[0x5FC3]

We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?

[yegle]

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

The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.

I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.

[tukantje]

Most likely reason why it'd be discontinued is that it makes rest of the ads less valuable; so to speak.

People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.

[lblume]

So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...

[AceJohnny2]

You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website.

Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.

[recursive]

"Large portion"? I don't think it says that.

[lblume]

Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.

[yesfitz]

If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card.

Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).

Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.

It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.

[mathgeek]

> It's astounding how radical the public library system is…

As a child of the 80s/90s I absolutely love how both of my generation’s uses of “radical” fit perfectly in this sentence. Well chosen.

[m82labs]

I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.

I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.

[mbirth]

Does somebody remember the service Flattr from a decade ago? You’d set a fixed amount to pay every month. Like a subscription.

Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.

[PaulHoule]

There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.

[NicuCalcea]

Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.

[Crespyl]

If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments.

We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.

[acdha]

What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.

I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.

[NicuCalcea]

Maybe you wouldn't mind, but nevertheless, it has been tried and didn't work. Here's how it went for Blendle, which had the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Time, and more on board. It wasn't payment processors that killed it.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

[KomoD]

Is it really about people not being willing to pay though?

I hadn't even heard of Blendle, had I heard that it was a thing and had the mentioned publishers I would've used it.

I've visited those sites so many times and I've never even seen a mention of Blendle.

[fragmede]

They haven't been tried plenty of times, what are you talking about? It's been discussed since the dawn of the Internet and the ideas been around since forever, but actual attempts have been very limited in scope. The rails are there though, they're just not user friendly (http://micropayments.fyi).

[rsingel]

Unfortunately you aren't willing to pay enough.

Micro payments for journalism don't work

[phoronixrly]

How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it.

And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.

Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.

[abxyz]

The solution is comfort in going without.

[Supermancho]

The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old. There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.

[tshaddox]

Note that this, like ad blocking or piracy, also doesn’t help fund the creators.

[Henchman21]

If you’re indeed “going without” you have no obligation to fund the creators?

[tshaddox]

Is the goal to fund more creators, or just to have fewer people with a supposed obligation to fund creators?

[Henchman21]

Well, I dunno what goals you have, but my goals include paying for the content I read and not paying for the content I don't. This is something I already do. Paying multiple parties for access to content isn't some maddening problem where the masses are crying out for a solution. Perhaps I'm utterly missing the point in this thread?

[tshaddox]

That's well and good, but I don't mean your goals for yourself. I'm asking what our goals are (or what they ought to be) for how people broadly interact with creative works which are easily copyable.

[snihalani]

I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views

[micromacrofoot]

spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it

[jennyholzer]

Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income.

Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.

E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.

Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.

Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.

This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.

[commandar]

A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.

Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.

I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.

[sonofaragorn]

That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

[commandar]

Kinda?

The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.

In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.

The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.

[bb88]

> The core idea behind BAT isn't bad

I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"

[jhaile]

I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.

[jennyholzer]

this creates massive incentives for clickbait

[mrkramer]

No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.

[dkarl]

In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"

[lanewinfield]

Scroll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) ) was attempting to solve this exact issue.

[jlarocco]

I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest.

Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.

[immibis]

> Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.

Not even the publishers! But they sure feel entitled.

[sn9]

I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be.

Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.

[yorwba]

Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore.

So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see what's going on before checking localized stuff.

[pseudocomposer]

I think something like Apple News (one subscription, many publications) is the best thing we’re likely to get in our current market conditions.

In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.

[Workaccount2]

ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers.

ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.

People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.

I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.

But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.

[stonogo]

You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.

[ASalazarMX]

Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them.

If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.

[cwillu]

My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.

[tukantje]

This is essentially a variant of tragedy of commons by this point.

[NicuCalcea]

I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways. The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers, that's their prerogative.

[cwillu]

At no point does ublock force their server to perform work it wouldn't otherwise. “Blocking clients with ad blockers” isn't a thing, there is only “send information plus instructions for the client to block itself”, and “only send information to logged in users” (and if they're incapable of choosing trustworthy users, that is not my problem).

[NicuCalcea]

I didn't say anything about the server doing extra work? And server-side ad insertion definitely exists, but if you want to get pedantic about the delivery mechanism, that's fine, websites have the right to bundle their content with ads and code that makes their ads more difficult to block.

[ACow_Adonis]

Except its a bit like that PERL quote.

You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.

You think, I know, i'll use ads!

Now you have two problems.

[the_af]

"Greedy end users"? WTF.

[piva00]

It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me.

Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.

I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...

[jlarocco]

I think that argument is begging the question.

Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.

After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.

I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.

[piva00]

I've gone full circle and not even internet content, I now subscribe to a few physical magazine and enjoy the act of reading them on paper, it's a very different experience than on a screen.

Similarly to my journey through ebooks back when Kindle launched, got very into it for a while but got tired of not being able to share interesting reads with friends, ended up buying physical copies of ebooks I really liked, and in the end just ditched ebooks to have only physical books on my bookshelves.

Which leaves me in this weird position on the internet, I would like to pay for some of the articles I read from publications I respect but have no need nor will to subscribe to online.

[dolmen]

I don't subscribe (with payment) even to websites I trust for their content because I don't trust them for how they track users, and how users are (or could be) tracked everywhere by payment processors via those subscriptions.

Subscribing to a public library where diversity of content is guaranteed but tracking is not per user is fine.

[hombre_fatal]

It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution.

Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.

Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.

Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.

Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.

Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.

[useless_foghorn]

I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of high-quality journalism would be helpful. If HN existed as pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation - knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay per should be chosen when you create your account, not every time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.

[tempnew]

“subscriptions like Apple News”

They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read.

The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.

I think the major issue is two-fold:

1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.

2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.

To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.

The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.

[HumblyTossed]

I feel like the major credit card companies really missed the boat with micropayments.

[disgruntledphd2]

Well yeah, sortof. Note that the credit card companies mostly function as tech providers for the actual banks, who get a bunch more of the money.

And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell.

Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.

[Arubis]

The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?

[morkalork]

Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s

[JKCalhoun]

Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they did that.

Or, wait…

[0x5FC3]

Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the other 2 as ad clicks.

[BizarroLand]

The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view.

There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.

No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.

No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.

Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.

[tukantje]

> No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.

The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.