote in their offices, but NYT is not the entity that wrote the JavaScript delivered in their ads.
> have you ever not clicked on a link on any of theses platforms and looked at the URL first?
You seem to be arguing that hyperlinks are an attack vector, which assumes such a broad interpretation of "attack vector" that the word becomes meaningless. It's like saying that an airplane is an attack vector because it can fly you into a war zone. Yes, it can... but I get to choose where I'm going.
Regarding that choice: these platforms show you the domain you're clicking through to, so you have a chance to bail. And with an ad blocker, you don't have to be as afraid to visit a malicious site. I have JS and ad blocking on by default, and I whitelist a site when it seems trustworthy enough.
It does matter, you used the word often, that word has a meaning.
> Uhh... what are you talking about? HN has minimal JS, and they wrote it. Some ad networks are injecting JavaScript into your browser that they have never seen before and didn't write themselves.
You never click on the article link? That page can be anything, thus include any JS.
> I get to choose where I'm going.
Thus you check every link before clicking on it? I feel like that's not the case, but I would applaud you to be consistent if you do.
> And with an ad blocker, you don't have to be as afraid to visit a malicious site.
Ad blockers only block ads, not malicious JS. If you visit a website which include malicious JS, it's just as bad as an ad that contains malicious JS.
> I have JS and ad blocking on by default
Blocking JS that's a good way to stop malicious JS. Blocking ads then is redundant, what does it give you more?
I consider ad blockers a security issue: too many ad servers in recent history have been used as malware distributors, including Google Adsense. Since publishers don't secure their systems (Google's vulnerability here is known for years and they don't fix it but instead opted to kick out malicious advertisers if/when they catch them), adblockers offer protection.
Same for me, if your website cause excessive bloat with their ads, then I'll just avoid it (unless that content is worth the excessive bloat, like Youtube ads).
As soon as I can pay for the content instead, I do it.
Ads is just another way to pay... if it's too bloated (thus too expensive) you just don't get it, or go find something less bloated (aka less expensive), that's it.
I use an ad-blocker on Firefox but I think if Firefox started blocking adverts by default it could find itself in a dangerous situation. A lot of sites would feel justified blocking Firefox in that case, which would do more damage to the already-shrinking user base. I know many sites have "turn off your ad-blocker" currently and I usually just leave at that point, but I could imagine a movement to more actively crush Firefox if it had ad-blocking baked in.
Although maybe long term this will happen anyway, so Mozilla has nothing to lose. I mean Chrome will have its ad-tech-friendly blocking-lite, Firefox will be the only real ad-blocking available, and sites will start to make moves to directly discourage Firefox use ("I see you're using Firefox, switch to Chrome to view our crappy site").
Successful ad blocking would kill the advertisement revenue stream. This revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills content.
I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money, not via ads. Give me that option.
Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.
Ads pay a lot more than that on quality websites such as the Scroll ones. 50c per thousand page is so low I can't see how you find it fair. We're talking lets say 1000h of work, and your fair price is 50c ?
In my experience, US$5/CPM is about right for general content focused on an industrialized market, but:
1) it’s based on page views where ads are rendered. So ad-blocked users aren’t in the denominator.
2) most of that revenue is driven by clicks, not ad views. So users like me, that rarely click on ads, ever, probably earn publishers about 50cents/cpm.
Sure but that price that you suggest is for everyone, not only ad-block users or people that doesn't click on ads.
At the end of the day, if it cost them more than an ecpm of 0.50$ to produce that content (and I'm pretty sure it does, because most ad-based website never made ton of profit and that was the case even before adblocking became popular), than that just doesn't make sense either to have a price that low.
I'm happy to pay by seeing ads or by paying money. I'm not happy to have my personal info floating around on the servers of the ad-industry in order to deliver targeted ads.
Subscriptions risk making silos. Once you have paid $5 for site-group-A (one million sites) it's annoying to find that the site you are reading belongs to site-group-B which belongs to some other subscription. This is the HBO-vs-Netflix problem.
Keep in mind that Firefox is a "user agent", their job is not to make websites happy, it's to make their users happy.
Ad-blocking is a lot like using a DVR, or a VCR. Someone sends you data and you have the right to not view all of that data. The company has the right not to send you the data if you don't pay for it, but they don't have the right to tell you that you must view all of it.
