[JCB_K]

This is just goodwill-in-disguise. They've collected money on behalf of publishers, without consent, and now they realise that was a bad idea. They understand they obviously can't get away with keeping the money, but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners.

[jerf]

"but they don't want to invest the time into you know, actually contacting the domain owners."

That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.)

No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those who gave it, but that may have its own problems.

[darushimo]

"That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking."

Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort. What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20 or more.

Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion of the way they've ended this operation.

Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could put in work to contact those publishers.

[simonbrown]

Another option could be to allocate the money between the site owners that have registered in the same proportions as before. If they set a date to do this, and the planned amount for most sites ends up being significant, this may provide an incentive for more people to register.

[sjs382]

They stole the idea from Superman III

[freehunter]

They offered a service similar to adblock and noscript, but offered money back to the sites to make up for the loss of ad revenue. To my eyes, your post came across as critical of this service, so I apologize if I misunderstood, but you should be leveraging even harsher criticism against projects which deny sites their revenue and don't offer that money back to them.

[JCB_K]

offered money back to the sites

That's where the problem lies, they first took money from users, and then "offer" to pay it back. They should've done it the other way around, only charging money for sites which actually signed up to the service.

They've done a good job at making it sound like a great service for publishers, but when you think about it a bit more it's quite shady.

[Groxx]

There's no charging for reading on sites that have signed up. It was a voluntary monthly payment for them to try to distribute evenly to publishers based on your use, not a "use Readability on x.com, pay Readability $1 which we'll transfer to x.com" model. If it were the latter, I'd agree with you, but it's nothing like that.

[freehunter]

As Groxx said, the money was collected, but not on behalf of the sites. The only reason it was offered back to the sites was because of good will. They didn't have to pay them a dime. They could have easily pocketed the $5/mo.

[Groxx]

Is the complaint that they are holding the money in the hopes that people will claim it? Or that they should have been giving it all out to the ones who did register, and every new source would start from zero?

"... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner.

If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.