Is it possible to estimate the revenue lost by blocking all the ads on a page? If you could handwave to some standard page value, maybe someone could combine an adblocker and micropayments - it removes the ads and punts 0.0001 cents from your account into a kitty for the domain. "ethical adblocking"...

I don't know how to do it, in a practical way that folks would tolerate, without restrictive metering that would result in "chilling effects" on reading, unless we have platform/client or infrastructure support.

One way would be to build it into client apps. You do something like a mobile app that, from a user experience point of view, feels like an RSS reader or something. The app acts sort of like a reseller. Various bits of content flow through it, and it tracks that, and figures out how much a given content source is "owed".

The person doing the reading just uses the app and reads whatever they want, but is paying some basic fee to get in at all. It has either a completely fixed rate or a hard cap. Maybe the user has the option to turn on local eye-tracking or some other measurement of attention in order to lower that rate, I don't know. But the reader reads and has a simple payment structure for everything, the app infrastructure figures out who gets credit for the stuff of value to the reader, and the payments go out. No explicit "I'm going to pay for this" step, no problem of accidentally falling asleep while reading and finding out that you're bankrupt.

The other way I can see it working, and I do *not* like this one, is that the ISPs build that tooling into their network layers, and tie it to their subscriber billing.

An app-based one would allow side-by-side comparisons and free market forces. An ISP-based one would end up with cable-industry-like lock-in and content bundling and other heinous crap.

The first problem that comes to mind is how to avoid elbow jogging the punter while not actually picking their pockets. The answer may be as simple as small-enough up-front payment.

Actually, paypal works pretty well for me, for low-value painless transactions. Whether it scales down well is another question.

One of the problems with scaling down payments (speaking as someone who used to work in payment processing) is that the structure of the fees imposed by the processing networks is often something like, if your payment is for "n", they charge "x" + "y%" of "n".

No matter *what* "x" is, scale down far enough and it dominates. And if you don't charge a per-transaction rate but your infrastructure has per-transaction *costs*, then scale down far enough per-payment and the transaction volume will go so high that you're out of business. So you can get away with "x" being zero if there's a minimum for the "n" to which the "y%" is applied, but that also prevents scaling down beyond a certain point.

If you look at how Apple actually runs payments right now, you can buy a 99¢ app here and a $2 movie there, and if you do a bunch together, they're aggregated before the money flows. That saves them money in processing/infrastructure fees, even though it raises the overhead because they have to track all of that and have well-separated approval/clearing steps.

You want it to scale down to small enough transactions, you have to aggregate in some form or you'll *eventually* get drowned in whatever costs you're not recovering. Or at least, back when I worked in the industry and with the little bit I've continued to pay attention to it, I've never heard of a realistic alternative.

It really depends on the reader.

For example, I'm not a customer you can advertise at. If I become aware of a product or brand being advertised obtrusively at me I boycott the product because excessive advertising implies that the product isn't good enough to be worth buying on its own merits.

(There are a few exceptions for high profile items; but, for example, I don't buy Apple electronics products because of the ads, I buy them because I'm a satisfied 25-year returning customer.)

...and in case people thinking that whole "x + y% of n" thing is just people being greedy, making the money flow really usually does have costs that scale with number of transactions (eg. the actual packet transmission for the payment protocols) *and* costs that scale with the *value* of transactions (eg. the stuff related to fraud management).

If the infrastructure has both of those costs... if they're low and you're not trying to scale down to micropayments, you can hide that fact and whatever you're hiding gets lost in the noise and you ignore it. Or if the per-volume costs can be covered by a per-transaction fee, that creates a financial overhead that in a practical sense kills microtransactions anyway. (If your fee is 5¢ + 0.0003%, nobody will run a 1¢ transaction through that.)

I've also noticed that adverts suddenly become very relevant after I've purchased the item I want to purchase, which is a bit pointless. "Buy this stuff" when I've already bought it and won't need to buy any more for 5 years is a bit pointless.

Heh, I'm also a customer who does not tolerate advertising and who responds those I can't block with boycotts. It's to the point where if I can't block a YouTube ad or something, I will literally hold up a sheet of paper covering everything but the timer, and also mute the system, until the ad is done.

The ad economy (in its current form) is *eventually* going to die (if for no other reason than the wars of escalation between attention-grabbers, fraudsters, blockers, and hijackers like those using ad CDNs for malware delivery).

It can't happen soon enough for me.

(Hey, Charlie? This might be a fun chat to tap Krugman for, once you've let us hoi polloi rant and gibber for a while.)

There are two options that would probably work.

The first is that the major content providers get together and create a network that anyone can join. Subscribe to any one site in the network for $10 per month and you get unrestricted ad-free access to the entire network. It would need at least the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, the Times, New Scientist, Scientific American and National Geographic to be on board from the beginning (and probably a bunch of sports and TV sites that I have no interest in). Then everyone pays $10 per month to subscribe to their favourite website, and gets a vastly better net experience. Total revenues to split between the content creators end up at maybe $400 million per month (assuming that 10% of the English-speaking world eventually subscribes).

The second is for the ethical ad networks to get together and create a really really good ad blocker for all platforms that only blocks unethical ad networks. "Ethical" here means at a minimum no movement of any kind, no audio of any kind, no Flash or PDF, nothing that looks like a user-interface element, no click-throughs to malware sites, fully honouring the do-not-track flag, and so on. Then they push that ad blocker as the ethical way for users to block unacceptable ads while still supporting the content creators.

I don't suppose they will do either of these, but since the option exists, my sympathy for them will be quite limited.

Various sites that require a login (such as dating sites like OkCupid) offer a 'no-ads' experience - if you pay a small fee, you get no ads. If you use an adblocker, the ads are replaced with a picture of sad looking employees of OkC asking for money... Doesn't work very well, but there you go.

How does tangentially related income work in here? By that I mean crowdfunding (Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Patreon) and sales of merch (Topatco, Charlie's mugs, etc). It's not ad based, and it's not microbilling...

Monetas(.net) is trying by doing (from what I can tell) blockchain + notaries to improve speed and scalability and they seem to have

Alternately, the growth of Patreon and Kickstarter help alleviate the need for so much microbilling by financing content creation up front. See also: http://www.indelicates.com/worthless/

I have no sympathy for the alleged need for "funding" and think they should never have abandoned the ban on commercial use.

I pay about a sixth of my monthly income on the hire of a server which runs purely non-commercial websites. They make no money and carry no ads. The proportion is so high not because the server is huge, but simply because I have fuck all money but use lots of bandwidth. I do it simply because I like doing it, and if I can do it anyone can. Especially since most people aren't going to want to serve gigabytes of video off their own server, but just text and images and maybe the odd youtube embed, which can be done for the price of a couple of pints of beer a month. Or even for nothing if you have a decent ISP who gives you a static IP and doesn't block port 80.