>This revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills content.
Content that is funded by ads is often not content I particularly care about. If it matters enough people will be willing to fund it, if not, let it die.
I agree, but the problem here is that not all pages are of equal value. The Guardian ought to be able to charge me more per page if it was written by one of their full time employees. I can't see how Mozilla will ever be able to figure out how to apportion the money, without just exposing my "balance" and the cost of visiting each page.
I take it as a sign they're exploring other options. If this takes off, I would expect them to more seriously consider including adblocking as a default.
* It's not "Ad-Free Internet" but more like "a dozen websites ad-free".
* They expect a monthly payment - which is fine, but the first thing I imagined from the title was a built-in blocker in the browser but this is quite different.
This looks like it's a bundling of Scroll into Firefox, probably with different UX. It seems dishonest to me if you're gonna say "Ad-Free Internet" and "We share your payment directly with the sites you read" and really only do that for 12 domains. The internet is much bigger than that. Find a way to do this for ALL sites!
To be fair to them, they have to start somewhere. If they had to get every single site on the internet onboard as a prerequisite (as you seem to be suggesting) they'd never launch anything.
And yet I've had to switch all my Lubuntu devices to using Chrome because Firefox can't seem to manage to remain open without eventually locking up the entire system.
Mozilla's userbase isn't really that significant, <5% is like ~2/50 people, where Chrome for example is 2/3 of all people using the internet by comparison: https://caniuse.com/usage-table
Sounds like a good idea since they never did communicate effectively about what pocket is and why I should get it. Even the website is vague, I'm not looking for an "ad-free space", not sure what that even means. I'm not interested in renting a room.
I don't understand why credit card networks (and banks in general) haven't stepped up their game with regards to micropayments (say, under $5). The marginal cost of any transaction is insignificant, and would be outweighed even by penny fees. Even if it required some extra steps for the vendor to become authorized to accept micropayments, and even with strict requirements around the number or total value of transactions a single card can be used with a single vendor during a time period, I think it could still work in everyone's favour.
One of the biggest fees on micropayments are the fixed transaction fees. Stripe is currently 27‰ + 5¢, which on a $1 transaction is nearly 8%! If those fixed fees could be made to go away for low-cost transactions, micropayments would work within the current system. Most people can accept 3% overhead, but most won't accept 8%.
It just seems like the entire problem is manufactured and not really an issue that can be solved until the banking systems just decided to solve it by changing their policies. I'm not even proposing a technical fix, it really seems to be a problem entirely with the current policies.
Edit: yes, I understand that Stripe is a gateway and processor, not an issuer or network, and that banks are often issures, but not the network. Yes, I understand that cards each have their own interchange rates, but many gateways like stripe have been just "averaging" them to provide low-volume retailers a fixed, predicable coat per transaction. I'm just saying that if the networks. E.g. Visa or MasterCard (or even discover or Amex despite being much smaller) could change their policies and requirements regarding fees for low volume transactions to remove fixed fees, and the vast majority of the issue with micropayments would be solved. I trust that the major payment gateways and browsers could work out a protocol to make use credit-card based micropayments very quickly and in a way that doesn't require additional third parties, beyond the payment gateway chosen by the person accepting the micropayment.
Unless this is expanded to enable any site to join the system, one might argue it's creating a special web for a few choosen giant media sites which I guess it's not what mozilla wants for the web.
Yeah nice and all.. But it'll be like tv: Even though you pay for the tv service, after a while they will simply put in ads again. The incentives for publishers are simply too tempting.
Personally, I don't necessarily mind ads, unless intrusive.
I mind:
- tracking
- javascript being used everywhere (IMO, for pure viewing, javascript should be optional).
That's why I like Adblock Plus, even if many find their position to be highly controversial. i.e. to charge advertisers to be whitelisted as "acceptable ads" if they respect certain criteria.
When left unchecked, advertisers are to websites what kittens are to furniture.
You should review your position regarding Adblock Plus. There is nothing on Acceptable Ads that tries to cover if the ad publisher is tracking the user or not.
