> what if ... everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?

Except in practice we see the opposite.

There's something interesting going on with companies when they want to get paid directly versus by ads: they demand 3x - 4x or more for subscriptions or pay per view versus what they make from ads.

Easiest place to see this is ad supported non-linear TV in the years you could get without ads, or with ads. You pay significantly more to not see the ads, than they make from the ads.

Perhaps this is justified because ad-free subscriptions reduce the audience size for ad buys, but when you look at the numbers watching with ads versus paying, it wouldn't seem like the "no ads" buyers make a dent in whatever pricing tier.

In the 90s when we were young and naive, we imagined a library card model, with a library fee and then you have fractions of a cent cost to read a post, and using (hand waving) technology to uncouple viewing history from payables to content creators. That, or the British TV license model, an Internet license of some kind.

It's curious to me the ad networks haven't gotten together to preemptively offer this. Arguably Brave tried, but from an adversarial (to the ad companies) stance. It would work better from the inside with a simple regulation: if you serve ads for ad-supported content, you have to participate in the library card system at CPM rates no greater than you receive for ads to skip the ads for card holders.

This is price discrimination. Everybody would love to charge more money to rich people and less money to poor people, since that increases the total profit.

The only companies that we directly allow to do this are schools, but having a premium version lets you approximate this.

Steam also does this. Most games are significantly cheaper in low-income countries like mine because otherwise they wouldn't make a dime here.

That's because you usually pay via credit card (or some other financial mean) which is cumbersome (and may be illegal) to spoof. But yeah, it can be hard to justify a subscription when it's the price of a full meal. Especially when other essential subscriptions (electricity, water, internet, cell services,...) is straining your monthly budget.

Steam is not the one doing that. Publishers decide regional pricing.

If Steam only had one input field for the price tag, then the publishers would only decide one price.

The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source for the content owners.

it takes a lot of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss of a $5/month recurring revenue stream that might last for years.

The fact that advertising is more profitable doesn't mean that the PPV model is not viable. It could certainly be so. Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers, which users can agree to, just like they do with subscription-based content today.

The problem is skewed incentives, of course. Advertising is acceptable to most users and easy to integrate, so why should website authors go out of their way to please a minority of their users who object to it?

>Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers, which users can agree to, just like they do with subscription-based content today.

you're describing the model of a product called blendle, a service which i loved but which totally failed. they failed to attract users, and they failed to attract publishers. this isn't some new idea that nobody had tried. it's been done. and it failed, not just for blendle. people have tried micropayments, they've tried subscriptions, if you can imagine a PPV model, it's probably been tried. readers and publishers both hate it.

I wasn't aware of Blendle, but I'm not surprised that it failed.

Advertising is ubiquitous on the web. Integrating it into web sites is simple, it works well for generating revenue at scale, and users have been conditioned from every other media industry to accessing content for "free". There is practically no friction for users, save for the degraded user experience, which most people have learned to live with or ignore.

So right off the bat, anyone trying to deploy alternative business models is going against the current of a trillion-dollar industry, and well established consumer expectations.

> readers and publishers both hate it.

Why do you think that is? Is it because the micropayment model is inherently bad, or because implementing it is difficult for website owners, it is annoying to use for users, and ultimately brings little revenue?

What if implementing it were as easy and convenient as advertising is today? What if users had an easy and convenient way to link their payment method into their browser, and from then on it required no maintenance? What if they understood that the web is not "free", but someone on the other end should be paid for their work if they find it valuable? What if this model actually generated significant revenue for publishers? What if all this was simply the way the web operated from the start?

Clearly this model hinges on a bunch of hypotheticals, but hopefully you get the point. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about users paying for consuming content. This is the way business transactions work in most respectable industries. You want something, you pay for it directly. You don't ask a third party to step in between you and the seller, to show you manipulative content that directly benefits them and their associates, while indirectly paying for the thing you actually want to buy. The fact we've accepted this corrupt business model as normal in many facets of life is absolutely insane. Never mind the fact that it's being used to manipulate us into thinking and acting in ways which corrupt democratic processes and cause sociopolitical instability, or that it's abusing our right to privacy and exploiting our data. To hell with all of that.

Do you think the fact that NO major content websites (NYT, substack, WSJ, ...) have settled on a PPV model is simply because they haven't thought of it? Or is it more likely that the numbers absolutely do not work?

That's a false dichotomy.