There is a strong inverse correlation between the proportion of interesting and useful content on a site (and also its ease of use and lack of bloat) on the one hand, and the degree to which it tries to serve ads and/or bleats about how hard done by the operator is on the other. The best sites are those which let the content speak for itself and don't care about commercialising it. Personal sites run by knowledgeable people, sites run by university dons on their university's server, Wikipedia, and the like. Sam Goldwasser's laser FAQ, for a single example. The sites of Linux distributions. And not forgetting this site which as far as I can tell Charlie runs on much the same basis as I do. These sites either don't care about funding (the smaller ones) or arrange it behind the scenes in some unobtrusive and specialised manner which does not involve ads or otherwise hassling the user (Wikipedia, distros).

Losing the commercial stuff wouldn't affect these sites, it would just mean the loss of a vast tranche of utter dross, like the Daily Mail site (which deserves to be taken down for the good of humanity), or the innumerable garbage sites which pollute google results with scraped content that doesn't even work to get people to see their ads.

Generalised, sure, but still applicable far more often than not.

Several of the content producers I follow online use a freemium model: good quality free content but the promise of more to paid premium members. This seems to work quite well but it's hard to see how every site could use it. Smaller sits could form networks and apply the same model, so this blood could be linked with that of similar ones and paid extras added with the profits pooled.

Beyond that if we're allowed to go really speculative could we enter an era where most websites don't bother monetising? In the era of cheap, low powered ubicomp how expensive would it be to maintain a website? I genuinely have no idea but if the answer is negligible then I guess there would be three types of site:

- Those that make money by selling, like Amazon with its products and this site by advancing the brand
- Those that make money with premium services, YouTube content creators, social media outlets
- Those that don't bother with making money because the negligible payment to maintain their site is worth getting their message/community/cat pictures out.

What I fear is that something like Mike Scott's suggestions come about, which is terrifyingly similar to ASCAP and the other copyright clearinghouses for music publishing, in which money comes from the delivery side of things, goes to the clearinghouses, and then pretty much sits there, very little of it getting to the creators.

Now, there's some differences, since the content creation is (unfortunately) more concentrated, and we're trying to get payment from the customer instead of, say, the radio station or performing arts hall. However, the introduction of middlemen will serve well to separate the content creation and content remuneration systems extremely well.

Ha, yes, I do the same. In fact I take it a stage further and run ad-blocking on my visual input. Supermarkets doing that thing where they move everything around to try and make people see different stuff and buy it affect me only by making me annoyed that I can't find things any more. I know what I want to buy before I go in there, and the things I don't want to buy I literally do not see: I only perceive the specific items I'm after, and the rest is just blurry blobs.

I am reminded of EE "Doc" Smith's scene in which the first point of sympathy between Tellurians and Rigellians is the mutual discovery that members of both cultures do this.

There is a Google experiment in this direction - http://www.google.com/contributor/. Basically lets you pre-pay the advertisement $$$.

Of course, this only covers one ad network (Google/DoubleClick). It might be the largest, but it's far from the only one.

(Full disclosure: I work for Google.)

Maintaining a low-volume simple web site has been so cheap that nobody truly needs to monetize it, going all the way back to when I started running my own, back in the early 1990s... as long as your *content* is free.

The techies here thinking about that are missing that the content has to come from somewhere. I have a web server in my basement (really, self-hosted, no colo) that costs virtually nothing to run. (Sure, it wouldn't stand up to being slashdotted or something, but I don't care, if that happened I'd just unplug it until the noise went away.)

But that's of no use unless I have something I want to publish and make my money elsewhere... which is actually true for *me*, but is of course not true for a content producer like a writer.

Don't think of this as "how do we make sure the lights stay on in the server room?". Think of this as "how do we keep the next Walter Cronkite or Hunter S. Thompson from starving to death in the streets?".

"In the era of cheap, low powered ubicomp how expensive would it be to maintain a website? I genuinely have no idea but if the answer is negligible..."

Oooo, look at the coincidence, you posting that at the same time as me :)

The answer is already "negligible". From a couple of pints a month down to zero if you have a decent ISP, assuming your site is not huge and doesn't have craploads of bandwidth-heavy content. The trouble is at the moment that either people don't realise this or are too greedy to care.

"Think of this as "how do we keep the next Walter Cronkite or Hunter S. Thompson from starving to death in the streets?""

Universal dole, Basic Income, or whatever you like to call it. Remove the assumption that in order to be given the resources not to starve to death in the streets people have to be made to do something regardless of what that something actually is or whether it's useful or not. Indeed this would do a lot to mitigate an awful lot of the things that I have seen discussed since I started reading this site.

Okay, so if I understand you, you're saying just make sure nobody has unmet basic needs, and we do completely away with the concept of professional content creators.

Now, just as a thought experiment, please pretend we're in a world where that's simply not going to happen, *and* the ad networks are going to collapse.

Just for fun, humor me: in *that* world, how do you prevent the next Victor Hugo or George Orwell from starving to death in the streets?

Is it possible to create un-blockable ads?

Here's one stupid idea. Make your whole webpage be a single image, text and all inside. The ads are part of the image, alongside the context. Good luck blocking them.

Well, of course you can block them, but now you need a more powerful blocker, that can pattern-match on sub-images and cut them out.

Then the advertisers can start randomizing the ads, to fight the ad-blocker. Yay, a new arms race! Another step towards the strong AI that will classify us all as ads and block us from existence!

Give up on un-blockable ads now please. It's not going to work. Dead end.

Either I'll come up with an ad-blocking concept that'll work (and I have a few for the ones you mentioned already), or I will simply stop consuming that content entirely (just as I've refused to consider Hulu Plus). You'd never get 100% coverage of all content everywhere, and so you'll never be the only game in town.

In fact that's the opposite of workable. You're talking about making the ads impossible to ignore. The way to prevent the advertising death spiral for as long as it can be prevented is to make ads that are so *innocuous* that nobody will *bother* to block them. What you're talking about isn't that.

If it prevents a blind person's screen reader from accessing the content at all, you've gone too far. If it doesn't, the ads can be stripped out.

Don't think of this as "how do we make sure the lights stay on in the server room?". Think of this as "how do we keep the next Walter Cronkite or Hunter S. Thompson from starving to death in the streets?".

Fair point (and interesting post). I like Pigeons answer of BI but really all that shoots to mind here is that the next big thing needs to sell something. But I don't think they are the typical website that needs addressing here.

If you maintain a website to host content then automatically you have a product. You just need to figure out how much you can sell and how much to keep free to attract traffic. Whether or not you can make a living off this depends on a bunch of factors.

Just for fun, humor me: in *that* world, how do you prevent the next Victor Hugo or George Orwell from starving to death in the streets?

You know, barely anyone dies from hunger in the streets in the First World today, without any Basic Income.

You do know overblown rhetoric when you see it?

The way to prevent the advertising death spiral for as long as it can be prevented

Why prevent it? It's fun to watch.

For certain types of content "payment optional" seems to be a sustainable business model. Patreon has completely revolutionized how some types of creators make their living, shifting them from being at the fickle whims of advertisers to having a much more predictable and secure source of income. Some even make enough from their donations alone to make their creations their full-time work.

Of course this business model only works for certain types of creators and creations. I think your work would need to fill three requirements in order to be sustainable under this model: 1) it must not require large capital expenses up front (unless you pay for them out of pocket), 2) the barriers to consumption must be very low, and 3) you must produce content on a highly regular basis, at least a few times per year but the more frequently the better. These requirements are based on the need to attain a critical mass of followers in order to get enough who will donate to you to make your work a sustainable enterprise. Looking over my Patreon account all of the people I am supporting are either web comic artists or Youtubers except for one podcaster, though this probably reflects my personal tastes more than anything.