Mozilla has to do this to show they're trying. They're not just about getting everything free. It will be good if it works, but it also works for them if
If you’re interested in this, make sure to check out Flattr and install their extension. It tracks your browsing over the course of a month, splits your monthly contribution among participating creators you’ve visited, and then deletes the collected data. Works for YouTube, domains, Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, and more. You set the monthly budget.
https://flattr.com/contributors
I wonder what an average user generates in terms of ad-revenue per month. You know, the mix of your-favourite-media-provider, your-favourite-news-sites, your-favourite-social-media.
If that's more or less than $14.99, I'd be willing to pay it for an "ad-free" internet. This will never happen, I guess, but just thinking about it...
I'm super into this, and I was tempted to sign up immediately. But then I realized I have privacy/tracking concerns; does anyone have a line on what Scroll/Mozilla say on this? I couldn't find anything after a (very shallow) search.
That survey they throw at you if you try to sign up is just complete and utter garbage, and asks you questions that both contradict each other, are in the wrong order, and ask you things you can't possibly have a good answer for at this stage.
Everybody is talking about journalists but what about the rest of the web? I regularly read the best opinions and tidbits on forums like hn and blogs. Who is going to fund those?
It's not MVP it's a Kite [0]. Minimum Viable Product is an actual "thing you can use", not mere concept. It's more than a prototype. The term implies it's something you can actually ship to customers.
It's conceptually viable; it's just not materially viable yet.
In all seriousness, I seem to remember that there was a practice of testing for viability using very similar means – basically, are people interested enough to click through, then collect emails.
So perhaps this is a path to demonstrate viability by questionnaire.
An MVP should consist of the minimum work required to test an hypothesis.
In this case the hypothesis is: "People would buy a browser if it offers an ad-free experience".
So it's viable according to that idea.
Viable doesn't mean useful though :)
If they offer free trials so I can evaluate its worth to me personally, maybe I'd try it.
Otherwise I'll keep fighting every website I visit with my massive list of ad-blockers and privacy tools. At least the latter option is free.
And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't do it.
This is _exactly_ why websites are as bad as they are right now.
> And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't do it.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you want to support an alternative source of funding for content, then this appears to be a great positive step towards an internet without tracking and invasive advertisements, promoted by the only alternative to Google in the browser market.
If you want to take a philosophical stance, you should reject the tracker and leave websites that don't adhere to your strict criteria.
That's because their prices are ridiculously high. Sure, I want access to NY Times. But maybe I'll read 1-2 articles per day. Not the whole damn paper. Same for any other site.
Blendle has been offering this service for years, though I believe they recently are backing away from it. I used it for a while several years ago, but I found using small transactions frequently to be very uncomfortable (as in off-putting, not so much inconvenient).
I vaguely recall Blendle. And checking, they want ~€2 per article, which is way too much. Consider that a digital subscription to The NY Times costs $250-$500 per year.[0] That's 365 days, with numerous articles published per day. But for argument sake, divide by 5000. That's just $0.05-$0.10 per article.
It was in the range of US$0.25-0.75, when I used it, but wouldn't you expect an a la cart offering to be more expensive than a bundle? The advantage is you dont have to pay that larger full year fee.
They already track how many times you've viewed the site in order to decide when the paywall goes up. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to track what articles you view and charge x cents / article.
I enjoy reading the WSJ Opinion section, but last time I looked at the price, it was way too high to justify based on the number of articles I read.
As others stated, the submitted title of "Ad-Free Internet by Firefox" overstates what this actually is: pay $4.99/month for ad-free experience on a handful of media publishers' websites[1].
(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)
The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as "ad-free internet" so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.
(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of $4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct digital subscriptions.)
Ok, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to search for "ad-free internet" and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12 Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have:
"<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"
It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text people actually see just says "Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate".
EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.
Yes but the HN guidelines also lets the submitter use some judgement if the title is misleading:
>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
But I'm not going to nitpick this thread's title. If "Ad-free internet" is the best representation for HN readers because Mozilla itself used it, that's fine too.
I dont want this interated into Firefox.
It should remain a neutral platform.
The only way to make this work is to track your id across
many properties. (I assume)
I do welcome this effort, which is similar to the
Apple News (or whatever they named it, I think)
but it would need a lot more content before I am interested.
People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off, publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.
I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the regular Bfeed.