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Would You Pay A Penny Per Page?
nebby writes "How Stuff Works is running an article regarding the "penny per page" model for web site compensation. It sounds like a very viable solution, being simple to understand, transparent to use, and fair to the webmasters and users involved. The only downside to it is that it would require a massive effort on the part of web sites, standards bodies, and/or ISPs to switch over. I know that methods of online payment have been brought up before, but in searching on Google I found no information about any groups or companies looking seriously into moving to this model. I was wondering if any such groups or initiatives have been put together, and if not, why not? :) It doesn't take much to imagine the possibilities of what the web could become if this were put in place ..." Penny-per-page actually sounds like one of the better micropayment ideas I've heard, but is just as vaporous as any of the others so far.
Have to pay a penny everytime we get into one of those damned porn sponsored click-fests of opening windows?!
Aggghhh... my credit card bill's high enough already!
;^)
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Pay a penny per page huh? Would that include the two pop-ups that come with HSW? :)
With dynamic server-side page generation, how do you determine exactly what a "page" is?
So, the website gets 1 penny from the mirror operator? That's what I call Return on Investment!!
I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.
I don't like the idea of giving a credit card number to any web site to track payments as number of hits. After all, all the evidence of numbers of hits is on their side, and I can see some websites being very unscrupulous when it comes to payments (remember the FuitadNet incident?)
And a penny a page could turn out to be about $40 a month, which is about what I pay my ISP anyway.
-Evan
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I'm already paying $50 a month to get online, there's no way I'm paying more $ to read content I can get for free elsewhere. If something is good and I enjoy the site, then I'll send the sites that need it (the small hobby sites mostly) a donation.
BilldaCat
fp ! -1
It doesn't take much to imagine the possibilities of what the web could become if this were put in place ..."
Actually, I'm having trouble imagining what the Web would become. What would be different than now? We'd suddenly get tons of great looking, content filled sites that we go to daily? Please.
Sounds like the AOL experience to me. Sounds like 1995 all over again.
Pay per view already works quite nicely in some niche markets - specifically, where users don't have any other way of getting access to that specific information.
For any other kind of site, forget it. As long as any sites can still make money with a "free" service, who is going to use one that charges? The only way "penny per page" would become viable would be if everybody did it, and that's not going to happen.
NO!
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
There is no way in hell this model could function worth a damn. I for certain would never pay to use most sites as it is... not because I'm cheap, but because the content ain't worth even that much.
The likelyhood of this ever taking of is completly nil.
There is far too many sites out there which want to be free anyway... Good luck charging for access on most of the common ones...
And the article feels like it was written by a fourth grade student.. (See! at a penny a page, Google makes 350 million!)
Sheesh
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Think about this: If I am an average "one-or-two sites" surfer, penny a page will be a money losing proposition for the site operators. Why?
Credit card transactions cost money. Unless the surfer is being billed quarterly, you're talking about a three or four dollar charge each month. Ask any merchant that takes credit cards and they'll tell you it's not even worth their effort to take the cards for transactions less than $20. If it's more than four or five bucks a month, that's way too much. I mean, I'm already paying $45/month for my cable modem, add on twenty more bucks and I'm over my budget for the month...
Who did what now?
This would definately be an interestng idea, but considering most sites are getting about $0.001 $1 CPM, $0.01 seems kind of Expensive.
My $0.02
-Roger
DealSpree.com
Calling this scheme "penny-per-page" makes it sound simple, but the basic problem of defining what it is that the user pays for doesn't go away that easily. What about simple page reloads because of browser hiccups? What about sites like Slashdot, where new content slowly encroaches upon old? What about archives? What about Akamai?
Those aren't new questions, they're the same basic things you encounter as soon as pay-per-anything is considered. I think that complexity makes the subscription model (Salon) more appealing from a management and marketing standpoint, because it's easy to describe and appreciate the value proposition.
I'm not down with web servers and ISP's but I would think it would be good for an ISP to cache common url's that people goto (i.e. msn.com for people that don't know how to change their default start page). So if my ISP is caching msn.com and I go to msn.com but never use msn's web servers then who gets the money? My ISP or msn? MSN made the page but my ISP is "hosting" the page.
Nice idea really. But I would get really mad if i opened a web page that pops other pages (like a pr0n website) and would have to pay a penny for each....
©2001 Google - Searching 1,610,476,000 web pages .01 = $16,104,760 .. for EACH refresh of their current database.
*
Hell no on that idea!
The upside to having to pay a penny per page to surf the web - I'm going to imagine that in this world those darn banner ads don't exist - many may move into the direction of more content driven websites that will make you want to read the information on the website. However, just how much web content will it take to make up one page? You know that they'll be those people out there who will be enlarging fonts and whatnot to make you view another page and get that extra penny. All and all, I see this kind of like the notition of ebooks - pretty good thought, but it will probably never catch on.
Short Answer: No
People will be suprised to find what they don't really need once they have to pay for it.
I fpages are cached how do they get payed?
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Call me a pessimist, but my belief is that businesses are incapable of handling this kind of thing responsibly. The moment we go to penny-per-page, we'll start to see things artificially segmented across a dozen pages, and all kind of fluff and noise between the front page and any useful pages.
Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested.
What about pop-up windows? Would they be considered as a an extra page?
If so, some less than moral sites may use this as a rip off scheme, i.e. when you go to the site, suddenly 50 pop-ups apprear and you are billed accordingly. Ouch.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
I provide three websites as a hobby, and I don't charge for any of them.
I do run a web board, and the users of that board have indicated that if I put up a pay pal account, they'd chip in.
If I have to "pay" for a site to use it, I'll simply not go to it unless the content was worth it.
While the concept looks good on paper, it'll kill off a huge amount of traffic to many sites. For instance - I don't stay on top of the latest overclocking news, but when someone points out a cool article at tom's hardware, I'll check it out - Yet if I had to pay for that article, i'd just not bother with it.
Now let's say that article would of convinced me to go and buy a certain athelon or intel chip? Where would the money be better spent? Taking a chance on losing a potential customer? Or tossing ad dollars to proven web sites?
All I can say is, if we move to the penny per page model, I'll be doing a helluva lot less surfing, more mIRC chatting, and a ton more gaming than I do now.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We can revisit the page without repaying the penny.
Sure, it sounds great. But the minute some company actually goes and does this, there will be a hue and cry from this and other quarters. "Information wants to be free" , will be the battle cry. A rash of projects to mirror, deliver fee-free, and thereby rip-off the content and intellectual property of these sites will be started, and any efforts to stifle them will be ridiculed and railed against. Companies will sue sites like Slashdot, which even now, in a fee-free world, routinely have users posting verbatim copies of the content which these companies hope to sell, and there will be outrage at this.
All micropayment and other schemes where people have to pay for something for content sound great until they really happen. Then we'll see how really honest people are. If music serves as any example, I for one am not optimistic.
HSW put the article on 17 different pages
:-)]
> next [more money
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The problem is, that, most people would probilly spend over a dollor a day with something like this, so they are looking at about 30 dollors by the end of the month. With times like they are now, some people cannot afford a spare 30 bucks to browse the web. This could Effectivly kill the web... atleast on port 80... or atleast give somebody a reason to outlaw apache because it dosen't support "Web access micropayments". I bet the next version of IIS will have code in it for such a use.
What about if you refresh, are you charged again? Is it per-visit, per-day, etc.? I don't think there is any way this would work. Some articles are already (unnecessarily) split into far too many pages, mostly so they can have more banner ads. Google caches.. who gets paid there?
Heh, but really. With everything moving to some sort of pay for content model, all of those computers our tax dollars put into schools for the kiddies to reach that fabled information super-highway aren't going to be as useful as they once were. Maybe at home children can convince their parents to enter that cc number--my parents would have laughed at me if I had dared ask for something like that as a child, but I doubt children in school are going to be able to do so.
Oh well, as long as individuals keep putting out content independently and without charge, the internet will survive.
This sig is false.
It would be too costly for Google and friends to index a site which demanded a penny for each page read.
remember the roots of the internet.
Fight against the nets commercialisation.
Free software people should be more respectfull of free beer/speech to even consider this sort of stuff.
It's also not going to add up to very much per month. People who log on to check stock prices, look up the weather, read the top news stories and so on might look at 25 or 50 pages a day. They would pay something between $5 and $15 per month for Web content. But let's also take the worst case scenario. Let's say that you sat in front of your computer 8 hours a day and looked at a new page every two minutes without interruption 20 days per month. That would cost $48 for the month. That is the worst case scenario, and it is unlikely anyone is going to do that. The cost will be minimal for just about everyone
I just popped through 6 pages in about a minute and a half reading/skimming this article. One page every two minutes? Do people actually read that slowly?
If I'm looking for something, I tend to have two or three browsers open... usually one on Deja that does near constant Usenet searches. Their estimation is about 240 page views per day. Heck, I can almost kill that just on Slashdot within the course of a day.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
In the internet medium, what happens if the routing decides to go south while that page was being delivered, requiring me to reload? What happens if I click a link on that page that took me to some place off site to read more about something, then when going back, the browser was forced to re-request the site again? What if I want to use that page as a reference, bookmarking, but being charged a penny ever time I accessed it?
(Yes, there's ways to bookkeep around all these problems, but I doubt that most sites would figure out all the right nuances).
There's just too many technical problems that can happen that a pay-per-page scheme can work. Instead, if those sites that cannot continue to fund themselves on banner ads should either look into 1) getting a better targetted banner ad provider, just as how /. has done, which will have a much better click-thru rate for your site, or 2) adopt a pay-per-term such as Salon has done for premium content. In the latter case, if your content is that good, you'll thrive (as I understand it, Salon's Premium is doing well, given their good content to start with), but otherwise, you'll flounder (and maybe for good reason).
And in the end, while I don't do it know, a web site with content and delivery like Salon would be worth about the same price as a magazine subscription for a year (eg $30-$40/yr) as long as it's unlimited access to the site.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Charging a penny a page does nothing but give the user a right to view the page, which continues the lie of 'allowed usage' being propagated by the RIAA and other corporate bodies. Ted Nelson has been hawking his concept of Transpublishing alongside Xanadu for years. It describes a system where the user buys a right to use an item many times rather than a right to view it once. It also allows publishers to choose the amount they charge, and that charge can be nothing. Just as long as Microsoft or Verisign don't manage the payment servers it would be fine.