Additionally, one aspect of Patreon I personally find critical is that it shows you the current level of funding a creator is receiving. For creators that are well funded it makes me feel like I am helping to sustain their livelihood and for those who aren't as well-funded it makes me think about increasing my donation to help them out. I don't know if I would be supporting as many creators as I do for as much as I do if Patreon hid or obfuscated how much the creators earned, though this is highly subjective.

Patreon isn't the only site using this business model. Twitch.tv streamers can earn a lot of money through Twitch's built-in donation feature. Rock Paper Shotgun, a PC gaming news site, has been offering subscriptions for over a year (in exchange for the occasional exclusive article) due to almost half their readership blocking ads. Crucially none of these sites require payment upfront to access the main content.

Also, this business model is very similar to how public broadcasting works in the US. For most public radio and television stations viewers/listener donations represent the largest share of their revenue followed by corporate sponsorships and grants from non-profit foundations, and then distantly by government funding. Most government funding for public broadcasting goes towards rural stations which don't have the critical mass of viewers/listeners in their broadcast area to be sustainable.

"Is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?"

No, like a forest fire, burning needs to occur to keep the forest healthy. A comment you made is key:

"Casual information consumers won't pay for access to paywalled sites, and a lot of the struggling/bottom-feeding resources on the web are engaged in a zero-sum game for access to the same eyeballs that are increasingly irritated by the clickbait and attention-grabbing excesses of the worst advertisers."

There is only a certain amount of money that can be extracted from "casual information consumers", and there are currently way too many information producers pursuing those eyeballs. That underbrush needs to go, and mobile ad blockers may just be the lightning strike that does it. Let's be completely honest here: while we all have our favorites, exceptions, and/or guilty pleasures, most of what gets produced in the "casual information" economy is utter crap.

But like with all forest fires, life come back faster and better than one might expect. When it does, there will be three layers in the information economy:

1. Stuff that is produced and distributed for free. This is what's left of today's ad-supported model. Ad-supported content will never be able to pay enough to provide content creators with any reasonable income in and of itself, but you probably can make enough to pay for your distribution costs because conveniently ad revenue and distribution costs both rise with the number of viewers. Still, people will create content in this space for various reasons other than getting paid. In fact, they may actually pay for the privilege of doing so. Your blog is good example of this: you do it because it promotes your projects that DO pay, and also just because you find it to be a useful/enjoyable thing to do. This level of content will be populated by (a) enthusiasts who just want to share info with each other to further their passions, (b) stuff that fills up third-party networks that survive by selling their members data (Facebook), and (c) the lowest level of commercial content creation aimed at people too dumb to install an ad blocker (the "penis enhancement" level of advertising). Outside of some decent enthusiast content on niche topics, most of what lives here will continue to be utter crap. Like spam email, it will live on, but everyone will do their best to minimize it and most of it will never see a live eyeball.

2. Decent casual content that is supported by micro payments (and maybe some small subscriptions). This is where most casual, mainstream journalism will occur. Someone will figure out micro payments. I don't know who, but someone will. It will probably take some kind of large entity to act as a fully automated middleman, so my bet is on Google/Apple/Amazon. (I guarantee Google is thinking about it with the new Android pay app, and Amazon is gradually sliding down the slope of payment scale with the Prime/Kindle set of tools. $.99 ebook? How about $.50? $.20? $.00125 for a snippet? Or just included with Prime?) Whatever it is, micropayments will be involve (a) users paying the middleman some amount of money up front that is large enough to not need a microscope, (b) tracking and automated aggregation of everyone the user owes money to over a certain period of time (probably monthly), (c) appropriate caps so that the middleman isn't stuck with too high of a bill if the user flakes out on payment (e.g. "We will not accept any charges more than $.05 per transaction from content creators, and we'll notify users when they've hit $20), and (d) an automated periodic settling of accounts with content creators.

3. Non-casual (technical) content. I work for a publisher that creates content for people in technical fields (law, accounting, insurance), and we're doing reasonably well with this, but we know that we have to put out stuff that is good enough that the readers really feel that they need to have it to do their jobs well. If you can play on this level, you can charge the type of money that can keep you in business as a publisher (~$100+ per book or book-like electronic equivalent). But our economics are completely different that those in the casual information economy (including fiction/genre publishers). Even with charging what we do, our authors do not expect to make a living by writing. They make their living by doing the technical things they write about, and the books are way of enhancing and developing recognition of their talents. And we still have some ads, and battle piracy, and all of that isn't easy.

So that's what I think we'll see in 3-5 years: Free stuff produced by amateurs and scammers, professional but casual content supported by micro payments, and technical content supported mostly by subscriptions. And of course, the boundaries will always be kind of fuzzy.

So, the mix of free and paid content can work for some. It's fragile, but it can work.

The puzzle as I see it, as related to Charlie's original question specifically about microtransactions, is that whole "mix of free and paid" stuff comes about *because* we don't have a good micropayment infrastructure today. (I mean *real* micropayments, like paying 1/1,000,000 € to read a page.) So you have content below a cost threshold that you round down to zero, and you have content above a cost threshold that you round up to a for-real grown-up non-micro payment.

Given the reality of the true costs of transaction processing, I don't have a clue what to do about that.

The scale *can* be driven down over time so smaller and smaller payments become feasible over time, but I don't know how to build a system that lets that scaling down in individual transaction value (and "therefore" scaling up in absolute transaction count) be driven by market forces and the like as opposed to technological advancement. Which is the magic I think we'd need for truly completely viable microtransactions.

Worth a look: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Anyway, this leads to my question: is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?

So: are there any promising distributed microbilling payment platforms out there on the horizon, other than the Google and Apple company stores? And if not, what is to be done?

What is the problem with micro-billing anyway, besides laziness of the potential customers? Is it still too expensive?

I think we are just sitting in a bad spot of the Nash equilibrium. Consumers got used to crappy content adorned with ads, and don't demand anything better, and Producers can't afford to create better content, because they can't support it with ads. It's an endless circle of crap.

"micro-payments"
Trouble is, once you've established that as a system, someone/some-group will start jacking the prices up & ripping everyone off.
Then what?

(Incidentally, back in my payment processing internet startup days, when I was living and breathing this, I did brainstorm and daydream about an eventual hyper-advanced payment infrastructure with arbitrarily low overhead that would "lubricate" all manner of transactions as much as anyone wanted. I got to the point of imagining a system where any time anyone took an action that made your life a tiny bit better or made you a tiny bit happier, some very small floating point value was automatically and without deliberate action added to their running balance. I ended up calling the currency "Karma". I don't see it ever becoming practical.)

