[fouric]

You make a very good point about adblockers having that negative second-order effect where they continue to let people have the expectation of getting things that are intrinsically expensive (storage, bandwidth, sysadmins) for free - I didn't think about that before.

As for alternative funding models - why not microtransactions? Attaching an explicit price tag onto website access (subscription model) or individual media/document objects (standard "pay for what you use" model) would have some other beneficial effects, such as reducing extraneous media consumption (mindlessly scrolling for hours suddenly starts costing you money, better to buy a book and get value out of it) - most advertisements are a mental cancer that we should try to get rid of anyway.

[samhw]

Thanks for the kind reply, I appreciate it. I do think that's the kind of mindset that adblockers are inculcating in people - they don't quite realise the extent of all the costs that are borne by everyone else. Perhaps especially so because the sort of person who uses an adblocker is probably the sort of person who can't imagine himself clicking an ad, and so underestimates the amount of revenue made from ads. And thus also likely underestimates all the costs which that revenue pays for. (And then you end up in a predicament like the very-self-aware fellow in the other subthread, insisting that Google and YouTube and Facebook could be run by non-profits, and 'it would all work out fine'.)

As for alternative funding models - which is definitely a much more interesting conversation - I actually considered starting a company in exactly that space. I have some experience in fintech ("very credentialised" according to my former Anglo-German lead investor, haha) and so I thought I could pull it off. I couldn't, and it didn't get past the MVP stage ... luckily. The trouble is that people aren't willing to pay even the $0.01 to access an article. There's something deep in people's brains which is averse to spending money, no matter how small the amount.

I believe - and this is more second-hand evidence from other founders rather than first-hand - that the approaches which typically see the most success are those where people 'top up' a certain amount and then spend it gradually. That doesn't set off the same psychological alarm that directly spending money does. However, that kind of approach would be much harder to implement - especially as something like a browser protocol - because it would require holding probably-vast sums of money in escrow[0], which is an extremely burdensome legal and regulatory position to be in.

Personally I think Brave - much as it's a stupid company started by a stupid clever man - might be onto the right big idea here (despite getting a million little things wrong, and alienating virtually all of its users and most of its non-users too). The core idea of buying attention tokens which are paid out to websites to which you pay attention is a brilliant one. However, it needs a lot more refining, since the crude version of that model is not particularly well-equipped to deal with the difference between e.g. a movie-streaming site, on the one hand, and a shorthand news site, or even a site like Twitter, on the other hand. I may well watch a movie for 180 minutes but get less value from it than I do a tweet. So attention != value, or at least the concept of 'attention' needs refining to be more than simply 'time I spend on a website', but there's a promising kernel there, I think.

[0] Compare it to Starbucks's gift card program. Starbucks is one of the largest commercial debtors in the world just by virtue of the vast number of Starbucks gift cards in people's drawers. These things add up quickly and bigly.