[myfonj]

I was ruminating around this topic the other day and came to conclusion it is probably terribly missed opportunity for certain advertising company. Now it sounds super scary privacy-wise, smells monopol-y and overall may not happen anymore (I think), but consider:

In situation when "all" users are being in fact "logged into" their service anyway, then features such as - pay to hide ads on this particular web (basically "overpay the advertiser"), - pay to keep ads and support the author of this particular web, - pay for extra features but remain anonymous for web's author, - provide data about yourself that the company gathered about yourself to the web's author, then it sounds like quite low-hanging fruit.

Web authors would gain "auth" for free, integration would allow some "serverless" features for otherwise basic webs and so on. My initial idea was (probably akin to Brave(?)): - pay advertiser one centralized "ransom" to disable X ad impressions, so they can be distributed to websites authors as I go, just the same way as if I was exposed to a real ad.

For favourite websites I could either top that by also allowing ads again, or paying them more, obviously with certain share ending up as a fee for that mediator.

I guess there was/is some blatant obstacle that prevented this (perhaps advertisers would all bail out when the could be legally "overpaid" by users?) or it in fact had been implemented somehow in the past (distant enough I missed it completely), but it was a fun thought exercise anyway.

[jsnell]

> it in fact had been implemented somehow in the past

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

[imiric]

If I understand your proposal correctly, why would advertisers be needed at all if users had the ability to directly pay for the content they consume? You'd just be giving adtech even more power over the user experience, something that adtech always prioritizes, right? :) Users are not even customers to them, but a shiny gold rock they can extract value from.

https://piped.video/watch?v=uSudkID3zJM

[julianeon]

I don't think that website really wants to call attention to the fact that it's serving you ads. They want it to be a seamless part of the Internet experience. Ideally, you wouldn't even notice the ads are ads. They don't want to support services that remind you that they're there, and are annoying. And if you want to monetize your site, they already have a preferred solution for you: sign up to show ads and get a check from them.