As a user, my concern would be twofold:
1) how do I monitor how much I'm spending?i.e. how do I know the cost of that webpage for me, and how do I make sure I don't spend more than I'm willing to spend on webpages per month while keeping the internet lifestyle I'm accustomed to(I read a lot on the net)? Technically this problem is easily solvable, but I'm pretty sure it's a hard solution to implement from a social POV

2)If the cost is deducted automatically, how do I make sure I don't click a link that refreshes automatically every 10 minutes and demands, say, a dollar per refresh?And what happens to auto-refreshers if I forget the tab open while I leave the computer running to do calculations or work on other stuff?(yes, rebates are a possible course, but they tend to be a pain)

Then buy from someone else?

I have been pondering some of the same questions over the last four or five years.

The closest service that provides some way of rewarding content creators is Flattr where each user presses a flattr button on a site supporting it and sets aside a pile of money to spend each month. The money is distributed among the sites, based on how many times you have flattr'ed them in the last month. (Disclaimer: I have never used Flattr, the above is from memory of description.)

Alternative venues of income are things like donations, premium memberships, paywalls or selling stuff.

The area of micro payments is an interesting alternative. Given that your global IP address comes from your ISP, it would be possible for any site to bill ISPs who could forward the bill to you (or include it in your subscription).

However, such a service could result in a lot of abuse. Aside from clickbait, we also need to set a price. Should the price be set by the site, some treaty or your ISP? What if a piece of malware starts accessing a high-price site millions of times? What about ISPs who refuse to process payments? When is the ISP billed - when the first request is given or when a page is loaded?

Not particularly on-topic, or at all.
Okay, I'm a day behind due to iPad update-fuckuppery. Only took 24 hours to get it done and working--not counting over night trying to ignore it. 8 hours yesterday to download and then freezing up during restart, and then wanting to be plugged into itunes, which said it would take from 18-76 hours to download over multiple attempts. So put it away.
This morning downloaded in 2 hours, and was successful. I was worried it would restore original settings and I'd lose a bunch of docs, but that didn't happen. What did happen was that my old word processor app no longer works--disappointing, but not a total surprise. Fortunately I had back-ups of my novels, and was able to make copies of the rest of the files via itunes, so nothing lost. Phew. Anyone have suggestions for a new writing app?
Haven't had a chance to check out all the new bits.

Now back to read the comments.

not forgetting this site which as far as I can tell Charlie runs on much the same basis as I do

Actually, this side is an ad.

It's just that what it's advertising is my writing. (If you like this stuff, you might want to buy some books ... and so on.)

I've lately broadened out into sharing the soapbox with other folks, mostly writers, but again it's on the basis of them having something to say that is probably of interest to folks who want to see what I have to say, not actual product advertising as such.

The second is for the ethical ad networks to get together and create a really really good ad blocker for all platforms that only blocks unethical ad networks

AdBlock Plus is actually doing just that. Aside from the usually discreet ads on the google search page, the response from advertisers and ad-funded sites have been accusations of blackmail.

I signed up for Google Contributor when it came out. I signed up for a monthly contribution of $10. So far they've paid out $0.12 to rotten tomatoes, and also paid out to some other sites for amounts that are too small to report, whatever that means. The total number of ads I have skipped using this is 62 between 9/12 and 9/18.

So to me this looks like a stunning failure, but there are some interesting tidbits. First of all, it seems likely that $10 would pay for a lot of surfing. Second, for whatever reason not enough sites that a (if I do say so) discerning Internet reader visits advertise with Google. For example, Wired apparently does not, and consequently has gotten no revenue from me, since I block flash and all their ads are flash ads. Same with boingboing and engadget and slashdot. So a lot of money is being left on the table.

Here's one stupid idea. Make your whole webpage be a single image, text and all inside. The ads are part of the image, alongside the context. Good luck blocking them.

Well yes, except that images are really bandwidth-hungry. There's a large body of empirical research that says if a user spends more than a couple of seconds waiting for a page to load they'll hit the "back" button without waiting; trying to load a 2000x2000 24 bit color PNG or JPG image of a page -- probably running to megabytes in size, even with compression -- ain't gonna fly.

Basically, ads consume bandwidth -- which is paid for by the viewer, not by the advertiser. Your workaround just shifts the stage at which bandwidth is consumed slightly. It doesn't do anything to force the public to look at your site, and if anything it deters them. Oh, and you know something else? It falls foul of disability law and it's not going to be indexed by google or the other web search engines because they'd need to OCR your page image ...

Here's a stupid, non-tech answer: in Africa, they're using their phones to pay for all sorts of things. Basically, the amount of money in the phone account is something like a debit card, at least as I understand it.

Now, if you can couple this with a packet sniffer that identifies the origin of each data packet the account user consumes, can charge the consumer's account for consuming that packet, and can transfer some part of that charge to the content provider (taking the rest as a cost/profit on the transaction), then you might have a working system. You could even theoretically reuse all that adware bandwidth to this purpose.

Now, how you get there from here, I haven't a clue, any more than I know how to stop a man-in-the-middle attack on such a revenue stream keeping the payment from reaching the content provider, or bogus consumers ripping off accounts to feed fake content providers.

Still, if we ever go to a more African-style "pay for everything with your phone" system, this kind of microbilling might become more feasible.

Of course, it also means that packet sniffers become part of daily life...

Decent casual content that is supported by micro payments (and maybe some small subscriptions). This is where most casual, mainstream journalism will occur. Someone will figure out micro payments. I don't know who, but someone will. It will probably take some kind of large entity to act as a fully automated middleman, so my bet is on Google/Apple/Amazon.

One annoying feature of the subscription model is that you have to sign up and log in ... ugh. I, for one, would not mind subscribing to a few decent newspapers (I currently subscribe to one), managing all those bloody user accounts is a chore. The notion of subscribing to middlemen (like Flattr or Google/Apple/Amazon/Facebook) who give access and pay content creators is interesting, as it allows me to manage the subscriptions in a centralized and convenient manner. However, I am a bit conserned with them becoming groups of cartels. Or rather, I would be if Google/Facebook/Amazon weren't getting pretty close to that, not to mention the empire of Rupert Murdoch.

One thing the current advertising model does much to enable is 'content laundering', in which content is either copied verbatim or minimally re-written before being published on a site with the kind of social reach necessary to make the content go viral. The original author gets nothing, but because the advertising revenue stream is indirect, we don't really perceive the injustice. If I had just paid to read that content, I'd be upset if I realised that my money was going to a re-publisher and not the original author - there's a visceral sense of injustice that doesn't exist with advertising revenue.

So, a micropayment system might help here. One could imagine a blockchain system whereby someone publishes something, and records the checksum of their content in the blockchain. Wherever that content is reproduced, others could immediately make a micropayment to that person (I handwavingly assume some kind of content-addressable storage where I can look up the author using the checksum of the content). I presume that with sufficiently smart blockchain tech a person could sell a share of their future revenue to an investor/employer in return for regular or upfront payment, so this might preserve something similar to the existing spectrum of writing for hire, publishing contracts, advances and so forth.

The checksum obviously helps us to identify illegitimate copies, though it would be trivially easy to adjust some punctuation and get a different checksum. I'm not sure how I feel about the countermeasure of copyright violation bots that would scan the available content-space for such tricks - at a high enough level of sophistication they should even be able to detect entirely rewritten copies that nevertheless violate the original copyright. There's a reductio ad absurdum in which if I repeat some anecdote or phrase you once told me, I get a micro-bill of 0.00002 ETH from your copyright agent bot or something, but aside from the absurdity of the notion it's quite hard to see what the philosophical objection to that would be. Just imagine how much we all owe the first person to use the words 'mansplaining' or 'bae' in back-payments for their innovation!