A brilliant idea (*SARCASM*), we haven't killed enough technology companies yet...let's give people yet another reason not to use the internet.
Duh, part of the reason the net's so popular is because it's free...it's been proven that the only sites that can successfully charge for content are news and porn
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
I fully agree that many (most?) sites are economically unviable. But to say that we have start paying a penny for every "page" (never mind that they don't fully understand the difference between a "page" and a "server hit") is about as silly as those US government to tax E-mail" hoaxes floating around the net.
A telephone call is 7 cents a minute long distance. A penny per page would mean that only seven clicks per minute is the same price.
Other comparison: Can you read a whole newspaper worth of news websites in just 25 clicks?
Penny per page, yeah right. Then with 5 words per page, the websites will be richt. Sure, people won't mind paying through their noses.
Penny per page, is that what banner ads pay now? Penny per banner-view? Definitely not.
Forget it nebby, it will never make it.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I can see the automatic pirate mirrors of big sites
becoming commonly used.
Is pay-per-page really transparent?
Perhaps if you could see how much a link will cost
before following it? This would be like
a pricetag. But certainly all this stuff will lower
the "experience" of surfing the web.
--- censored
If a web site's content is so valueless that the operators would resort to some sort of "penny a page" scheme for revenue generation, I think it quite likely no one would ever visit their site again. If you can't generate revenue by selling advertising or by providing a service then maybe you need to rethink your business plan.
Where does this sh*t come from?
most days you couldnt pay me to visit slashdot.
They owe me a penny for every stupid page with ads.
And is it me who just saw the Delta ad with the turkey getting cooked?
I'm sorry, but that is the wrong image to associate with an airline at the present time.
Seriously this is almost at the level of the "free ISP" scheme where they pay you to look at ads during your surfing.
Lets see, the os shows you ads, the browser shows you ads and now a penny per page.
Humm. "here's a quarter call someone who cares".
I may be a dinosaur, but I thought that the entire purpose of the internet was research, the dissemenation of information and communication, not a get rich quick scheme.
Internet Panhandeling (IP?, oye, now it makes sense).
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
It's already annoying enough for most people that they pay -- extravagantly -- for cable television and subsequently spend 30-40% of their time watching ads (unless you've got a tivo). In a way, they're hitting you twice, making you pay for the medium and then suffer through the message.
An across the board pay-per-view future is pretty damn bleak, unless there's more interesting value added to the site/service than just simply "you get to see the page". I have to wonder about the continued viabilty of services (Salon, etc.) who have jumped on this model.
Also, I have to wonder who would win in a fight between a bear and a shark, given an arena that has sufficient water for the shark to freely navigate, but not so much water that the bear would be unfairly hindered?
~jeff
-click next page-
until
-click next page-
ADVERTISEMENT
-click next page-
content starts
-click next page-
getting broken up
-click next page-
into multiple pages...
That is to say, you already have web-magazines that divide up articles into far more pages than necessary, just for the sake of more banner ads being displayed. How many more sites are going to start breaking up content into multiple pages, just for the extra pennies?
And what happens when a page fails to load? Or if I want to revist a page I've already paid for?
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
What is to stop webmasters from further segmenting their pages? One of the best things about the Internet is the unlimited page size. If this goes through you won't be loading up a 300k HTML page, you'll load up 100 pages of 3K HTML and end up paying a dollar. And don't even pretend that banner ads will go away. I like the premise behind this, but it can be abused too easily.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
People would start orginizing pages in even more convoluted a manner than they do now. Now it takes traveling through 5 pages of product info to download a driver, after this, 100.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
What if I want a refund?
oh yeah, let's make the entire web one big capitalist gangbang. why not charge a penny a keystroke, you corporate whores?
Take me for example. All thse numbers are being extremely conservative for me.
I'll say I surf an average of 2 hours per day. Thats 120 minutes per day, or 7200 minutes. Now, assume I spend around 30 seconds ona web page before clicking a link to view another (This is a VERY high estimate for me). Thats around 240 page views per day, or $2.40 by this "penny per page" scheme. Thats 72 dollars per month, in addition to my 45 dollars per month for my DSL connection.
And this is being conervative! I can easily name days where I spent upwards of 8 hours online, roughly half of which was viewing web pages. This is much too expensive, I'd never go for it. Maybe 0.25 cents per page is more reasonable.
Not a fucking chance, pal.
pirating web pages...
It's whether you WANT to charge them a penny/page. Honestly, you think it's wise to charge someone's credit card 1 penny at a time? What about transaction fees with the cardholders' company? And think of the billing statement mess. "Honey, why are there 213 charges for a penny to something called 'OSDN'? Didn someone steal your card over the internet?" *Calls credit card company, who removes the 213 charges, slaps OSDN with the fraud fee for chargebacks*
As for whether I pay, it's simple, I use the donate button on many pages I frequent often. SomethingAwful.com is a good example of a site I support.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
What I would prefer is a flat-rate kind of model for web sites, like kuro5hin uses. You pay five Euro a month and can surf the site as much as you want, without banners. Web masters or companies decide what their site is worth and you get a login id or something which identifies you.
I would pay five Euro a month for some of the sites I view regularly. And I'm considering moving some of the bigger sites I maintain to such a model, because
The trouble is that this has to happen everywhere, if people are supposed to accept it. It worked with auction sites (Ricardo, QXL, Ebay) so it will probably work with other sites.
Remember, though - "penny per page" is FAR too complicated.
Home Page
With this model home users would suffer from an unbearable amount of pop up adds and rediculous redirects. how long before viewing you email on line costs a couple of bucks?
yet another rediculous scheme designed
to enrich undeserving lazy people who do
nothing.
Is this talking about pages or requests? This is a world of difference. Most large sites, and even some small ones out there are using dynamic page generation based on php, perl, and some with asp. This idea wouln't seem to count images, but I wouln't like paying for annoying banner ads, or popups, and won't.
This is a very broad subject, and should be more specific. I am not exactly seeing what is defined as a 'page', since most arn't static anymore, and those popups are actually a small static page with a resized window.
Would this mean that I could start charging everytime someone went to my site/server for ATM/DSL bandwidth usage?
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
--------------------------
Can you imagine how much invasion of privacy this would entail. They would have to track every page each user went to. The monetary issue aside, this is dead in the water as far as I'm concerned. The implementation of this would be a nightmare.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
So, besides annoying the hell out of me, each pop-up-window would actually cost me? And if I "accidentally" hit a porn-site that puts out hundreds of new windows, each time I try to close one, not only would I waste time closing them all down, but it would cost me as well!!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
It seems to me that whatever the micropayment for viewing a page, a "penny" is way too much. Besides the obvious problems of pop-up windows etc. I visit so many pages each day that it would cost me a few dollars each day to go online.
No way would I pay that unless it was to those sites that gave me valuable content
A penny per page? I'm wondering how many dollars I would spend in the average day. Especially, if as some have already commented, sites start splitting up information into multiple pages as a way to increase revenue.
And hey, is the front page of any site going to be free, with a warning that clicking on any links will lead to that charge, or am I just flat-out charged for any access? What happens if I hit the wrong bookmark?
There's a reason this is still vaporous. There are so many unanswered questions, and so many unpalatable pieces of the scheme that it's not anywhere close to where the masses will accept it. A penny per page is pretty damned high, seeing as how the cost to produce and serve a single page is so low, and the page, once produced, can be served an infinite number of times.
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
I visited one website this past weekend and it came with 3 popups. Each of them came with a few more. I soon had 20 windows opened. Closing some of them merely launched 3 more. You know what I'm talking about. Doesn't that just encourage them to bombard me with new pages to make money? How much do I have to pay for pages I never wanted? What if I'm only there for a moment to realize that it has no useful information? A penny per page has too many holes.
What counts as a page view?
When I have read all the HTML?, What if the graphics don't load, but are vital to the page. What if I write a bot that reads 99% of the page but then closes the socket. What if my browser crashes? There are so many what if's to make it totally impractical from a viewing POV.
Who pays?
At home, how do I separate my kids browsing from mine, and similarly how does a company separate work browsing from allowed spare time browsing. And what about contested payments? Am I expected to compare my browser logs with my bank statement? There are so many what if's to make it totally impractical from a financial POV.
In short:
It won't work.
DWR is Ajax for Java
I pay my ISP $40 a month already and am not willing to pay a fee on top of that. There have been so many ways to make money off of the internet since it became commercialized, but this by far is the most rediculous. Can you imagine the amount of bogus links on pages that open up a hundred windows, crash your computer and steal a $1 doing it!
Sound waves should be free!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the great things about the web the way that information can get all around the globe quickly? Paying a penny a page would be irritating for most of us in the western world, but it could effectively close off huge sections of the web to citizens of developing countries. Say you "normally" view 5 pages a day on each of 4 or 5 sites - if you're living on $5 a day, are you really going to pay 5% of your income to view US news sites, UK informations sites, etc?
Trev - used to be interesting. Honest.
I'm sorry, I appreciate the fact that someone has to come up with ideas, and I'm not loaded with alternatives, other than leave it free. But Penny-Per-Page?! It just wouldn't work. For one thing, you might see Slashdot suddenly limit the number of comments per page to 10, or google will only let you see 5 results at a time. "Oh, you want search item #100, that will cost you $.20." For example, the article could have easily been in one page, but HowStuffWorks breaks their stories up to increase banner hits. Don't you think everyone would do that if they got a guaranteed penny per page?
There are just too many ways for this program to be abused. For instance, the author says we could create a cap of $20 a month. Well, guess who's site I'm going to hit 2000 times on the the first day of each month. MINE! This is not to mention the amount of tracking that would have to be implemented to do this. Maybe we could just let the FBI send us a bill since they will soon know where we've been anyway.
The only way to make a micropayment plan work is to make it voluntary and give a reward to those who pay other than just the content. Sure you will have freeloaders, but the people who are your return customers will probably pay to keep you around, and if they don't, let them eat banner ads.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I would try to craft a rationial response...
....
But this idea brings to mind only one thought,
LAME.