I can't speak for all web sites, but I reckon a combination of factors could explain why such a solution hasn't been deployed:

1. Advertising is ubiquitous, easy to integrate, and provides a safe revenue stream.

2. There is little to no infrastructure for the PPV model. Whoever builds it would need to maintain their own version of it.

3. People expect the web to be "free". This is even true within technical crowds who understand that it's really not free. And a large part of that group doesn't mind advertising.

So, really, it would require a substantial amount of effort to implement, it would add additional friction to users, and ultimately only a minority would appreciate it.

Had this model been in place from the beginning of the web, things might be different today. Alas, if my grandma had wheels...

And people prefer unlimited subscriptions.

No one uses the PPV model because there isn't sufficient payment infrastructure (402 payment required). The friction for entering your credit card information into a website is ridiculous, you might as well target the high end of the market with a monthly subscription.

The PPV model, like Ads, works well for websites that you're not well associated with. Random blogs and websites that you otherwise wouldn't be willing to share your credit card info with.

Have any of them actually tried it though? If they have and I missed it, then I apologize, but I can't recall the NYT letting me read an article for $1 with zero friction via Apple or Google Pay or Stripe link or something. It they tried it and the numbers didn't work, that's one thing, but I don't recall that happening.

Doing it via conventional card networks won't work, the fees would eat most/all of the payment.

A critical mass of publishers would need to team up and form a cooperative/etc where a user could register once, deposit some money, and then that money would be spent every time they view an article. But that requires cooperation between competitors, which is already hard enough, and the cancer that is the advertising industry wouldn't like this potential existential threat and would be more than happy to pour fuel onto the fire to ensure it never succeeds.

What's surprising is why the card networks themselves don't get in on it. They could do so in a completely backwards-compatible manner, introducing a new card number range that only works with transactions under a certain amount and have different fraud protection/chargeback rules.

WSJ was available on blendle (pay-per-view microtransactions). Washington Post was available on scroll (monthly subscription, divided up amongst the publishers you read each month). neither service still exists.

i don't believe NYT has ever tried a pay-per-view model.

I think it might be because with ad model you can sell profiling data many times over to different parties. You can’t do the same with a single charge.

I wrote about this exact problem last year. To anyone who disagrees, would you pay me 5 cents to click on the following link?

https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

yeah 5cents is nothing and knowing it goes straight to the person who put the effort into writing is better than it going to an advertiser.

You're presupposing that these blogs are producing content worth paying for. The unfortunate truth is that the overwhelming majority of blogs (99.9%+) are not.

The PPV model can at least cover the cost of bandwidth. If you are loading the page, it must be at least some value to the user, say 1/10th of a cent.

Then why is everyone so nostalgic for the old days of the blogosphere to return? If blogs are all worthless, then we shouldn't care that they're disappearing and/or being put behind paywalls; we haven't lost anything.

I blog for my own satisfaction, and my blog has no ads on it, and I don't charge visitors. I'm happy to have a few dozen readers.

That's what people are bemoaning the loss of: the before times, when people did interesting stuff without regard for whether it could be monetized or not.

Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly ads or topping it up manually, which then gets distributed to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose, transparently in the background while they browse.

It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is precisely the right model that could work at scale to eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for everyone.

Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators some of that money if and only if the creator realizes they have to sign up for Brave's cryptoshit. It's straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak is deserved.

But then again, online ads are the physical equivalent of a crowd of paparazzi following you 24/7 including inside your home, which would also prompt physical violence in the real world.

From my perspective I couldn't care less if one bad guy is stealing from another bad guy.

Nope, they don't "put ads on the site". That's not how it works.

Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.

"If you thought click-bait was bad before..."

I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.

At the risk of pedantry, though it's still germane to this context, that's more the Tidal model than the Spotify model.

Spotify's model is more that your monthly amount gets disproportionately redistributed to the artists that bring more interest and listens to Spotify, regardless of whether you were one of those listeners. Smaller and niche artists suffer under Spotify's model.

This is exactly what I want. I don't really care to subscribe to most written media (I do in some cases) but once in awhile an article grabs my attention and I would shell out to read it.

Charge the provider per view. Charge the sender of that spam email per message delivered. The new internet. Would this work?

> Would you pay per view?

Yes, but only after viewing, of else I'd pay for "editorial" or AI generated slop which would be generated like link farms pointing to Amazon etc.

And that's the chicken-and-egg problem ...

In theory that could be resolved by registering for free at reputable sites and then paying per view with micropayments. Or by a scheme where one would register and only pay when I actually did read stuff, not with the currently en-vogue monthly fee for each and every site.

How do you track the views?

How do you track ad impressions?