[efitz]

A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)

I don't see any solution that was based on customer goodwill ("that was cool, here's $1") as something that there is much demand for.

What we need is a browser-mitigated micropayment ecosystem. Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card, and then when you browse to a URL you get the option of an ad-ful experience like today or a micropayment option, e.g. "nytimes.com requires a subscription or a $0.50 payment to view this page OK/Cancel". Micropayments would avoid the fee overload of the credit card companies and your browser could display your balance in the toolbar. The server could be provided with a cryptographically signed receipt and there could be a periodic reconciliation.

Note that there is no need for the complexity of a blockchain anywhere in this; IMO a blockchain just complexifies the solution and turns off people who don't trust cryptocurrencies.

[imiric]

> Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card

This will, sadly, never happen. When an adtech giant controls not only the world's most popular web browser, but also has major power in directing the future of the web itself, there's no scenario where they would voluntarily align against their own business interests.

Brave actually has a browser that does what you say, but it will never gain major adoption, either from web users or sites. Course correction of a ship that has sailed long ago, and is run by people who benefit from its current direction, will never happen.

[luhn]

Presumably the browser would take a fee for facilitating the transaction, which could replace any lost ad revenue.

And imo most websites would double dip: Have paid content and advertising. You already see that for online newspaper/magazine subscriptions. If Google is on both sides of that, that's extra revenue for them.

I agree that it'll never happen, but moreso because a lack imagination and willpower from Google.

[bee_rider]

It isn’t that surprising that Google isn’t bringing us to the post-ad web, but I’m surprised Apple isn’t. The idea of an app or something asking the OS for a payment, and then the user trusting the OS to handle the details behind the scenes is already conventional on iOS, right?

They already have a nice way of doing subscriptions to podcasts too. So it isn’t like Apple is totally allergic to giving content providers with a way to offer their users premium services. It just hasn’t happened for websites for some reason.

[efitz]

The problem is while credit card processors want 2-4% with a minimum, Apple and Google would want 30% - their App Store rates. So expecting Apple to do it is a nonstarter.

[bee_rider]

I’m not sure that is the problem really. 70% of something is still better than 100% of nothing after all.

Something that looks a lot more compelling which came up in some comments here is that KYC regulations can be a headache for payment processors. Maybe nobody wants to deal with them for the not-so-lucrative 10c per website view market.

[didntcheck]

> A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)

It could, but we've now seen the absolute vitriol levelled at sites who dare to ask for a bit of money in return for content, and the lengths people will go to to avoid paying then make up some excuse to justify it. It's funny how a common excuse for ad blocking used to be "I'd pay for content if there was an option", yet you don't hear that so often now that many sites do in fact offer that option

[Spivak]

Because it's so annoying. You read for two seconds and then

LOOK AT THIS PUPPY. HE CRIES WHEN YOU DON'T GIVE US MONEY. YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE HIM SAD DO YOU?!

[X] BE A GOOD PERSON AND GIVE US MONEY

[_] I ENJOY BEING A DRAIN ON SOCIETY, ANNOY ME AGAIN TOMORROW

And you can't just give them a dollar to get them to shut up. It's always $2.99/mo BEST VALUE (billed centennially $3588.00).

[kelnos]

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I would be fine paying per-article on a lot of news sites, if the cost was on the order of single-digit cents.

I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions to, say, the 15-20 different news sites that show up with that frequency on aggregators, with headlines I'm likely to click on.

Put another way, let's say I read 10 articles per day, so about 300 per month. Those articles are spread across a lot of different sites, let's say probably 100 of them, ranging from single article from random blogs, up to 7 articles from a larger publication like WaPo or WSJ.

At even 10 cents per article, on average, that's $30/mo, total. I'm comfortable with that. In contrast, with the current "system", if I had to subscribe to even 15 of those medium to large publications, at, say, $15/mo, that's $225/mo, which I'm absolutely not comfortable with. At that point -- assuming there were no ways to bypass paywalls -- I'd simply just do without, and find other free sources covering the same stories.

But still, I don't think micropayments will work, even if the friction is pretty low. There is a surprisingly huge psychological gulf between free and even one cent. Once you ask someone for money, they are going to agonize (even if just a little bit) over whether or not the article they're about to read is actually worth it.

[alisonatwork]

This is exactly the same problem that happened with streaming services. When there was only one streaming service that had most of the stuff on it, a lot of people felt it was reasonable to pay $15 per month. But then the streaming services splintered and it would now cost n * $15 per month to watch the exact same shows you were watching before.