The service providers are really serious about trying to carve new revenue streams out of a system that was never built for it. The only micropayment system for content delivery that could work would destroy the web. That system used/uses per bit or bytes delivered content charges. It works for B2B telecom service
Aw! Nevermind, the idea is just LAME.
The article isn't worth $.09. The problem with this (or any service that people pay for) is that you demand a certain amount of quality since you are directly paying for the service. If I do a search, then Google had better give me relevant results. Sometimes, I get results that are from pages with just the Meta Keywords to attract hits. Also, if the page is should be laid out where I can get to where I want in one click. I'm not going to navigate 8 pages when I know exactly what I want. And the porn sites will have so much fraud....
There is no content on the Web that is worth a penny a page.
Present company most definitely included.
I moderate at +3, Highest Scores, and I always mod down.
If you don't like it, vote me off the island.
Even this article separates into 9 HTML pages what could have comfortably fit on a few. The idea being, if someone wants to read an article, they must load more banner ads.
If we end up paying per page view, that sort of thing might run rampant, so one would need to visit 20 or more bogus pages to get to the one they know they want.
Worse, I know many people, myself included, wouldn't bother browsing much, for the same reason nobody likes per-hour connect charges if they can avoid it. I don't want to feel like I need to savor every URL, and I don't want to wonder whether a site is going to be worth anything before viewing it.
I'd rather see
* sites that have free areas, and premium subscriptions if you use them often
* banding together of several sites that charge a joint membership, or charge ISPs for access. So you decide whether you want a standard or executive internet connection when you sign up for service.
The first is actually starting to pop up, and it seems to make sense.
I'm assuming we're talking about some kind of debit based system here, so why stop at a penney a page? Why not 1/10 of a cent?
A (dated) draft RFC on MPTP (micro payment transfer protocol) is already out there.
I see initially as a client-side controlled browser plugin, with a console for the user to pre-set who and how much it's authorized to pay without user confirmation. You adopt a new protocol like "MPTP://" and use public key messages in the headers to arrange credit xfer from a source account to a target account.
How much do companies get now for banner ads? Not a penney a page surely. I would imagine a fractional penney a page would be an improvement for most news sites.
Its a good idea, but it will probably never work.
Personally, I love the idea of targetted advertising. ThinkGeeks adverts probably recieve more of my attention than anything else, because although not targetted, they are generally about something that I am interested in. Centainly more so than "another credit card", "free XYZ", "adustable beds", and the other usual stuff.
Why pay per page (and have the content subsequently altered to maximise on this) when targetted advertising would create greater revenue, and a better experience for us?
P.S. I dont understand the privacy arguements against this, but I would be interested if someone would explain them in an adult manner, without the silly childlike flames?
With all the normal ranting about "free" (beer) software and the inherent evil of commercial software (*ahem* Microsoft), wouldn't it be silly to condone the "pay per view" idea for web pages? Or have I missed the point of this completely?
This sounds much like UK satellite TV. Pay for equipment. Pay for installation. Pay for TV Licence. Pay for subscription. Then pay AGAIN to watch anything half decent, and that's WITH advertisements thrown in. Mmmmmm.... fair.....
95% of the web is utter shite - And especially those f***ing pages used to 'poon search engines into linking them for content. Christ that makes me angry.
"Oh, what a tangled Web we weave..." when we try to implement Passport and .Net
"A penney saved is a penny earned..." unless you surf the web.
Seeing as the content on the web is in part or in whole "borrowed" it lends new meaning to "penny pinchers".
Whoever came up with this idea probably wanted the money to "come rolling in" that is most likely not what they meant.
Ok, I'm done.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
As I've said before, charging the spammers a penny per message is a far more viable idea. This ties in with mandatory spam licensing with a federal register of spammers, where people can bill the spammers for traffic.
This kills several birds with one stone.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's a company : eCash Technologies Inc having a viable solution for micropayment, but I don't think it will become a standard before all patent claims on this are lifted (a cryptographer, David Chaum owns most of the patents on digital cash), like RSA usage took off when we approached the end of the patent and explodes now.
Another technology that won't took off before patents expire...
See also http://www.aci.net/kalliste/dcguide.htm.
Hey, I'll go for this. Thanks to Nimda, I'd earn $3216, which would more than pay for my bandwidth for the year.
Not only that, but, it'd serve as a financial incentive to prevent worms like Code Red and Nimda. The more I think about it, the more I'm liking it.
The article says the web is great: reach a world wide audience like never before. Isn't a penny worth more in some countries than in others? A penny a page may seem like very little to the US, but for those in poorer countries, it may be too much.
Also, wouldn't librararies, universities and other places with free internet access be forced to shutdown their access? 1 cent per page may be ok for an average middle-class American citizen, but libraries and such have many people looking at the web day in and day out. No free internet there anymore.
Finally, The billing mechanism should track for and eliminate charges for... pages that auto-refresh... pages arrived at by pressing the back button, duplicate pages and so on.
Translation: our idea doesn't work... don't tell anyone
From the Article
Google.com gets about 100 million page impressions per day right now. With a penny per page, Google would make $1 million a day, or something like $350 million per year.
Issue #1
If google adopted the "penny per page" model you would see the numbers get cut in half because there will always be a competitor who will offer free service. That's what's so great about the Internet, your not forced to stick with one supplier. Isn't google profitable anyway?
Issue #2
What happens when I search for something on google using the "penny per page" model and I don't find what I'm looking for? The problem with this model is that it doesn't determine the value of the page for the customer. You will be paying a penny for a steak and a penny for Ramen noodles.
90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.
Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:
This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.
Sounds like we are going full circle again in life. This is how aol/compuserv did things back in the early eighties.... great....
I'd accept to subscribe to some sites (which is actually what this idea consists of) if in return they'd guarantee me the quality and relevance of the info I could fetch from them.
But such info should be concurrential, IE not taken from existing books... if it is Free, then I should not been billed, etc. etc.
Well, actually what I mean is what I originally meant 10 years ago: the Internet is the Great Library, it belongs to the mankind patrimony and as such one can't force people to pay to benefit from it.
The only decent retribution to such a service which spreads culture among the world would just be to require people to spontaneously accept to contribute to make it a place where we can getr even more knowledge.
So, well.... no, thanks. You may open paying sites (wasn't Slashdot supposed to become a fee-based service, anyway ?) but you won't see me there, then... And if you look for me, I am webmastering the GNUArt websites...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
seriously, now: how do they imagine me to pay? credi card? I want to be sure that I'm paying the right amount and the right person/company. I guess crypto could handle this, by sending some sort of 'encrypted and signed' cookies, so that it could be guaranteed that someone is not spoofing my address/web browser to navigate at my expenses.
;)
I'm sure some issues may arise. Now, what do you think about that 'cypherCookie' thing? could it work?
if I can spoof someone else's address to receive HTTP, will the owners of the spoofed addresses receive extremely high WebBills?
...what did you say Microsoft's address was?
cheers
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Who will refund my money for all the 404s?
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
While I agree with all of the issues against this idea, I also feel that there are sites out there that probably could use a little money and put it to good use. I wonder if this thing could be tackled instead at the ISP level -- say a small (dollar or two) charge that gets distributed to sites based on the aggregate transfer of data or connections with that site. It would certainly solve most of the privacy issues, as well as all the mini credit card transactions.
At least it might cut down on banner ads and those annoying pop-unders. It would be worth a couple of bucks a month for me if I never had to experience another browser bombing.
When you've seen one non-sequitur, the price of tea in China.
My first question is what is a page? So if I have a web page that launches 200 pages you owe me $2.. Sounds like a winner to me.
$penny a page for a search engine with 50% or better outdated links?
A penny/page for quality information is fine, but for the current crop of crap no.
What about paying me for data I enter. All those fourms where my info is catalog as a collective. Who's paying me?
From the article:
... The fact that they don't pay for Web content is a historic anomaly. "
"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. "
But you can go to a library and read the book for free -- or read parts of the book while in the bookstore. And I have a number of books whose last few pages are dedicated to selling the publisher's line.
"Imagine what a penny per page would do to: NASA (or any other government site providing tons of content) "
That's taken care of with tax money. I somehow doubt that I can dedect my use of the IRS's page for getting forms from my income tax.
"Right now people pay for cable TV, newspapers, magazines, telephone calls, directory assistance, video tapes, movie tickets, DVDs, pay-per-view, CDs, books,
Here's my problem with the article: it keeps saying that the Web is a new medium that needs a new billing model... but keeps comparing itself to other incompatible media. People pay for media (CD, book, etc), but get a pay-once and use-forever deal. Cable TV gives unlimited access -- whether you use it an hour a week or 24/7. Local telephone calls (in the US) are unmetered.
It sounds like the author is mostly jealous of the "big" web sites that can charge subscriptions, while his site is "free". At a penny per page, the first site to benefit would be Howstuffworks.com.
Also, what about sites where you download images individually? Like desktop backgrounds, do you get charged for each one? And sites with dynamic content, do you get charged each time you hit refresh? What if they refresh automatically? You accidentally walk away from your computer for a while and come back a day later with $1.44 charged to you for content you didn't even want? (based on being gone 24 hours, with a refresh every 10 minutes, and a charge of .01 a refresh).
With things like Flash becoming more popular, this really isn't a very viable method until you incorporate some sort of method of dealing with that. What might be more reasonable is .01 for every 10k of data (or some other arbitrary amount). Because Flash files have all of the information packed into one file they are bigger than your regular web page, so this might charge more appropriately for them.
BTW- I'm against pay for web in general, don't we already pay our ISPs enough? If you want to have a website, you have to pay for hosting. Deal with it.
All circuits busy.
The thing is, I don't like the idea of being charged for every link clicked on, page refreshed, pop-up encountered, etc. I am one of the many many people out there who has become very accustomed to the web being free (as in beer), and so the only way I can see myself paying for web content is a reasonable flat-rate monthly or annual fee. This could be accomplished most easily by grouping together like-minded sites (eg. OSDN), and charging a subscription fee to access all the sites under the larger umbrella. This would also help solve the problem of transaction fees outweighing income.
Today, there are very few good business models that work on the Web, and this deficit has a significant effect. The Web is becoming somewhat like a desert. There are some survivors -- Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon and so on -- but nothing new is germinating in any significant way.
