[90-00-09]

If I am not mistaken, when Marc Andreessen was building the Mosaic browser (1993-ish) he and his co-founders contemplated the monetization model for the web. Since micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads. In this sense, reliance on advertisement as the primary way to monetize online businesses is as old as www.

[sumtechguy]

I think it goes further back than that. You can find early radio broadcasts where the story was brought to you buy some brand. They would even work the brands into the stories sometimes.

[landhar]

Indeed:

> The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored by soap manufacturers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera

[lelanthran]

Yeah. I believe that's where the term "soapies" originated.

Shows originally brought to you by washing powder manufacturers.

[KMag]

G'day, mate? (I've never heard the term "soapies". Is it Australian slang? Having lived a decade in Hong Kong, I got exposure to a fair amount of Australian slang, and this fits the character.)

[lelanthran]

South African ...

Although I was under the impression that soapies was an American word.

[KMag]

I've only ever heard "soap operas" or "soaps" in the Upper Midwest and East Coast.

Let's blame Australia.

[lelanthran]

I've found that quite a lot of South African slang is mistaken for Australian slang, while a South African accent is often mistaken for a British one[1].

[1] I've actually been asked, once, "You're English, right?", when I was in the states.

[JohnFen]

I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

[lelanthran]

> I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

After reading the other replies, I believe that it's not just your part of the US.

I'm going to put this down in the TIL column - I always thought it was American slang, TIL I learned that it's not.

[jprete]

It’s pretty close even if it’s not actually an Americanism.

[sumtechguy]

It may be. It could be a very regional item. Like soda vs pop.

I personally never heard it until this thread. I have heard 'soaps'.

[Dylan16807]

"ies" doesn't sound very American.

[fragmede]

Micropayments, which are now possible if you accept cryptocurrency (specifically Solana) as the intermediary instead of Visa/MC, work. But how that would work is that you'd scroll past an article and pay for scrolling down. Instead of doing that, we put an ad in so when you're scrolling down, it costs the advertiser a micropayment and sends it to the ad agency (Google) at the expense of the viewer's time.

[kevin_thibedeau]

How do I convert Flooz to Solana?

[fragmede]

Responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what you said, as per the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it looks like you'd have to use something more mainstream (BTC/ETH/USDT) as the intermediary as https://flooz.xyz/trade won't convert Flooz directly to Solana. Getting money in and out of the Solana ecosystem is part of being able to do micropayments. USD to Solana (and back) is supported by Coinbase, however. My main point is that the code to make it so that scrolling down the article you're reading sends sub-cent amounts to the author is actually possible with today's technology, whereas it wasn't back in the 90's.

[mistrial9]

> micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads

this is completely specious .. source: present at the time

[literalAardvark]

Please elaborate. Curious.

[mistrial9]

there are people here that can tell the stories better of course. MarcA was building the browser with other grad students and whomever, and they ultimately formed a company called Netscape. That product was called Netscape Navigator, and sold to consumers in a commercial software box, like a big book, similar to Adobe Photoshop and dozens of other huge programs in that day ("shrink wrap software").

Through the 1990s many Usenet users talked about ads on the Internet via usenet lists, everyone knew about AOL and their business model. The opinion among most coders in public was that ads on the Internet would "ruin it." Public surveillance on the scale that is common now, was a topic from comic books. etc