To go back to the original question, I don't think that this involves burning down the web. The underlying protocols are OK - not great, but also less bad than many others. Nothing I've described is made impossible by the architecture of the web, so it doesn't have to die in order for micropayments to happen. There are other good reasons for the web to die, but this isn't one of them.

this is somewhat what i was thinking about - a way to make me, the reader, the person who pays x. because then *i'm* the system's customer. not the content provider.

Yes, we can add micropayments to the web without burning it down and starting again. There's even a "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code reserved for future use.

One way: server is configured to know which pages are free, and which (if any) require payment, and how much. When a browser makes a request for a paid page, the server would respond with that status code and informational headers which indicate what payment gateway(s) are supported, what the cost of the page is, and a blurb of partial content to show to the user (so they can decide whether to pay or not).

The browser, on getting this response, prompts the user whether to pay or abort viewing the page. If they decide to pay (and it could remember this choice for a site, if you wanted to just automatically pay in future), the browser can submit a payment transaction to one of the specified gateways/companies where the user already has an account set up (like Paypal... who are in a good position to be the first company in this space) and get back a confirmation token which is then submitted to the original publication site along with the request. The server then verifies that token with the payment gateway and serves the page.

The process looks a lot like a 401 Unauthorized response, where the browser has to resubmit the request with additional information (in that case, authentication info; in this one, payment info).

C.

Saying the options exist is not causing them to really exist. The "Join our network" kind of thing can work, and work reasonably well. AOL was that kind of thing. But to get all the parties that you listed to agree...well...

The one about "only ethical ads", however, is totally unworkable. There are too many divergent opinions about what ethical means. And management always reserves the right to change policy, and they listen very attentively to marketing. Even simpler approaches don't continue to work. E.g., I have refused to install Flash, because it's a security hazard, to HTML5 has come along and includes many of the features of Flash that I find objectionable. So far there's been no large movement towards using them, but it's purely a matter of time. (Currently most browsers don't support HTML5.)

Now as to the first option, again, the one of multiple providers getting together to form a subscription site, I see that as magazines redux, and I wouldn't expect there to be only one. The problem is that you don't encounter them on the drugstore checkout line, but that may be soluble by "trial subscriptions".

Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest's company "Peppercoin" offered a micropayment system circa 2002 that also solved the "fixed billing overhead" problem. Trouble is, they were literally 10 years ahead of the market.

Wikipedia has a summary, and the technical papers are online at MIT.

As for a magical means of switching from the present mess to a new one, how about an ad blocker that threw micropayments at stubborn ad content to make it go away? We already have ad blockers where you can opt to view certain ads so that the hosting site doesn't block your blocker...

Amazon (apologies) recently launched "Underground" https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground

Essentially, part of a PRIME members' subscription, content providers (game/app developers at the moment) are paid by Amazon according to the amount of time a subscriber spends in the app/game. The rules are that the app/game has no in-app payment (so essentially the entire, highest value game or app is delivered at the outset, or at the very least optional components are included for no additional charge)

I'm unclear if this is a net positive for smaller (non blockbuster) developers, who have generally had to rely on an ad-supported or freemium model anyway. As a consumer, I love that I have access to apps without ads.

This is similar, I suppose, to the Kindle Unlimited model, which has some drawbacks (especially for established authors), but which I have used as a consumer to read back-list titles and new (to me) authors. It hasn't stopped me buying books!

However, the rapid switch to subscription based media *has* resulted in me no longer buying DVDs/Blurays - I either get it from Netflix or RedBox on disk (rental), or I watch it on demand (fixed period rental) or via my subscription.

Cory Doctorow proposed a similar "reputation currency" called Whuffie in his debut novel: "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

for example, I don't buy Apple electronics products because of the ads, I buy them because I'm a satisfied 25-year returning customer.

And the Apple advertising leads head for the door, switching off the lights as they go saying "Our work here is done."

You're the target for the advertising you think you can and do ignore. It's not as crude as "Buy more Veeblefetzers!" blaring from the radio every five minutes but advertising hasn't been that crude for half a century and more. One of the abilities of top-rank advertisers is to get their consumers to believe deep in their hearts they aren't influenced by advertising while paying again and again for their short-life consumable product because of their advertising.

There's one alternative that's quite famous in the UK that's neither of the above the options. The BBC runs a HUGE website with all kinds of content. There's obviously the news and sport, but it hosts a gigantic amount of educational content, recipes and much, much more.

This is, to use a phrase from elsewhere in our culture, free at the point of demand, but supported in effect by an annual or monthly subscription in the form of TV licensing. Somewhere in the blurb that DCMS has produced about charter review it talks about how much bbc.co.uk costs - but of course that cost is amortised across every household and many businesses not just users.

Would this work for other things? People subscribe to Sky Sports, Sky Movies and the like - not me, but Sky TV, whatever they're called these days, rely on this business model to survive. If they gave you free subscription to curated ad-free relevant web-content as well... I can imagine that working. If they gave suitably cheap add-on ad-free web-content, I'm less sure but then I'm not the target audience.

I AM, however, the target audience for the iOS content blockers. I've just bought one for my iPad. It's nice not to get spammed by adverts yes. But it's wonderful to see an iPad load nearly all webpages in 2-3 seconds again. Some pages it loads faster than desktop computer, despite the fact the desktop is wired in to the router via an ethernet cable. The desktop still downloads all the advertising banners and stuff.

I'm not sure about a micro-payment system. Technologically I'm sure it could be done I'm not sure I'd go for it culturally. If Google's model of advertising is dying, and Facebook relies on that too, Apple offers a curated walled garden model. So do things like Netflix in a different media environment. I happily pay Netflix £6/month even if I happen not to watch anything in a given month (although that's rare) and if I watch a couple of hours (I rarely watch that little) it's cheaper than a cinema ticket. I haven't seriously thought about the amount I'd pay for a "Newsflicks" or a similar service (and a lot of what I read is author's blogs and the like that come essentially ad free anyway) but perhaps a monthly subscription into a curated walled garden is a more realistic system than a micro-payment system?

@ 9: This might be a fun chat to tap Krugman for...

My thought exactly, but you got there first. This should be up his alley, unless it's too micro.

I have some experience on the subject, as I worked on the subject while at France Telecom circa 1996. At the time, FT made about a billion euros a year in revenue from the Minitel, which was basically a glass terminal with a 1200/75 modem connected to something like a premium-rate number. We could see the writing on the wall for the service, but there was a whole ecosystem of content providers who needed to be moved, kicking or screaming if need be. The first order of business was convincing them that billing by the minute made no sense whatsoever on the web.

We ended up making a system that routed requests for paid content (on a per-page basis) via a proxy server that used network authentication to identify which account would be billed, along with provisions to not bill the customer again if he reloaded the page, ways to ensure the customer did in fact agree to pay for the content, and so on. The charges would be put on their ISP bill. We also got patents for the system. That said, it had modest adoption, and 5 years later when I went to visit my former colleagues, I found out they made a modest million euros per month or so, mostly from selling ring tones.