The economics of it make sense from the perspective of the creators, but they don't from the perspective of the consumers. Creators need enough cash that they can afford to survive flops, but consumers only want to pay for hits. This is why I think micropayments will never be a great solution for TV, journalism etc.

As a consumer, I can see the appeal of taking a Robin Hood approach. Pay for one streaming service and pirate the rest. Pay for one newspaper subscription and bypass paywalls on the rest. Adblock all of the things. If the law of big numbers holds then all of the content providers with at least some content worth consuming should end up getting fairly compensated. If those economics don't work out, then neither would micropayments anyway.

[fragmede]

Unfortunately, the Visa Mastercard duopoly charges fees which make this impractical, which means that via a cryptocurrency is how this would be implemented given today's technology.

[ozr]

This is why you'd 'charge up' some prepaid store.

[didntcheck]

Not to mention then taking on the role of judge, jury, and executioner on who is allowed to receive money. That's really not healthy for a free society

[striking]

Or you could start off with macropayments and make micropayments possible later. Letting perfect be the enemy of the good is how we got here.

[bakugo]

> A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)

I don't know how anyone can still live under this delusion when we're currently seeing multiple paid streaming services putting ads on their paid plans that were advertised as ad-free.

Corporations will never be happy with the profit they're making. If they can make you pay AND show you ads, they will.

[ertian]

That's why it has to be lightweight. The thing that would drive prices down and keep ads at bay is competition. Since setting up a new streaming service is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, the players are protected from competition and can squeeze their customers. In other markets, if you had a lightweight payment system that isn't just a component of a walled garden (ala Medium or YouTube), you could see actual competition. Then, if some player started showing ads or raising prices, people could just up and move elsewhere.

Imagine the early internet if we didn't have HTTP & HTML. It would have been a bunch of specialized AOL- or CompuServ-type walled-garden services, each of which could have wrung their customers dry. That's the world we ended up with in streaming. But the WWW doesn't have a mechanism for simple payments, so payment infrastructure can be used to lure and trap content creators. That's why we need a simple, lightweight, portable and open payment mechanism, to complement open web protocols.

[emmo]

Sorry, slightly tangential, but haven't we seen streaming services get progressively worse as more competition has entered the space? Netflix was great when they were pretty much the only place in town; now it's a fragmented disaster of services that have to squeeze harder and harder to keep things viable.

[ertian]

Well, but that's due to a lot of problems specific to the media landscape. Netflix started as an afterthought, the big media companies viewed it as a sideshow or as a stopgap measure while they made other plans, so there was a honeymoon phase where it was cheap and had a ton of media.

Most new entrants to the market are themselves media companies, so with each one the media landscape gets fractured. They're able to leverage popular content (over which they have a monopoly) to lure customers and raise prices. There's not many of them, and the barrier of entry is almost impossibly high (step 1: develop a 50-year back catalog of beloved films & franchises...), so the market is insular.

Compare with music, where there's a ton of smaller labels, and the barrier of entry is much lower. Streaming companies compete mostly on price, interface & experience.

I think the problem is kinda inherent in the market, and Netflix was just an anomaly because it caught the media companies flat-footed. You would need openness and competition on a much more fundamental level to solve streaming video media.

In the meantime, simple and open web payments could solve for music, podcasts, prose, reporting, art, etc. And hey, maybe somewhere in the process you could see the birth of micro-studios.

[kelnos]

Agreed. But I think the solution to this is compulsory content licensing, not consolidation. Granted, the end result of that might still be consolidation (or many players just going out of business), but at least that would be true competition: the streaming services would be competing as streaming services (and would be judged on price, video quality, app/website stability and usability, reliability, recommendations, etc.), not as content producers.

[efitz]

OK fair enough.

As an aside, I don't think that's greed, I think it's perverse incentives - e.g. if a VP wants that big stock bonus next year, they have to figure out how to cause x% revenue growth, rinse and repeat. Sooner or later you hit market saturation and have exhausted all the easy, user-friendly solutions.

[BlueTemplar]

The whole goal is to get rid of (middlemen) corporations and to start paying authors directly.

(Of course, unlike what OP suggests, this is probably hard to accomplish in a (variety of) browsers directly while Google and Chrome are still allowed to exist.)

[foobiekr]

The problem with micropayments has ALWAYS been malicious actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that is structurally inseparable.

[ace2358]

The problem with Ads on the web has ALWAYS been malicious actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that is structurally inseparable.

Hmmm