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations. Second, Mr Brain assumes that only corporate sites are worth visiting. Aren't both of these rather flawed? For a single counterexample to both of these flawed assumptions, what about e-prints of scientific papers? The authors of the papers are more interested in getting the papers out there and read than in getting paid when the paper's content gets read. Advancement of Science and all that. Also, the occasional paper has way more interesting content than the usual slick, marketeer-approved corporate collateral web site.
Brain gets other things wrong, too: When you go to the book store, you never see free books. Walk by a locally-owned used book store. I guarantee that you'll find a "Free! Take one!" rack full of books in front. Walk around any heavy-foot-traffic downtown in the USA and you'll be able to collect a large number of (free!) tracts, flyers and even funny newspapers, like the Onion. Try it, Marshall.
Marshall Brain's underlying assumptions are totally wrong. His penny-a-page scheme won't work.
Based on the National Average, this really wouldn't be too expensive for anyone in particular, however the logistics of the whole thing are insane.
This 'subscription' service is already in use today on several websites, however at a much higher price. I know of several web sites that has users subscribing so they don't see banner ads.
To back up my claims on the national average, go to this link..
Based on this, the AVERAGE (I know this doesn't represent most surfers of slashdot) charge per family unit will be about $10.00 extra a month. A bit high eh?
That would pretty much nip Opera's scheduled reloads in the butt. I love having it refresh slashdot and a few other pages every 15 minutes.
Additionally, what about sites such as cnn that use java to autorefresh? How can you be responsible for views that you don't instantiate?
And then it may lead to crappy site layout so that sites could maximize bill rate. When everyone configs their slashdot account to autoexpand every post to save money, don't you think that slash will nip that in the bud to save on server load and earn Cmdr Taco a few more of his namesakes?
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
medioctaty on the web. Imagine being teased with the promise of some information you want, and then being led through 9 other pages of useless crap to get to it. The website makes $0.10 instead of $0.01, and wastes another five minutes of your time to make it. It's already tough to avoid retardo X-10 popups and other current time wasters, we don't need more of this crap.
Micropayments cannot be budgeted by the consumer.
This is a great thing for service providers. Without being able to track their spending while they're spending, customers are likely to spend more than they mean to. Metered access is a great way for companies to soak their clients, and the Utilities have been doing this since time immemoral.
Customers, who have to juggle a power bill, gas bill, electricity bill, cable bill, insurance bills, rent/mortgage, car payments and grocery tabs are sick to death of it.
Things like insurance premiums, loan payments and cable service is provided at a flat rate. Customers love this, because they can budget for it. Gas and Electrcicty are easy to "guesstimate"... usage will vary predictably by month, depending on climate. It's still irritating as hell to figure out, and most renters that =I= know make a point to look for "Utilities Included" apartments. Yes, they're paying more for a worse location even after you add in their yearly utility bills... but the savings in budgeting hassles are worth it to them.
Metered internet access, on the ISP side, has been a proven looser. Customers are simply not interested in paying less for uncertainty, and very interested in paying more for unused capacity, so long as the bill is easy to figure out.
Micropayments simply will =not= take off, because customers do not have the patience to budget for them. This is a market reality, and one you budding netrepreneurs had better take to heart: offering more complexity at a lower price is a sucker's game. Offering comprehensive service at a flat, fixed rate will make you more money in the margins, =and= attract customers.
SoupIsGood Food
so what happens when i decide to set up a proxy that only charges .25 cents a page? i could then work it like an insurance agency and invest half while telling the websites that the money is on the way, i could then quad my money day trading and then pay off the bill of all my users ;)
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
How long until the same is applied to domestic suspects as well?
Mind you, it stop people doing these elaborate flash sites where there's no server reqests (example).
It's a good question though. If you only get half the page, do you only pay half a penny? How much for a 404 - or even a 500?
Seems to me that you can't charge for something unless you can prove that the "customer" got it. You can't do that with the web. I might be able to prove what my server sent, but I can't prove that you got it.
Oh yeah, and forget popups - what about redirects?
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
I've got a small website that offers advice and has features that allow people to contribute content on how to find a job in a particular industry.
The content really is worth paying money. People using the site are at an advantage and many have used my PayPal donation button to help out.
If I started charging for it, my readership would go down, my contributions from viewers would fall and the net worth of the site would drop too. It would also encourage a lot of other sites to offer similiar content and then compete with my site. I don't think I'll ever charge for content -- Its a participative model that won't work if less people view and contribute.
I have a whole bucket load of pennies so I shouldn't have any problem surfing the web as I normally do.
Seriously though, when money is involved and it being easy enough to exploit, it wouldn't take long before a model like this would fail.
No.
Next question.
Aside from fact that nobody will pay for web content anyway (geez, didn't we learn ANYTHING from teh dot-com bust?), the problems with micropayments are setup costs and transaction costs. There's no way to make them low enough for 1-cent transactions. PayPal seems to have reduced the practical minimum to a couple of dollars, but there's still a hassle factor that technology isn't going to overcome; this is the barrier to micropayments.
Think of cash... there's no setup hassle or cost, and minimal transaction hassle... anybody can pay with cash, anybody can accept it. Now THAT's efficient. And when you think about it, nobody even sells anything for a penny cash anymore, much less through a payment system that involves computers, the Internet, and a third party.
No I would not. The whole purpose of my writings is to share information. I don't want to make a living on it.
Enough others will not. They write to change oppinions or sell goods.
I already pay for the freaking net with ISP fees, I'm not going to pay for content. You greed heads can go home now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Of course, some might argue that it's time we change the way the web works, but personally I like the web the way it is now, and I say this as someone could probably benefit from pay-per-page.
Sturgeons law is utterly inadequate to describe the web. Way, way, way more than 95% of it is crap.
What's more, I do a lot of my surfing right now because it's free. I can live without it, and if I have to do any sort of pay-per-view, I will. There are a small number of web services I wouldn't want to live without; those I would much prefer to "subscribe" to. (Pay $15 a year or some such for unlimited use.) Indeed, I already do pay for a couple of them. So I'm not being a "cheap Slashdot freeloader" here. I'm just saying that it's not worth it to me to have to watch the balance rise as I surf the web, and there are a lot of pages out there that aren't even worth $0.01 to me.
I'm presuming that not all pages will go pay. I certainly don't intend to charge for people to view my fluffy pages (and I will be pissed if my service providers decide to do so under some future version of this scheme), and I'm hoping that a lot of the stuff out there (especially educational and academic things) will remain free. I hope that all of the rest is clearly marked so that I know to avoid it unless it's worth paying for me.
-Rob
what happens to being anonymous when you have to have a valid pay account (be it paypal, credit card, etc) to view or post to a site?
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
No one wants to pay for something they can POTENTIALLY get for free. Just apply all the thousands of arguments on Slashdot about people getting music for free.
The concern for any consortium is the risk involved. It is quite likely that consumers will just stop using them and move to a free alternative.
StrutterX
They'll refer to it as "penny a pop-up".
I have a feeling they'll be for it...
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
The web was just fine before people decided they needed to make money off of it. I really don't see this working. I certainly wouldn't allow anybody to withdraw from my accounts at random. If the site has content that I am *willing* to pay for, they should have a subscription service. So far the free stuff seems to be working just fine.
And before the web, usenet, ftp, and gopher worked just fine. The content is no better. The signal to noise ratio is definitely worse.
The crappy pages also had to pay me a penny when I look at them and notice that they have nothing to offer.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
If the ISPs did billing, what about Universities? Libraries? The government? Sure it'd make more sense to fire people who surf too much at work, butI don't want to have to pay to use the library!
searching on Google I found no information about any groups or companies looking seriously into moving to this model.
;-)
Of course you won't find anything on Google!! They wouldn't allow Google to crawl their pages because they know Google's evil cache will betray them!! Then people will do a "site:www.pennyperview.com"->Cache search on google!!
Don't quote me on this.
Would "warez" sites start mirroring pay sites?
i'm assuming you mean a large, predatory shark and a large bear. enough water for a shark to freely navigate would greatly hinder the bear, so the shark vs. bear battle could not take place fairly.
Google.com gets about 100 million page impressions per day right now. With a penny per page, Google would make $1 million a day, or something like $350 million per year.
Umm, no, sorry, that's not how it works. With a penny per page, Google would make $1 a day, or something like $350 per year, because people would use alternatives. Anyone who has taken Microeconomics knows that in an efficient capitalistic model businesses make zero profits. The internet isn't perfectly efficient (we still have patents, in the case of Google), but the fact of the matter is that I have instant access to competition. I need only type in a word, a dot, and com into my browser.
That by the way is the biggest difference between TV and web. With TV, I watch "The Tick" because it's the only damn thing on at the time. Even if I had cable, my choices would still be limited to the hundreds. With the internet, I have literally millions of choices, and there are almost zero barriers to entry (any Yahoo can pay $20 a month and start her own website). That is the difference with the internet, and it's not one that is ever going to be "fixed" (short of massive government regulation, anyway).
Would people pay for content? I think the answer is "yes". But a penny a page is simply too high. The only business model I see working is an AOL-like one where you pay a flat fee (say $30/month. Half the fee goes to the connection/bandwidth provider, half goes to the content providers. Sort of like ASCAP for webmaster.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
It shouldnt be about money, I believe information should be free.
Anyone who agrees with the GPL, Open source, etc etc, would know that selling websites is as stupid as selling source code.
Sure people sell source code, but selling source code isnt really helping technology progress faster.
Websites? We dont have to sell websites since they cost NOTHING to make except time, so why pay for it? You'll be paying some big million dollar corperation like Microsoft a penny to view their site, not some small time site.
SO why argue about this? hopeufully big huge sites will go out of business except for search engines and "NEEDED" sites, and it will bring the net back to the way it was at its peak in 1996-97, when we had as many user created sites as we had commercial sites.
With stuff like freenet and distributed computing technologies, hosting a site in theory is free, so the technology is there, GREEDY sites want to chanrge you
now i understand companies have to make money to pay bills, but when I know technology will make these bills no longer exsist, then i dont care if no one pays.