The technical mechanism is unimportant. The real issue is that micropayments impose mental transaction costs that end up being prohibitive. Prof. Andrew Odlyzko has excellent articles on the subject: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropayments.pdf

Advertising is going down the tubes, micropayments are too exhausting and most people are cheapskates who refuse to pay for content (economists have done experiments that show when people buy a dead-trees newspaper, they literally pay for the paper and value the information contained therein at zero). The conundrum of how to fund journalism is not going away. The reality is there is simply too much content, most of it generic commodity and of low quality, and the market won't reach equilibrium until a good many publishers go out of business so the survivors can start charging again. There will still be free "content" of the Faux News ilk, used to further a political or lobbying agenda. Premium high-value content will remain subscription-based like today, and a lot will be bundled as a loss-leader by platforms like Facebook, Google or Apple News who make money somewhere else. Finally some journalism will be funded by non-profits like the BBC, Grauniad or the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Another excellent article boy Odlyzko, "Content is Not King": http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications2.pdf

Another note on subscription vs micro-payment. Like others here I support some creators through a Patreon subscription (currently larger than my equivalent Amazon/Netflix costs). I don't mind subsidizing those folks who get to see the content for free, mainly because *I WANT TO SEE MORE OF THAT CONTENT*.

It's enlightened self-interest.

Unlike renaissance patronage, this is a form of micropayment (I believe it can be as low as a dollar or so a month for some folks), and it' one that lots of people could live with. At $5 a month, it doesn't take too many patrons to be able to eke out a median living (at worst).

Casual Information Users can only be super-stingy because they're still on a web where content is mostly supported by advertising (including illegal sites scraping content like Rob describes). In a Web/App Ecosystem where the only free stuff they'd have access to consists of

1. Non-profit apps/pages
2. Sponsored content pages
3. Freemium access

They'd have to open their wallets to enjoy more than a limited slice of the Web. I imagine they'd probably favor "bundles" of access built along a subscription or Patreon-style model, rather than tons of micro-transactions.

In fact, a No-More-Ads Web might just bundle the costs for a lot of sites into your broadband subscription - or at least those that can negotiate that, which would almost certainly include Facebook, Google, and a host of other major platforms.

Here's some people making micropayments work - by proving articles from many, many, many publishers:

https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc

I wish they'd expand to the UK. I'd pay them happily.

Let's say the minimum unit of micropayment is 1 credit. It's a SFF site, after all. It's the amount that a content provider is paid for a packet of data, say, although there's no reason providers can't charge more.

One could also specify that each carrier in the chain (the cable companies, the ISPs, etc.) each charge one credit for the packet to go over their chunk of the Net.

The final charge in credits comes out of the consumer's account with her end ISP. When she accepts the charge and opens the content, credits flow back down, paying each packet carrier and the ultimate provider.

That's my simplistic mechanism for how this could work, although you'd need quite a blockchain to make sure each credit ended up in the right account.

You could even run a web server with a little dashboard that told you how much you were spending to view content, and you could have front pages that told you how much it would cost you to view something before you got into it. Probably this would be like the health meter in a first person shooter, and probably it would annoy old school users like me, but it might work.

Of course, how many credits per dollar is a key question.

Note that this approach favors local blogs over foreign video, so the political roadblocks come from both content providers and consumers who want to stream huge files like foreign videos, while those doing research on documents will get by fairly cheaply. Actually, the whole academic publishing industry might oppose this too, because it devalues their content in comparison to, say, soap operas.

But again, how do you get there from here?

Micro-payments have been successfully implemented within the context of closed (or mostly closed) systems, such as MMOs. I believe that Second Life was the first such platform to go all in for micro-payments. What all these MMO micro-payment systems share is that people don't pay in "real" currency, but instead use real world currency to purchase special in-game currency, where each "point" of currency is worth from half a cent to a few cents.

Based on this, I would predict that an effective online micro-payment system would first emerge from a closed system such as the Apple iOS. There is a lot of money to be made as the virtual central bank, if you have nearly complete control over the ecosystem.

A bit of a rant: I block ads. I block ads because a significant portion of them are full of bad code that slows down my system significantly (whether through malice or incompetence, I can't tell) and others start flash, audio, or video streams without my permission. When I see one of those sites that used to crash my browser with their ads, posting messages like "we detect you are using an ad blocker, please consider...", I just roll my eyes. I was fine with ads until they started breaking my internet experience.

Advertising is not going away, the only reason Ad blockers work at the moment is because the Ad content is easily distinguishable from the "real" content. While the lost revenue from ad blockers is less than the amount of effort required to break the ad blockers the status quo prevails. At some point the (and ad blocking going mainstream in IOS9 could be the tipping point), the advertising companies will invest in new tech to make the ads indistinguishable from the content (think product placement in tvs and movies).

On the tech side this is pretty straight forward to do, they will just need to server the ad content from the same servers as the non-ad content.. most probably a reverse proxy layer in-front that fetches the non-ad content then just inserts the adverts. If that layer lives in the advertising companies network there is nothing really for the content producers to do except update their DNS.

Two other thoughts on micro-payments:

Could some of the net neutrality laws and regulation in various jurisdictions prohibit some types of micropayment systems?

The internet is world wide (the first two "W"s in www). Consider that what we in the west think of as a micro-payment could easily be a several hours labor for an internet user in a developing nation.

I do think we can get there. Advertising won't go away because some people will prefer it to paying, but eventually there will be choices for those who don't want ads. Lots of current micropayment efforts have been described above. I don't think any of them get things quite right so my research group is releasing a new one called Tipsy ( http://tipsy.csail.mit.edu/ ).

There's an important distinction to be made between (forced) micro payments and (voluntary) micro donations (Tipsy does the latter).

For micro payments, you have to manage authentication, carefully check whose allowed to see what, and prevent circumvention. I think it will ultimately be done through a payment network, where you sign up to a system that tracks your usage, bills you once, then distributes the proceeds to the sites you visited. Single sign on handles the authentication part; sites will then check if you are someone who's paying into a network and, if so, let you see content. Lots of privacy problems here of course. It's much harder to deploy than micro-donations.

I'm more excited about micro-donations. I'm an optimist about Internet users' willingness to pay, and think that the only reason this hasn't taken off is that it's still too complicated. Tools like Flattr make you click buttons (after deciding if you like something enough to click). Others make it hard for you to manage your budget (how much content am I going to consume this month, so I know how much to give for this one). Others have real trouble with micro-consumption: if this is the only article I ever read on this site, I'm not willing to spend the time to make a 2 cent donation. And all of them require significant work on the content provider side to integrate the system with the providers web site.

We've tried to address these issues with Tipsy. All a content provider does is put a small text file on their site listing their paypal or dwolla account. Tipsy is a (currently chrome only) browser extension that looks for those files and, over time, total up the amount of time you spend on each (in you browser, so it stays private). Periodically, it presents you with a statement describing how you've divided up your time and recommending how much you should donate to each provider. It builds a page with paypal (or dwolla) buttons to let you make those payments with a single click.

