Sure, but that's because you're already used to and invested in Reddit. Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens. That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.
This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue.
That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs!
There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted.
We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.
> That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.
Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.
And at some point you had to go through the vetting process with PayPal. When I signed on, I had to verify a micro transaction into my account (years ago, dunno about today) in addition to the traditional forms. And, of course, I thought about whether or not I trusted PayPal for a while before I took the plunge. There's baggage with every system at some point. Clearing the initial inconvenience is one of the biggest steps because it affords the user time to reconsider.
Pretty much everyone who buys things on the Internet has a Paypal account.
You may as well say that the inconvenience of opening a bank account is too much baggage for people to use Paypal, except pretty much everyone who wants to use Paypal already has a bank account.
You are correct that trying to get users to put CC details in to pay a "microtransaction" will put people off, but there are plenty of convenient (two - three click) payment processes that already have huge amounts of users.
But you go to amazon because you want to buy something, not because you're feeling benevolent, so the expectation of needing to jump through the hoop is there and the necessity of doing it is real. Plus, once you've gone through sign up once you never need to again.
Some site I've never been to before asks pretty please for 40 cents and I'm not about to go find my wallet (probably in my room across the house) grab my credit card and enter a ton of personal information into some strange form who's security I don't really trust, especially when I know the credit card processor is probably keeping 30c + 3%.
PayPal and similar help but then... I have to use paypal. If only I could just directly send the money (like bitcoin, from me to some address) with a token that the site provided me attached. Pretty sure a lot of people are working in this area to make it happen. I really think app-store ease of transactions with the open web will change things up for the better.
This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue.
That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs!
There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted.
We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.