Lets forget about charging for sites and develop free hosting alternatives using peer to peer or distributed technologies.
Websites are art, just like programming is art, websites host information like source code is information, so if we can have "free" software, why not a free web?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Money. Money is a great medium of exchange for the industrial era. It's okay for the digital era. And almost completely unacceptable for the digital information era. Micropayments are an idea which attempts to address this situation - but really they aren't money as we think of it, because they aren't really a medium of exchange. Personally, I still think that the web is headed in the direction of free information, and pay for services. Fee-per-page is not really in this direction, and so, as other posters have commented, is not really a viable solution. Personally, my biggest problem with any fee-oriented approach to the web is that it creates more barriers to entry for the less-priviledge portions of _world_ society. The web has been building this great potential as an equalizer (information-wise) for all people of the world. The technologies are still expensive so it is still just potential... but still, it is getting there. That was a bit of a ramble :-)
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I think a better solution is that participating web sites are restricted to x ads per page and you pay a going, regulated, impression rate. That is, and would be, at least a couple orders of magnitude below a penny per page.
It'd work like this. Participating sites are restricted to between 1 and x ads per page. Your payment goes thru a central body you register you preference and payment info with. You say you want ads or you don't. If you do, the various marketing folks can try and track you and pop up their one ad per page. If you don't marketers serve up no ads and aren't allowed to track or sell your info, but they do track impressions you should have seen. Then, monthly or so depending on activity, they request per impression payments from the central body (which bills you) and they pass along the impression fees to the web site owner.
Then each site decides whether they participate, each person decides whether they participate, there is a central body tracking and paying, and everyone is free to change their minds at any time with ease.
I think BBSpot gave us a glimpse of the future this will lead to with this review of a new video card.
Ever since Scott McCloud (of Zot! and Understanding Comics fame) started touting the idea of web-based micropayments, I've been seeing these schemes crop up more and more often. The one thing I've noticed is that they all seem to be performing the most horrible contortions to twist the web into something its not...all for a buck.
And, I can't help wondering: what if the WWW just isn't a good medium for most methods of making money? What if, after all this, its just able to do what it was originally designed to do (i.e.: serve up information-based sites, mostly educational and techinical)?
Pr0n notwithstanding, I don't know why nobody seems ready to consider that the web may be just good for a few commercial storefronts (in select markets), distributing some basic corporate information (acting as an informational "web presence" to companies who care to do so), and leaving the majority of traffic for personal and educational/technical sites.
I'm not a Luddite who longs for the "good old days" of the web (although I have been known to go back to using lynx in pinch), but it just seems that most models of revenue-generation on the web DON'T WORK. Hundreds of companies have gone out of business ignoring this. Sure, maybe there's a way to circumvent the web's limitations, but why doesn't any industry consider that the web WILL NOT make most of them money? It seems to me that the web is not the tool that they're looking for, and they're trying to force it to do things it wasn't meant to do...like trying to use a screwdriver to pound nails -- sure, you can do it, but it would make more sense to look for something like a hammer.
As others have pointed out, Penny a page schemes are more expensive than they sound.
I wonder if the better solution is something like a blast from the past?
Years ago, before the internet, I joined compuserve. For my hourly fee, I had access to a number of different forums. I think AOL works something like this now (don't use it, can't be sure). In a way, ISP's work that way: for your access fee, you are hooked to all of the internet.
Perhaps "consortium providers" can strike deals with groups of interesting web sites, actting as middlemen (I know, I know. It's a dreaded word) providing access on a monthly fee basis.
By providing access to a variety of sites, users don't look at a cascading stack of fees from individual sites. They don't get charged if they go back to a site, they don't feel bad about a site whose quality goes up and down.
Paying to view web pages may not fly, but it certainly won't fly if it's not reasonably convenient, reasonably affordable to surfers and reasonably economic to the providers.
When I use google, I generally have to hunt through many of their pages to find the page I really want, with no guarantee that I will be successful.
Same problem with visiting web sites. If I visit a web site, I may or may not get the content I wanted, yet I'm stuck automatically paying for it. I may have to hit dozens of sites looking for specific content. I would be afraid to click on links to find the correct perl man page.
When I go to the bookstore, I can look at the book, read the back or the contents, and even read some of the book itself to know that it's what I want. If I visit a site, I've paid for it whether it's what I want or not.
Paying to visit sites won't work. If every web site in the world started charging for it, people would stop browsing. If only some sites started charging a penny a page, then those sites would quickly disappear.
Even from the user's point of view the inconvenience of registering, even if one does not investigate the rate schedule and privacy policies, makes micropayments not worth it. It's hard enough to find the answers during a search while weeding sites and doing snap evaluations on the way to finding the right page or pages. Adding worry about billing is just another disincentive to use that site and an incentive to find another, more accessible site.
Then you have the additional issue of whether the page site is viewable with your particular configuration of browser, monitor, graphics card and OS. If a page won't display legibly in any of my broswers, then I skip it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
NOTE: Please give me a chance, I think I have a really good point here.
If people wanted a meter on the web, limited-hours access plans would be a lot more popular, I think. The great thing about the web is that I can look at as much stuff as I want for a flat rate. I can try out new sites and, if they suck, I'm not out anything.
I realize that some people are probably looking to micropayments as a way to encourage growth and diversity on the web. But I suspect that, at least in the penny-per-page form, they would have just the opposite effect. If surfers are aware that they are being charged more money for every new site they travel to, there will be a subtle but very real instinct to restrict their surfing, and the big, reliable, well-established sites are likely to win out. Meanwhile untested new sites will be starved to death because visiting them will involve a "risk" that one will be wasting one's money.
"It's only a penny!" you say? No it isn't. You know that, I know that, and whether surfers consciously realize it, they'll know too: it's a stream of pennies. If a stream of pennies gets long enough it becomes a dollar, then many dollars, and people don't like to waste money, especially on "frivolous" activities.
Believe me, I'm not entirely against micropayments. We need some solution to financing the internet other than banner revenue and corporate money, obviously. But giving people a reason to visit fewer pages would have as great a "chilling effect" on the internet as any censorship legislation, if not more.
A penny per page? Sorry. The cost is just too great.
I alrday pay x$ per month for access, x$ for a line.. Now i have to pay to view unknown content? Or worse, those popups.. So i get to pay for both crap AND ads.. There goes the web...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Personally, I don't like it. Although for the site owners it probably makes cents...
...ugh.
crazy dynamite monkey
Sites like the new york times have people subscribe to their web service, why not just stay with that? That way you wouldn't need to worry about websites unfairly redirecting or linking you to fluff/filler pages for your money.
Jonathan
This is my world and I am...
The biggest problem is that the author is not living in the real world. The biggest problem with micropayments is that the cost of administering the system is more than the cash flowing through it. Every transaction on the visa network costs ~$.45 so any payment less than that the cost of the transaction is more than the transaction itself. While the visa network may not be the most efficient model possible, it is arguably a pretty damn good international financial network. There will be some more efficient system developed. This system it will still have a floor of how cheap a payment can be, and I can assure you it will be a lot higher than a penny. The other problem with micropayments is that most of the info on the net just isn't worth paying for directly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There is a company that does per-click billing. It can be either per page or per article. They have been refining the technology for several years. It works, is anonymous, you give them your credit card and the content provider bills through them. You don't need to give the content provider any credit information. In fact you don't need to give them any personal information just your clickshare ID.
Check it out www.clickshare.com
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
If your employer is the one providing an internet connection, and you surf a page that requires payment, who pays?? What about college, univeristies, schools in general?? This will never work..
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
How's this for a wild idea... Click on those pesky banner ads on sites that you support. Hell, if slasdot showed more than ThinkGeek ads, I'd click on them more often.
Yahoo! is a great example of having enough ads to click on. I make extensive use of their free features, so when given a choice, I shop through them. If I'm not buying anything, I click on a banner ad. It works out to something closer to a penny a day (at best), but I wouldn't be surprised if it were enough to turn a profit relative to the cost of dishing me up the content.
All of the ads that Yahoo! links too are okay by me in terms of content. I see personal value in keeping them alive, so I grin and bear it.
You can too.
If the penny a page theory were a reality, would web designers make their sites have more pages, in other words, split their information into multiple pages, or would they economize their sites by packing a lot of information in one page to save their customers money? I'm sure their is a happy medium, where the customer is satisfied by the amount of info they get before they hit the "next" button, and the company that provides the information is getting enough money. Also, it would make a lot of sense to include the ISP in all of this too, or create an organization to make sure that everyone gets web access. Imagine the interenet worked like this:
1. An organization monitors how many pages you download and charges you $0.01/per page.
2. Of the money they collect, they keep just enough to allow them to provide the internet connection, the rest goes to the websites who are providing content.
3. Net access is free to the end user, you ONLY have to pay the $0.01/per page fee.
I think that would make a lot more sense, and maybe even allow EVERYONE to have broadband access because websites would pour more money into internet infrastructure (the faster you download pages, the more money they get). Unfortunately, a business model like this will never happen because we are rooted to our current ideas. At least it will not happen over night.
So how soon till people start illegally emailing web pages, trading them online via a gnutella client? And at what point will the CPOA (Content Providers of America) decide that their IP is being stolen and sue them with all their corporate muster?
/., if it comes to that at least you've got another 6 months of stories. :)
Don't worry
No silver bullet, just a bagful of clips.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
When looking at economic incentives, one must always be careful just what they are incenting.
(1) Would this reduce the frequency search engines and crawlers are updated? How would search engines operating on ever-thinning margins recover their $0.01 charge for indexing the Web's contents? Would it be passed on to users in the form of subscription? (Now I would pay a penny-a-search for the use of Google).
(2) Would we see a proliferation of websites that are just trying to get that first hit and have no substance related to the information one is looking for? How lucrative would a site be that could make $0.01 a hit for having just the right Meta tags as to come up tops on a search for "Scholarships", "Data Recovery", "Projector", "Home Business", or "Credit" (the top five non-sexual keywords used according to MetaEureka)?