We're just beginning to recruit content providers for tipsy---right now, Pro Publica is the only one participating. But I'd love for you to install and play with the extension, and welcome feedback on the extension, the idea, and the site.

Anyone remember the early days of Google, before they merged with Doubleclick, when they specialized in small, unobtrusive, low-bandwidth, text-based ads! The Internet went crazy with support. Heck, even Slashdot was pro-ad for a change. (And that was before Slashdot got bought by Dice.)

I'm not entirely sure, but it seems like there might be a clue to a reasonable way forward there. Assuming anyone on either side is interested in or willing to work towards a reasonable way forward.

I could imagine, say, a low-level negotiation between browsers and servers, where the browser tells the server how much bandwidth the user is willing to waste on ads, and the server responds by telling the browser how much of the content will be available in that case.

Of course, there would always be cheaters (probably on both sides; certainly on the advertiser's side), but it could be treated like spam. Do business with spammers, and your reputation goes in the dumper. The idea of automatically calculated reputation scores isn't outside the realm of possibility.

it's difficult to see a future without advertising: what else would berks do?

No, don't answer that.

Try this: picture a world in which 40 or 50% of the content is paid for by subscription by the few and micropayments from the many. Then 60%, then 70.

As advertising gets squeezed, it gets nastier: flashier, noisier, more intrusive and more dangerous.

You would think that the retreat would become a rout, and advertising would disappear. And in a logical world, you'd be right.

But in the real world, there will always be something to sell, and a repellent berk with the gift of convincing people that giving money to berks is the key to selling it. They will succeed in this as long as advertising works.

And adblockers are the game changer here.

I doubt that adblockers will ever be 100% effective, so advertising will continue to work, and there will be an enduring economic niche for berks. But it will be a small one, and the ad-supported space will be tiny...

Perhaps no more than 30% of all space

...And toxic: because bottom-feeding and free-riding and flat-out larceny will never disappear from an economy of manipulative liars.

We seem to be well on the way to multiple micro-billing infrastructures without burning the web down.

"Gamification" of apps is trendy in the mobile app space, and those are basically micropayment systems. I'd guess that there is very serious money at stake, since Game of War: Fire Age is currently bombarding Aus TV viewers with very expensive TV ads despite the game itself being a free initial download.

And the other thing that's trendy, at least in the iOS development circles which I follow, is turning Web sites into apps. Facebook have an iOS app, and they also have their new content distribution scheme.

Phones are either the dominant form of Internet access for most people or soon will be. What we're seeing with ads on the web is a dying ecosystem.

BitCoin isn't the answer but...

Microbilling systems seem to very accurate identification of individual internet users and very accurate tracking of individual web requests. (Maybe not foolproof, but if it's too easy to falsify either, it will not succeed.)

Yes, governments can and do extract such info from the web systems we have today. But this is going to make it really, really, easy for them :-(

Phones are either the dominant form of Internet access for most people or soon will be. What we're seeing with ads on the web is a dying ecosystem.

Outside the twitterverse and social media, how much content comes from people's phones?

I suspect we're seeing a diversification of the internet. Consumption is phone-driven. Production still relies on computers. We're not quite at the Stand on Zanzibar point where someone can reprogram the web through their phone, and somehow, I doubt we ever will be.

The interesting part is that there's a social divide here: those who have only phones are limited to consuming and transacting. Creation depends on more complex equipment. I wonder how the privilege of owning a keyboard will play out, socially and politically?

"...how do you prevent the next Victor Hugo or George Orwell from starving to death in the streets?"

It's not much of a stretch to say that Orwell did, by his own choice. (OK, not the "to death" bit.) Hugo ate the animals out of the zoo, but apart from that episode I don't think he ever had much to worry about. Well-off family, pension from the king, tremendous popularity...

Both of them were around long before anyone had the idea of supporting your writing with advertising, and both of them survived...

Yes, but it's not too far off - you provide interesting content at your own expense, you obviously wouldn't do it if you didn't get some enjoyment from it, and any financial benefit it brings you is pretty nebulous and unquantifiable.* It's still close enough to my idea to count for what was in any case a pretty imprecise point :)

* At least, I assume so in default of any reason to think otherwise. I wonder how well it works? I found this site through Google, and only had any reason to google you because I already liked your work. I don't think I'd have found it eventually through general browsing anyway. The website that did make me think your work would be worth checking out in the first place was TV Tropes.

Thanks for bringing up Odlyzko's work. I'd remembered the gist but forgot the source. It's worth a read.

I suspect bundling is probably the best answer. I wouldn't pay much for an old movie, but Netflix sets a reasonable price for thousands of them. Similarly, a $5 charge for, say, 100 downloads from a large selection will probably go down better for most people than individual transactions at $0.05 a download.

The biggest problem with micropayments is always going to be in the name. They're micro. If an artist has a few thousand followers, it's a pittance. An artist with millions of followers can probably either raise prices out of the micropayment range or make better money on auxiliaries (convention speeches, t-shirts, etc.).

Anyway, this leads to my question: is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?

Yes.

It's called taxes.

They already pay for the internet.

Anyone who pretends that the vast networks of fibre cable, that stretch across the entire earth, wasn't built by governments is an idiot.

Sure, there's some private investment in there, but the legality, the diplomacy and the initial drive was done by governments.

Trolls. Rentiers. Scum.

Oh, look - there's SOPA again, being pushed on the end of a bill regulating beetroot fungi levels!

p.s.

If you want an insight into this, grab hold of a map of the undersea cables and so on, then wonder why Svalbard (population: about 40,000) has two (yes TWO) of the largest pipes known to man when New Zealand (population 4.4 million) has only a single one, and it's not comparable in bandwidth.

DERP.

I don't think the technology of some sort of plugin is a challenge, it's leveraging an existing relationship to get payment info from the user. Mobile seems like a better ecosystem to focus on.

Facebook is an obvious option - you could do InstantArticles with ads, or for payments.

Most of the top mobile apps (MAUs) are owned by Facebook, Google, Apple.

Amazon could definitely do this. Heck, they could roll it into Prime or something.

NetFlix already has payment info. Seems unlikely to me, too much of a stretch for them.

Any of the payment processors could jump in. Stripe just launched their Relay API which, among other things, lets you complete purchases right within a tweet. Braintree (now part of PayPal) could definitely jump in.

I am gonna decompose the post into two bits

First, advertising death spiral, adblocker, total fantasy not even close to happening and will never ever happen. Year over year spend continues to rise by around 18%. Ad blockers are almost irrelevant as the revenue streams are moving quickly to mobile anyway, and even for web if the adblockers ever start becoming a problem (they aren't curently a problem, they are increasing and being wached but not a problem) they are dead easy to disable and very very hard to re-enable, the arms raise is totally on the side of the content producer

Is there a lunatic fringe that might stop using the internet or certain sites over disabling ad blockers? Sure, but they are way too small to matter. Especially given that as advertising gets better and better it becomes very difficult to tell it from content

Now micropayments, sure, why not, tons of easy ways to do that and there is certainly a market. The main blocker is legacy financial institutions and their ridiculous markups, however easy to work around those if really needed. Most likely people to do that is PayPal, especially given they are now freed from eBay

The government pays for a lot of overseas fiber but don't think it is close to a majority anymore

Inside the US the government pays for almost none of it these days, hence the entire net neutrality debate.

