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by oconnor663 2380 days ago
Think of an ad as something like a 1¢ payment from me to the website. Suppose there was no such thing as ads, and the website wanted me to make the 1¢ payment directly. What are our options for doing that? Is there any way to do it without paying fees much larger than 1¢?

If you want ad-supported businesses to go away, invent a convenient way for me to pay Google 1¢. (Convenient as in, I don't need to create an account with a password.) It's extremely difficult, both for technical and legal reasons.
4 comments
perl4ever 2380 days ago
I didn't know anything about the ad industry, but it seems like you may be off by an order of magnitude. Click through rates average 3+%, and it costs around $2.70 per click.[1] That seems to mean an impression is worth in the ballpark of 8-10 cents. Based on my recent web browsing history tonight, I seem to have visited around one page per minute.

So, the problem is not how to create the infrastructure for micropayments, but rather that explicit charges would be very high - the effective cost of browsing the commercial web is about $6/hr, which is about twice what it cost in the mid 90s to use AOL.

I'm not sure of all the implications, but I think this should substantially change a person's views.

[1]https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/

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izzydata 2380 days ago
I'd am perfectly comfortable with all ad based internet content disappearing from the internet. A much better internet will take its place.
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dredmorbius 2380 days ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk

https://www.npr.org/

https://www.pbs.org/

https://www.cbc.ca/

https://www.abc.net.au/

http://www.ard.de/ (and satellites: NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, hr, SR, and RB, because reasons)

And similarly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

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prox 2380 days ago
Good call... Been thinking about this same system for a while. Give me a cookiejar I can fill with a small amount only from mybank / paypal etc and instead of accepting the flipping cookies, I click a button and throw a couple of cents in the jar of the website. I like what brave is doing, but I want more control over it.
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