(3) Lastly, one has to understand the lesson of setting consumer expectations. Any governing body that would impose a $0.01 "usage tax" (which is what it is in my mind anyway) per page viewed should be aware that when you give something away for free for years, and then try to charge for it without adding value, perceived or otherwise, for the consumer, you are going to generate significant backlash unless your product or service is monopolistic, in that there is no competition and no substitutes exist. What would the open source community say to a $0.01 per 1000 lines of code tax on the GPL?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
A hypothetical article from the future on the downfall of the web:
In the beginning it was a penny per page, theoretically to just recover the cost of serving the page. Then a few sites decided their content is worth more, so they charged a few more pennies. Soon pages costed a dollar or more.
Meanwhile thousands of people had already been copying the content to their local disk to view again in the future, or perhaps share with a friend.
Since web sites were finally making a little money, large contect companies began buying them all up. In the end only a handful of companies owned a majority of the contant on the net. Prices rose and rose.. The actual authors were of course being paid only small fractions of a penny.
All of a sudden the price/page hits a certain sweet-spot where the cost is higher than the value, and people start file-swapping pages. The WWWAA (World Wide Web Association of America) was formed to 'protect web page author's rights'. Lobbyists were deployed, campains were launched, laws were passed, and copyright protection mechanisms were put in place and made illegal to circumvent.
F that.
_______
2B1ASK1
just for everyone's info, Mozilla has this feature too. I don't use it, so I'm not sure if it actually works, but the preference is there (bookmark properties).
NO WAY !
Who really benifits from penny per page technology, small sites? No. Important sites? No. Big corperate sites like MSN.com and Yahoo.com? YES!
So why should WE support something not even built for US.
We wouldnt make ANY money from penny per page technology if we cant get any hits!!
We are better off using memberships and incentives if we need to make money.
Want to access a certain portion of the site? SUBSCRIBE for $2 a month.
This penny idea benifits only people who get a billion hits, not sites that are important but may not get as many hits.
Think about it.
I dont agree with paying for information, but i WILL pay for service, I WILL pay a small subscrition, maybe $5 a year to a website which i really value, at the most $10.
And i think others will too, but i wont pay to view a site, Thats the WRONG IDEA.
Thats like the RIAAs idea of paying to LISTEN to music that you dont REALLY own.
Or Microsofts
This doesnt benifit the economy, or the consumer, it only benifits the people who already have a monopoly, dont fall for it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I live in Eastern Europe. My income is about $400 per month which is above average in this country. I have a university degree and am not stupid or lazy. I just live in a poor part of world. I cannot afford to buy any western books or subscribe to any magazines. Web is the only source of information that I have. Web completely changed my world because giving me information freely. I am extremely afraid that someday such scheme will be adopted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If everyone has to pay 1c per page how are search engines like Google going to actually get their content??? Won't that kind of eat their profits?? Does anyone _seriously_ see this happening??? Penny Arcade on this very issue
So what does it cost per page view to track and bill? If it costs more than $0.01, then this system would be a further drain on resources, rather than paying for anything.
One of the big problems with the micropayment model is that it creates a lot of overhead. Keeping track of all those views, payments, etc., as it stands now, would require a lot more resources -- resources that could go for other things.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
No.
Next?
I don't think I could allow myself to be charged 'per page'. Browsing the internet, and all the information there, that doesn't require information, should be free. I definitely don't want my ISP to start charging me a penny per page. Why not charge people who link to us too while we are at it? I saw an interesting thing about somehow that people might only 'liscense' links once, so not just anybody could link, and in todays day and age of the DMCA, that would seem likely /. would like this because of first posters who constantly refresh slashdot.org, right?
.com business, however this is not the way. This will make people more afraid of the net, make them afraid of racking up a huge bill, and discourage casual browsers on the internet... In addition, if I get three pop up ads, that's three cents, because each of those is it's own page. Now is that really fair? For me to be paying to view an advertisement from your site? I didn't think so...
Although my page, traicovn.com, isn't very interesting, I don't think that I could charge a penny for a view, even if it was the best page on the net
The other issue that comes to mind is it isn't really page views that kill your bandwidth and bandwidth bills, it's the number of kilobytes downloaded... So this leads me to think that perhaps it should be charged by the amount of bandwidth each person uses when they access your site? Surely
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a pay system to view the pages on the internet WOULD be a possibility, but it's not probable, and regardless, it's not a good idea. Keep the internet free.... I see where people want to make more profit, especially in times where it's hard to make a buck in the
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
With all of the pop-ups on pr0n, we'll all be entering bankruptcy.
The linked article complety ignores different countires and different currencys.. why should i pay more for my slashdot pages than people in the states ??
Why did they keep mentioning Amazon.com as an example? I hardly think charging users to search your store is a good business model. Imagine how well Barnes and Noble would do if they charged everybody a $5 to walk through the door.
Plus, this article completely ignores the fact that it usually takes quite a number of page hits to find useful information on the Net. Taking their book example (we'll just ignore the fact that they dodged around the issue of their other non-linear medium, magazines, being largely supported by advertising), if I'm buying a book, I'll flip through some pages and see if it's worth my while before shelling out the cash for it. With their model, you pay first, then find if you have a useful article, or something that reads like it was written for a 7th grade social studies class.
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations.
The web is all about money, like it or not. All the servers, bandwidth, telecom infrastructure, it isn't free. This is one of the reasons that $40 a month cable modem access has been failing. Network access is so expensive that $40 barely covers expenses. Ever look at the monthly price of a T1 (hint: it is over $1000)? There's a reason the cost is so high.
What happens right now is that some guy or girl somewhere puts up an interesting web page about a hobby or other interest. It costs $100 a year to run. Then it gets Slashdotted, so to speak, by a mention in a magazine, and they get hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. They close down the site and have no incentive to ever try it again. For a while during the dot-com boom the site may have been picked up by a company--which is what happened to Slashdot--but that doesn't happen any more.
What is needed is a way to *balance* the web so that you don't need to be a corporation in order to run a popular site.
there is a technique that some people have been trying to make work, it envolves fractions of a cent not a penny. I dont know about you but i look at nearly 1-300 pages a day and i already have to pay for bandwidth ie. dialup wireless dsl cable bla bla bla. this whole pay to play thing is getting out of control.
Penny-per-page will kill general internet surfing in one fell swoop. I know I f around on the internet all the time and spend money recklessly to boot, but I guarantee that at a penny a page, my internet surfing comes to a halt without pause.
This is the best proposal ever for eradicating spambots from the web! Think about it: you set up your robots file to point to a directory that isn't even linked to your site -- only the poorly behaved spiders would dare enter. A little URL re-writing, and you route the rouge spambot harvesters into a sort of honeypot-firehose (honeyhose?), ramming page after page after page of bogus email addresses back to them. Then wait for the check to arrive in the mail. I love it!
I wonder if this would noticably impact peoples browsing habits? If people had to pay for each page view or refresh, it might cause them to be more aware of their browsing habits and to reduce behavior which consumes bandwidth. I doubt it would make a big difference, but I have to wonder if it would make a detectable one...
But that's for toilet paper.
That stuff's expensive. Maybe I should diet or something...
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
"The fact that they don't pay for Web content is a historic anomaly."
Too bad people don't really see it this way. When the phone bill or cable bill comes in, people see that ISP charge as a charge to use the web. And you're asking them to _pay again_?! What is this, the IRS?
And the poor academic institutions. I can see "technology fees" going up an order of magnitude for something like this.
Is this a socialist web idea? Isn't capitalism supposed to drive people to make new, inventive ideas that will entice people to part with their hard-earned money? Seems this idea is saying "Don't worry - you don't have to impove the web, just throw some meager content up there and we'll make sure you get some money."
---
The faster you go, the shorter you are. --Einstein
Technology is leading information on the net to being free, Eventually you wont have to pay ot host anything
So this is about greedy big corperations who want to keep profiting on the net.
The net was better WITHOUT these corperations so fuck them, lets go back to how the net was when it was at its peak, when regular users were making sites and actually making money, getting famous, and the sites were better because it wasnt about all the money
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
most pages out there aren't worth a penny.
web content needs to stick to the 'free' [as in beer] model of broadcast tv. certain sites (much like cable tv) may be able to sell access - but only because of the quality of their content. we shouldn't all just accept 'penny per page' as the standard. the standard should be 'free'. the exception should be micropayments.
in a world where your competition doesn't have to charge -you- money (getting theirs from advertisers), pay sites are going to have a hard time convincing people that:
1. the content is worth the money.
2. they aren't unnecessarily splitting the page up to increase 'hits' (and thereby payments)
3. it's worth having your personal and billing information in some central location to facilitate a 'transparent' experience.
people are vocally worried about all the potential abuses of MS collecting user information in a central location. but to pull this off, you not only have to do that same thing - but through some intermediary or council.
and we all know how fair, impartial and just all the government sponsored net cos have been thus far.
*cough*RAND*cough*new TLDs*cough*
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
For business to 'reinvent' the internet, is folly. Those who use the internet on a regular basis are technologically informed and at least somewhat adept at using and learning new things. This also means that they're willing to do a little extra work and go the extra mile in the beginning to make their overall life easier. So the 'business' internet goes to a pay for play system, we'll find ways to mirror the pay sites, share them amongst P2P systems, etc. So the entire internet gets locked out to people who don't want to 'subscribe' to it, we'll create our own internet. So they shut that down too, we'll build wireless, constantly changing, localized 'internets'. The foundation of the internet was built all wrong for a fundamentally business use, so big business will fail if they try to warp it to a strictly business use internet. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," has somehow been forgotten by business these days.
I wouldn't pay for info on the 'net. There's enough, some say too much, free info out there already, why would I want to pay for more?
What about web cache's like squid, how would you propose to eliminate the possible use of a cache, granted the cache device need pay but those behind it need not.
How about I get paid to read web pages? I mean with things like MS IE web page popups into your face and have you ever gone to a XXX site and set off endless popup????
How about all the pages I access in trying to find some information thru google?
Seems to me that the bottom line would inspire people to write one word web pages to cause you to have to access 50 pages for a fifty word new article.
I already Pay my ISP for access and time online.
and we seem to be annually fighting off internet taxes.
But I guess the way to reduce internet use is to charge a penny a page and then 2 cents more to collect that penny and an additional penny in web page tax. And of course the telephone companies will figure out additional charges, like they do on my phone bill ($1.50 month for single bill fee? - Don't I get an option?) etc..