Regardless using it for commerce is just like using a road the government pays for

Micropayments...

Apple might be able to do it. If they wanted to. Don't charge per-view, do a Spotify-style model instead. Apple could acquire free access to content when accessed via iOS from a large majority of the top 1,000 non-porn paid sites in the world (and ad-block the rest). Tout it as an advantage of iOS "What you want, when you want, without fees or ads", instead of that nasty ad-ridden Android thing.

Microsoft could possibly do the same, and add it into the subscription cost for the Windows OS. But you'd never get the enterprise market buying it, and I don't know how much of a lifespan the home PC has.

(Why spotify-type subscription and not charge per view? Because no-one wants a waiter standing behind them at a restaurant charging them 50p every time they take a bite. People want to pay and then relax and enjoy.)

So, no Amazon or other online retailers? Count me and everyone who lives outside central markets out with a vengeance.

When I was 14 Amazon was started, and even with shipping costs, the ability to browse and order books online without having to rely on my closest retailer to decide they might have a buyer and order it for their English language section was..revolutionary.

I think micropayments have all the problems tiered telecoms pricing does; people are willing to pay to know what their bill is going to be ahead of time. It's totally not a question of technical ability, it's that any kind of micropayment model will collapse into basic cable.

People in general do not agree that content creators, as a class, ought to get paid. This is because most of the content out there is worthless to any particular person. (Look at the successful webcomics; it's at best a couple percent, and generally way less, of the free viewership who buy stuff. That wee fraction is sufficient to making a living.)

The consumer wants an accurate labelling system; the seller doesn't, because accurate labelling reduces overall sales. ("I want a book like a Patrick O'Brian novel"'s honest answer is "good luck with that", rather than "try this stuff that involves at least one mention of a violin".)

Plus there's a whole bunch of drive to parasitize because cheap replication makes parasitizing so easy.

"Ecosystem" in computers is "the cost of going somewhere else is high"; the app mechanism destroys interoperability because interoperability is bad, it facilities a desire to stop giving you money. (Think of how often phone number transfer had to be legislated very specifically.)

So, really, to produce a solution to the "ads, threat or menace?" problem, you need something that reduces everybody's insecurity; people have to be able to get to what they want, the content creator has to be able to get paid, and the intermediaries... well, we can't entirely do without them, there has to be a viable business model, but we need some way to keep them from pulling all the benefit out of the system, and some means of structurally enforcing that or you get farming. (Farm productivity in Anglo NorAm since 1950 -- roughly tripled. Farm income in constant dollars, same period, roughly flat. That's what a robust intermediary does.)

I'd totally socialize it. Give the various national archives and copyright offices something to do.

Content creator uploads the thing; citizen and residents download the thing. Total usage gets tracked, legislated rates get paid at the legislated schedule, generally as a "this much for art/share of pie" thing. Cross-border can't be any harder than the existing tax treaties. Grant funding for collective projects can come out of overage, official "tenner to vote" fundraising contests, permit the content creators duration-limted time-delay limited access setups so they've got something to sell on the kickstarter-or-equivalent, it really wouldn't be hard.

And it would be a reason to think about socializing the network infrastructure, which it really ought to be.

Might help if Charlie can give some idea on what kind of service would need to be microbilled?

AdBlock Plus fails on a couple of counts. First, their criteria for an acceptable ad say nothing about do-not-track, which is crucial. Second, they charge money for getting your ads listed as acceptable. The EFF's Privacy Badger is doing better along those lines, as it won't block ads from websites that state that they comply with the EFF's do-not-track policy.

Maybe I'm just getting old but it seems every time a new system comes out to capture money from us punters, within a few days, someone comes out with a way to circumvent it. Thinking regional DRM, online ads even - many of the comments above are arguing which adblocker is better and their respective merits etc instead of looking at the underlying premise that they were created as they filled a need. People don't want crap thrown in their face.

I honestly can't see any kind of micro payment system being any different. I don't mind paying for quality content adfree, but hell will freeze over before I pay money to Google *not* to receive ads (not the least due to their international tax dodging strategies - CD makes a very important point above governments - ie taxpayers, you and me - already paying for the infrastructure)And to the commenter who wrote about the U.S. not paying for infrastructure, well not paying tax on revenue in the U.S. IS a payment to that corporation.

If a site is too ad clunky, I don't bother with it irrespective of the content. Life is just too short. I don't watch commercial TV or listen to commercial radio for the same reasons very often. 37 minutes of content and the rest of the hour ads? (The point about respective incomes worldwide was also on point)

A micropayment system might last for a while and even if they only capture 30% of the market, they'll still be ahead but warez and piracy didn't come about because the system was working well in the first place. Disclaimer - I generally pay for content of any format happily (ad free only) although I have been blessed with a regular income for the last few years so have been able to afford to do so. In the leaner years, I do without, borrow from libraries or create my own.

What "someone else" ??
It would, inevitably gravitate to a monopoly or a cartel, I'm afraid.
Like electric power supply in the UK, or the dominance of MS in OS's etc ....

Yeah, right.
And, if you want to read most newspapers without paying a sub, then you have to go "incognito" & your ad-blockers do not then work .....
Sorry, I'm paying an ISP, I'm paying an electricity bill, I'm paying for anti-virus ... why the hell should I pay any more?

but hell will freeze over before I pay money to Google *not* to receive ads

Personally, I'd like it if there was a Search company that provided paid service and didn't depend on ads. This way I could be sure their primary concern is providing good service to me, not to the advertisers. I don't like to be a product.

YES!

( See how easy it is when you post comprehensibly? )

You are ferpectly correct (as Obelix once said ) .. it's paid for by guvmints ...
And any attempt at micro-billing will, IMHO end up in the hands of the greedy sharks, plus, of course the ultra-panopticon scenario envisaged in # 67.

Shall we all agree, just not to go there?

"Think of this as "how do we keep the next Walter Cronkite or Hunter S. Thompson from starving to death in the streets?""

The costs of good content production go way beyond those of simply paying the writers, *especially* in journalism. Investigative reporting is *expensive* - never mind the const of reporting from war zones and the like.

A universal basic income would enable amateurs to create content based on publicly available materials, but that's filler stuff - little more than processing press releases. It'd kill decent reportage completely (even assuming that talented journalists would be happy with what would basically be a subsistence-level income).

Did I just read this?

"...hell will freeze over before I pay money to Google *not* to receive ads"

No shit. And, indeed, no way in hell.

The incentives are perverse - it all ends up at "Tax the rat farms".

The problem with micro-payments isn't technical; it's human. We have a built-in bias for anything that's free. For us, free is different from cheap. It's even different from very cheap.

The bar for free stuff is really low, and the bar for paying anything up front is much higher. All kinds of sites are able to persuade people to pay attention. But only the most valuable publications (such as the Economist and the Wall Street Journal) are able to persuade people to pay money.

The problem isn't getting people to pay a lot for what they read. It's getting them to pay anything at all. And micro-payment technology doesn't help with that.