http://adage.com/article/digital/official-google-chrome-ad-blocker/309238
Could be an interesting way to find a middle ground.
Depending on how this works, I could be very excited or very worried.
Reason I'm could get excited: I would really like to see some sort of micropayment system for content that would serve up ad-free content for users willing to pay a couple of cents to read an article (which is generally more than most big media outlets earn per pageview) and would be an alternative to 1000 subscriptions.
Reason I'm worried: Google.
I would love to see this done successfully by anyone other than GAMFA*
https://medium.com/the-official-unofficial-firefox-blog/browse-against-the-machine-e793c0fee917
*GAMFA - my new acronym, like LAMP, but it stands for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon
Quote from: ergophobe on June 04, 2017, 09:04:10 PM
Depending on how this works, I could be very excited or very worried.
Reason I'm could get excited: I would really like to see some sort of micropayment system for content that would serve up ad-free content for users willing to pay a couple of cents to read an article (which is generally more than most big media outlets earn per pageview) and would be an alternative to 1000 subscriptions.
Reason I'm worried: Google.
I would love to see this done successfully by anyone other than GAMFA*
https://medium.com/the-official-unofficial-firefox-blog/browse-against-the-machine-e793c0fee917
*GAMFA - my new acronym, like LAMP, but it stands for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon
This.
Well said ergo.
1. I don't trust Google.
2. Micropayment system, something easy, would act as a carrot for publishers to remove ads.
3. Ad block by neutral third party would be the stick.
I'm thinking a carrot and stick approach would be more effective than just a stick (ad blocking) alone.
QuoteI would love to see this done successfully by anyone other than GAMFA*
Do you think there is anyone outside of the GAMFA companies that would have the influence with enough publishers to pull a critical mass of them into a single micropayment system?
Well, if Google provides the stick and you started with 10 of the 20 biggest publishers, it would grow fast.
It's like a network effect thing though - I need a handful of my preferred outlets on there before I want to put money in my account. So the hard part is the first million users. After that it gets easier :-)
>> hard part is the first million
Put Shak on the case!
Quote from: ergophobe on June 06, 2017, 12:51:53 AM
Well, if Google provides the stick and you started with 10 of the 20 biggest publishers, it would grow fast.
It's like a network effect thing though - I need a handful of my preferred outlets on there before I want to put money in my account. So the hard part is the first million users. After that it gets easier :-)
The biggest publishers have the least incentive to join, as once blocking ad blockers is considered legit / not spam by Google (since Google itself is pushing such a system) they have no reason to funnel users through Google's payment ecosystem rather than collecting subscription revenues directly.
It takes an awful lot of 5 cent or even 25 cent micropayment conversions to equate to a $300+ subscription to the WSJ.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-google-users-free-ride-then-fades-in-search-results
Quotethe Wall Street Journal's subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent. ... The Journal decided to stop letting people read articles free from Google after discovering nearly 1 million people each month were abusing the three-article limit. ... In the most recent quarter, the Journal's digital subscribers grew about 30 percent compared with the prior year, driven partly by barring Google users from reading for free.
Eventually that 30% number will slide downward to a far lower rate of growth (you get the easiest conversions first) but implementing a Google micropayment model would cause membership to once again contract.
And working with Google as an indy pub is an even worse idea in terms of risk. Because then you don't know if something you write "offends" somebody and leads to a viral complaint in a push to get you demonetized.
Better to have a few rather close relationships (like the Patreon model) rather than many tire kickers who can be arbitrarily cut off overnight because Google offsets their own lax policing of their sites (like YouTube) with draconian hatchet jobs to third parties who mistakenly trusted Google.
One area where Google can give itself a competitive advantage is by caching full articles behind the payment system so they are the only ones with that full text in their search index, thereby making cloaking a competitive advantage to their own micropayment system, but outside of that it is quite hard to see them adding enough value to offset their douchebaggyness. And, they've repeatedly highlighted they don't believe in the concept of customer service
https://www.wired.com/2011/03/mf_larrypage/
Quote[Larry Page] told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous.
which was highlighted once more recently with Google Home glitches
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/googlehome/k_YqijnNB8Y;context-place=forum/googlehome
You can't diversify away from excessive domination of a monopoly by further entrenching that monopoly in other aspects of a business. And what happens when Google decides to flush the feature like they did with authorship / buzz / wave / etc.?