Funny, last time I checked, I didn't have to pay a penny per page at the library.
Does a paridigm of information have to pass some ways through time before people will slow on the talk of "viable" and the capitalistic bent "makin' it happen"?
There is more to life than buying and selling; but not much, it seems.
"I just got a bill for 4000$ because my my cat jammed in the F5 key, refreshing slashdot.org continuously for a couple of hours..."
man is machine
Every year there is an effort in Congress to discontinue the penny. I'm all for the Internet saving my handy pocket-size Lincoln portraits.
Everyone's griping about the idea without reading the article (hey, it's Slashdot. What's new?)
I personally think it sounds pretty reasonable with the cap in place.
Thanks!
-Bill
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the biggest problems with pay-per-view schemes is that they actually increase the cost of running a website. Whether the website operator actually takes care of the authentication/payment mechanisms (do I actually trust a website operator for that??) or outsources it, it still costs extra money.
:)
There goes my $0.02!
The second they start to tax the web
freenet or something like it will offer the free alternative.
its a stupid idea
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Many large cities now have free newspapers often published by Metro international. I don't know what happened in other cities, but in Toronto they have basically virtually eliminated the 'traditional' newspapers from the scene.
This will quickly cut your traffic by a factor of ten or a hundred, and you'll be able to get cheaper webhosting. Problem solved.
Find free books.
This is what people forget...
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I don't agree with how the author flatly states that the Advertising model for web site income is a failure. I think web advertising has gotten a bum rap because of unrealistically high expectations (e.g., if a view does not equal a sale, then it must not work). Ads might be going through a bad spell, but it will pick up. Especially if more *non* web places start advertising.
This is not, by the way, an endorsement of pop up ads and other ad related annoyances. I don't like ads, but I think they can work. I don't like TV commercials either, but I still watch TV.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Contrary to most who posted, I assumed after reading the intro that this was a voluntary service used by us, the information consuming public, to reward providers of information we consider valuable. For instance, I find some some site that I enjoyed or found useful, flip a switch and presto -- that site gets $0.01 for each of their pages I viewed. A relatively pain-free way of rewarding good content providers. The problem of course would be transaction costs, but I'm not smart enough to solve that problem.
While I haven't thought all this through for a problem yet (imagine that, heh), I believe there are a number of organizations that collect sites into a large group - like a cable network. I guess OSDN would be something like that for linux/open source sites. The pr0n people set up "verifier" services, serving the purpose to make sure you're > age of majority whereever you live, but I'd also hazard a guess they get $ based on the number of "logins" to that service that they generate per month/day/whatever.
Would that model work for Slashdot et al? $29.95 per year, you get a login good at all OSDN-affiliated sites, and then everyone's happy? Most small sites are run by people willing to absorb some cost or share cost, it's only when they become really big/popular that there's a problem.
Again, maybe there's something I missed. Forced micropayment at the ISP level is going to flop, and flop hard. I'm not going to manage 150 subscriptions to 150 different sites, either. I might be more inclined to handle one or two, however.
For what it's worth, SourceForge/Freshmeat and Google are about the only things on the net I'd pay money to use, though. :)
..don't panic
Why stuff their pockets with pennies?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...and other 'e-tailers'?
Will I have to pay $0.01/page to buy books?
Would anyone here have paid 10 cents to read the HowStuffWorks article?
.sig this!
TV and radio use advertising to pay for content and currently it works.
However, Cable/Satellite TV services charge a per month and for some content, Pay-Per-View, charge.
A Penny Per Page scheme could easily be turned into something very expensive. Consider a news based content page that short paged you! If CNN reported on the current War but only gave you 150 words per page you could easily be into 10-25 cents a story. Now 10-25 cents doesn't seem all that expensive but compare that to the cost of a local Newspaper. The NY Post is 25 cents. The NY Daily News is 50 cents. They contain many more stories.
Of course pr0n is a thriving business on the web and their model is close to a Cable/Satellite company. You pay X Doallars for some amount of time, often with recurring charges.
Most of the issue here is content:
Is Slashdot worth a Penny Per Page?
Is tucows worth a Penny Per Page?
Is Yahoo! worth a Penny Per Page?
Is goatse.cx worth a Penny Per Page?
Clearly all of these would need some sort of Preview Page to entice anyone to actually use them for a cost. Sex sites are normally unable to get anyone to get past their initial FREE PREVIEW pages, as most webmasters lament. Fortunately these sites do not work on volume. A few hundred paying customers can easily float a pr0n site for months.
Perhaps a Penny To Get In and a fifth of a cent per page thereafter. Pennies add up quickly.
Imagine if you were on the MS Knowledgebase searching for some "Hot Fix"; do you know how many pages you can inadvertently hit on your way to the correct file?
This
Gosh now that my competitors are all charging for access, I'll have no trouble rising to popularity with my free pages.
Wouldn't this crazy scheme lead to a resurgence in quality hobbyist web sites? You know, the type created at home a couple years ago that have now all sold out to companies like OSDN/VA Linux?
That's a nice way to drive people away from the internet. Imagine if TV stations charged by the minute. No one would watch TV and that would kill ad revenue.
The internet was not designed to be a profit producing, commercial medium, it was designed for information exchange. The sooner these MBA's figure that out, the sooner they can cut their losses.
-ted
Howstuffworks has been a great source of information for me and I think they are one of the most valuable resources on the internet.
What a waste of their time it was to publish this article. Aside from the fact that 90% of the web isn't worth a penny per page, imagine the impossibility of managing the accounting.
The other angle on this is that there were information systems like this before the internet. Networks like CompuServ, AOL, etc made you pay for the information on their networks and guess what happened? The internet brought free publishing and subscribing to information to anyone who could manage a connection.
Do you really beleive that if such a system was put in place that some brilliant (or even medeocre) hackers wouldn't build a free underground fabric underneath?
And still yet, any company who wants to draw visitors to their site would simply drop the surcharge and let people in for free. I have read about movie theaters who give free admission simply to sell concessions. Once this happens, it will become the expectation of the consumer and all other sites will have to follow suit, leaving us right where we started, only having wasted an un-imagineable amount of resources implementing this system.
what a waste...
second society
I'm eager for a better way to make money for providing content, but I have concluded that it is elusive. I've spent time writing for and managing various rags before the www and it was the same back then. You work your arse off and make no money, but you do it because you love it. For some reason people think that transmitting documents over http magically overturns this situation. It is hard to make money publishing anything.
That said, I have some issues with the penny-per-page idea. Namely, the system simply needs to allow for variable pricing as apposed to a one size fits all approach. Consider the act of inflation itself and ask yourself about the value of $5 now versus 10 years ago. The same applies to the value of a penny when you are racking them up in the thousands. Furthermore, the concept is terribly US-centric and I fear that the American Internet would become a closed network if people in other countries couldn't interface to our billing system.
Personally I'm still of the mind that the web doesn't exist to make money for someone. It wasn't developed by a marketing committee and it doesn't have a mission statement. The best thing about it is that it is data-agnostic, and I get a bit offended when some whipper snapper comes along with a plan to totally revamp the underbelly of the web so that people can make money. No thank you.
Of course, I'll confess that I wish that we could revamp our mail agents so that it would cost a penny (or something like it) for every message we send. Putting the onus of the expense for email on the sender would do wonders against spam.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Like so many of the problems with the web, this is one that was thought about by Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu, and solved.
Precisely because of the problem of defining what counts as a "page" in hypertext, Xanadu used micropayments based on amount of data. Clearly you'd need different micropayment scaling factors for images, text and audio, but apart from that I think it's workable.
Would I pay? Depends on the site. BBC news, yes. MSNBC, no -- I wouldn't even read that for free.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What the hell kind of idea is this?
Will people complain about paying slightly more per month under the penny per page model?
Of course people will. Does this article realize how many nonsense and junk sites you come across, even using Google, when you do a search for something esoteric? Why should I have to pay any moron who happened to entice me to click through to his page, especailly when I find out that his site doesn't even have anything to do with what I was searching for, or is just a list of his bookmarks? If this plan is implemented, I guarantee we'll see people trying to outsmart search engines like never before, and dissemination of information will become like never before based on greed and profit (see next point).
When you go to the book store, you never see free books.
Of course not. Let's review essentially what it takes to make a single copy of a book (IANApublisher, so bear with me).
All that needs a managerie of workers from lumberjacks to suits. Those resources and people are not free, because they are scarce. If I take the book at that store, no one else can take it. Another book must be made, which will cost even more time and resources.
Now, compare that with what it takes to get my web page to the viewer:
In addition, when someone downloads my page from my host, it's still there, and another person and do the same. The only thing that's scarce involved here is the bandwidth and disk space, but advertising works just fine for my host to compensate for that.
Also, since when do I have to pay to look at a book I want to purchase? At any book store worth its beans, I can read through any book I want to without buying it. (Usually, I end up at my library, where the community I live in has graciously purchased not only the multitude of books in my local library, but has networked it with several other libraries, so there's virtually no chance that I won't be able to find what I want.) The whole book == webpage metaphor is flawed, because purchasing != viewing.
One thing that keeps new book above some minimum price is that the book is scarce. True, authors deserve compensation for their insight (maybe exclusive rights for about seven years like copyright was originally in the U.S.), but that's done a whole lot better than penny-per-page. Why not set up a standard, but *voluntary* system for compensation. If you like what you see, click this button on your browser (it should never be on the page itself, because I guarantee you that it'll be in the most annoying spot possible), and, poof, the author has been given his penny.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
The concept of paying for content is a reality.
While there are many problems with a penny a page, as pointed out by previous posts, paid content is reality.
Many sites (eg: Upuzzles site) do charge for content, as do many newspapers.
Companies like Clickshare have been implementing this for a long time.
This is a successful and increasing reality of market forces
It improves the content available
And increases the efficiency of the web
Reading through the comments there seems to be a couple of recurring themes I would like to address.
1) What happens if you visit the same page twice/refresh/etc?
I personally read this differently, as it said a penny per page... not a penny per hit or visit. Since they obviously know who you are (or how else could they bill you?) and are tracking what pages you are visiting then it would not be hard at all to only bill a penny per page. That is discard any page hits to a page you have already viewed as you have already paid for the priveledge of viewing that page. The only question I still see with this model is how long does you penny pay for the page? That is do they discard duplicates from this month? Year? Lifetime?
