Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.
If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably not believe.
Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.
This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don't seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn't the users that decided to substitute 'ads' with 'tracking', 'visual garbage' and 'malware' it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.
But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made 'advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card' into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.
Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won't be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.
I've seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to never want to disable all my ad blockers, we'll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.
Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.
$1 per week doesn't seem like a lot when phrased that way. But when you think about all of the sites your adblocker blocks ads from on a daily basis, if it'd add up a lot of they all charged $1. I'd be ok with not consuming a good bit of content and paying for the small few I like, but I'm not sure that's sustainable. It'll be interesting to watch.
Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the jump from no payment to $1 is the biggest hurdle. If you can get someone to pay anything at all, you can probably get the to pay more than micropayment amounts, so your optimum payment is never a small one.
I always thought of micropayments as being like 1cent or less, like a small enough amount to be forgettable for even the stingiest people. And to somehow make it effortlessly simple to pay, so it's closer to an impulse purchase. There's a lot of friction associated with finding a credit card and punching in numbers and an address.
I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from less than a cent to $0.35 to various sites I've visited in the last month or so, and all for $5 a month. Seems like a better way to handle paying for content than signing up for subscriptions individually with dozens of sites.
21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way.
You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms, but for the small amounts you are mining that really doesn't matter. The benefit is having (a small amount of) money put onto your device without you having to make any effort at all and replenished over time. There will also be the ability to specify a threshold below which money can be transferred from your device to a website without your authorisation. So you might specify 1 cent a webpage (for a collection of high quality sites) that you're happy to pay without constantly having to press an “ok” button.
This will then deliver a very low effort system for micro-paying websites requiring very little need for attention and management from the user, effectively automatically paying websites with device-generated digital currency rather than with attention/exposure to ads.
That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained.
Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there) and then have a browser plugin that reacts to a payment challenge (either HTTP 402 or some meta-tag) and presents me with a native chrome button that can't be spoofed by site JS. And add a whitelisting option for something like The Guardian where I currently pay a monthly fee.
> Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there)
That's how I use my Paypal account. I top it up occasionally by transferring money from my real bank. Paypal has usually the equivalent of about USD100 and it does NOT have my credit card number.
I would be quite happy to use Paypal for micropayments but I haven't seen anything yet that works and asks for a small enough amount to qualify as micropayment.
You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).
> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.
Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).
Besides it being utterly ridiculous to have a mining chip in your computer, you are ignoring that Bitcoin is terrible for micropayments.
1) The blockchain can handle approximately 3 transactions per second, which if actually spread evenly across the day (which they wouldn't be), it can handle around 260,000 transactions per day. A website like the New York Times does over 1MM unique per day.
2) In order to get settlements on your transactions, you have to pay a fee or else miners will ignore you. Current fees are around the equivalent of $0.04 USD. So your 1 cent transaction will not only bound up the network, but also cost you 5 cents to actually get processed.
Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.
Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario into account.
Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 / year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.
A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such as articles.
All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.
You'd think so... I signed up for flattr (https://flattr.com/) with some credit shortly after they launched. Over half a year, I found one website (https://lightspark.github.io/) I went to which wanted to receive my money (and they did). Everybody else served ads (which I blocked).
Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)
Clicking on a Gittip/Flattr/Patreon badge or looking up a donation Bitcoin address are always worth a sad chuckle.
That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a counterpoint.
It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.
I wouldn't judge B addresses by looking them up. I cycle mine once in a while, I'm pretty sure others do too.
Why are you being so negative about donations? Some pick up, some don't. I don't see anything negative about even minimal donation. It means someone actually cared enough to do anything. I'd be happy to receive a $0.002 tip for some content I created - and not because it makes any difference to my account.
They haven't found a killer app yet. This seems like a ripe moment for them to shine. I'd be all over micropayments like a cheap suit if it let me read any article on any service I wanted, ad-free.
Micropayments can be as automatic as ad auctions. Publishers would just give readers the option of winning the auctions for all ads on the page. Most simply, payments could come from deposit accounts for readers.
I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment.
This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)
If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.
"there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers"
At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.
The most successful micropayment service of can think of is probably Spotify. It doesn't look how everyone was imagining micropayments but is effectively the same thing.
Their $1 per week only says that they won't serve ads to you as well, it says nothing about all of the other rubbish that still tracks you but doesn't display ads.
spot on. i wrote and gave them feedback saying i was happy to show their ads, but i do not consent to being tracked. their ads are only blocked because privacy badger blocks them due to tracking. no tracking, ads are shown.
If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably not believe.
Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.
This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don't seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn't the users that decided to substitute 'ads' with 'tracking', 'visual garbage' and 'malware' it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.
But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made 'advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card' into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.
Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won't be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.
I've seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to never want to disable all my ad blockers, we'll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.
Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.