2) What about the mess created by charging a penny per transaction on your credit card?
I really don't think a system like this would use credit cards at all. Most systems that charge a very small fee use alternatives like Automated Clearing House Systems. If they used an ACH system you would give them the numbers at the bottom of one of your checks instead of credit card numbers. Then they would accumulate the penny charges and once a month they would simply charge your checking account. It would appear on your statement as either ACH or EFT (Some banks use the Electronic Funds Transfer acronym instead of ACH). This way there would be no more fees for anyone involved than there would be for cashing a check and you would only have one statement per company month instead of 2000 1 charges from OSDN each month =P
Whos penny are we talking about here? American? Canadian? Else? How are we gonna know what this next page we view is going to cost us? This brings out the "pay as you go" type system where you will buy a block of "page views" from some company. Except this wont work if there is more than one company... odds are very good there wont only be one. Will they be compatible? No, of course not. Ok, so that wont work. Well each site could keep track of you and force you to login each time you visit (blah blah cookies blah) but then you have to trust the company to not screw you over (hah! ya right). Maybe the only way to do something like this is to give you some free content but if you want to read more then you can pay to view or download the rest of the information. Of course this would cost more just due to credit card charges...
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
There is nothing new in the article as far as I can see. It is an old suggestion, and there are lots and lots of people and companies working on this (myself included). However, there are several practical problems that this article ignores.
The first is a practical method of prepayment. You just cannot afford to send a bill per transaction. The safest and easiest solutions to emerge the last year are proxy payment through SMS or phone. Much easier and hassle free than credit cards. Also makes anonymous payment possible (good for, you know, those sites).
The second is the practical problem of knowing who is accessing the site. You need a single logon for all sites for a payment system to work. Logging in to each and every site is too much hassle. MS Passport desires to do this. Please don't let it. It is way too much power for one company to hold.
Lastly, you need a practical method of metering payment. I prefer a pseudosubscription model myself. A system where you buy time limited access to a site rather than pay per page. Pay per page encourages partitioning up the content artificially to get more hits. Also, in a subscription model you can use various prices, not just a penny. To make this simpler you can use a kind of opt-in mechanism to automatically accept a given price for a given site every time you need to renew. Significantly, a subscription model needs fewer extra transactions to make the system work.
Fixing the amount to a penny may not be a good idea. It will mean that all sites will aspire to reach as wide an audience as possible, lowering the content to a least common denomintor, instead of encouraging niche markets/special interest sites that could set a higher price to compensate for fewer visitors.
The Web IS a global medium, so how would you charge non-U.S. residents ? Adding on the need for currency conversion would ensure the accounting costs are not worth it.
With money changing hands as it would in this system, the last vestige of online anonymity would vanish. Also, increasing the money motive on the Web would bring the mass-market, genericized, bland flavor that plagues other mediums here too.
If the ISP were made the collection point, they'd all have to adopt the same model; otherwise, some might be privileged, and others not. Or maybe you'd want the collection service as a third party; this is more feasible, but the logistics of tracking micropayments profitably would be hmm, small. That'd also add network load and many more points of failure.
That's the peril. There's also the promise. I could understand a move in this direction, but the Net community should watch it like a hawk.
I'll never pay. For one thing cause then i'd be paying an additional 20-50 dollars from pages viewed, for that price i can get several major newspapers.
OK, who is recycling content? I mean this idea is far from new. Remember Xanadu, Ted Nelson? I mean the whole concept behind his idea is getting paid for the information provided, whether he knew it or not.
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/
FearLinux.com
Support Texas Troops use TXGoogle
would
have
cost
you
nine
cents
to
read. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You will never ever get people to pay for something that was once given to them for free. It just doesn't work! What if network televisions announced you had to pay one cent for each half hour of television you watched during prime time? Even if you watched every M-F 6-10 we are only talking about 8 cents a day, 40 cents a week, and $1.60/month. Not like they are begging for money but nobody would adopt it. Even I would rather watch a commercial (read: take a leak) every 10 minutes then pay $1.60/month.
.htm, .html files and redirects the .htm,.html gets to your proxy server. Then this could be taken to the next step and since you know exactly which HTML pages a person reads, and you know their identity (assuming your service gives out usernames and passwords to your proxy server), you could make highly targeted ads that appear in the corner of a webpage then go away after a few seconds (like geocities). This business model would work just fine right up until the ISP's go, "Flat rate dial-up unlimited internet, no per-page charges for $30/month." So the end result is the ISP's make more money and webmasters get 1/100000 of a cent/page.
Don't believe me, then let's get technical, shall we? This model works all fine and dandy right up until I set up a proxy server with a $10/year subscription charge, all pages free. If I rack up 1000 subscribers that is 10k. As you find your cachability rate of your users surfing habits, plus bandwidth costs, later subscribers could be charged a higher subscription fee to insure break-even. Best case scenario you make crap loads of money since this model is based entirely on the fact that the marginal cost decreases exponentially with each additional user. Plus all of the tricks of the trade (give them a local proxy client that fetches all non
From the article:
:)
Anyone with a computer can publish anything they want, and the entire world can see it a few seconds later.
That's right... if you don't take into consideration the slashdot effect, in which case it's "for a few seconds"
Now, perhaps the penny-per-page model would work as a trial model, where potential customers can try out your website by viewing a few pages (with some minimal rate, like $2), and then decide whether it's worth playing the flat rate (which is cheaper in the long run, but guarantees the site owner a cashflow from that individual). Loyal customers will not appreciate being charged for the actual amount of content they use.
Take a look at print media, for instance. If you pick up a newspaper or magazine at a store/kiosk, you're paying the list price for it. You know you are paying more, but aren't quite sure yet if it's worth signing up for a one-year subscription. Then when you do decide that a subscription is worth it, you can get the magazine or newspaper at a discounted rate. The number of pages between each issue can vary, as can the quality of the content. But that's okay, you're not paying for individual pages, but the whole issue. You can read whatever articles you are interested in and skip over the rest. Or you may get bored one day while on the bus and read the rest of the articles you normally don't read. It's your decision, and you're not forced to pay for your unique reading habit.
Yes, I know that the Internet is supposed to be different, but there are some fundamentals that are carried over from print media that influences how people use the Web, especially since almost everybody surfing the Web is familiar with how other non-Internet markets work. They'll know that they are getting ripped off just by comparing a Web site to their favorite magazine or newspaper.
Subscription should be the answer. Adult sites operators (read: pornographers) have known this for some time now. And I'm sure they are doing fine since there are so many.
If you have content worth paying for, charge for it. But for those who are browsing just to shoot the breeze, it is a losing proposition.
Say, you are following links and suddenly stumble on the web page of Little Jimmy's doggy (wich consists on just a picture of the mutt and the name typed below). Was it worth a penny?
Keenspot (web comics site) has an alernative subscription service without ads.
No sig
Why would I click on a story before many of the comments are posted? I'd see a few fp schmucks and a few others who'll blow a penny to post, but not much else, I think. I would probably only click on the stories the following day, after any intelligent posting happened. But then, if many followed that example, there'd be no discussions.
And don't let those salesmen to fool you.
Do I pay a 'penny a minute' to watch TV? No.
I think this is a dumb idea that will fail miserably. Maybe I'd pay a penny to see 100 pages. But a penny a page would add up quick!
And what about X-10 ads? Or pop-up-porn sites?!? One visit to a warez or a crack site and I'd owe someone $100 in a matter of minutes !!!
That means if I give /. 100 page views per day, which isn't much, I give them a buck a day, compare that to a subscription to a daily paper, or a magazine. I can get Time for what, like $30/year or so, why would I pay $400/year for SLASHDOT?
Look at the debate on kuro5hin.org over this very topic, which they're actually dealing with as we speak.
I'm going to start my own Slashdot micropayment system anyway, every time I go to Boston2 to reboot some friggin NT box, I'm going to throw my loose change under their cage gate. It might amount to a buck or 3 per month. Admins, listen up, bring a broom with you to Exodus to collect your MicroPayments.
One maggot and it all gets thrown away -- My Fiancee
http://www.xrayspx.com
I like music
How will this affect Usability aspects regarding page length? Jakob Neilsen has come up with some pretty good size, and page length guidelines. Essentially, there is a need to balance length with the annoyance of a page that is too short or too long.
Are these trends going to change? Will users beg for longer pages, whereas website authors might make more single-page clickthrough stories?
- passion
First we pay a penny per page, the PHB's decide to push it further and further. If this form of metering is unacceptable for Internet access, why should it be acceptable for Internet content?
They'd have to outlaw all pop-up ads, because one good mousetrap could conceiveably cost you almost a buck. A penny a page doesn't sound like much, but think of the money people like intellicast or others who use these pop-up ads would make on their millions of daily page views.
Vaporous? There are already certain companies focusing on this arena -- check out PB Click. These folks already have infrastructure in place to handle micropayments, and are getting vendors on board as we speak.
Email Andy Ling if anyone is interested in knowing more about these folks. (To try to keep the gratuitous advertising to a minimum).
NO
The entire premise of this is absurd. Imagine the annoyance of going to google and searching for the phrase "to be or not to be" and receiving the following reply for your penny:
The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be.
For my penny, I would have a list of "about 236,000,000" web sites that include the word "not." (Doubt me? Try it yourself.)
This is why this idea will fail. When a search goes bad, a web page turns out to be mirroring something seen elsewhere, or a the information is outdated or incorrect, we just move on. But when every one of these extracts a penny from us, we will get rightly angered by it.
Should I pay a penny for each X10 video camera ad that pops up? That would make the owner of that site richer than Bill Gates.
Nobody said that the web had to be profitable -- and no one is forcing site owners to leave unprofitable sites running. I know that I won't pay a penny a page for what is, more often than not, useless material and I think others will share my opinion. Make a site with valuable content and people will subscribe, but don't expect random visitors to just open their coin purse to you on blind faith that you will provide useful content.
Better model is monthly access fees...
How long before "Webster" is created after the implementation of a pay per page. Free webpages, we can swap them, trae them and put them on cdrs. After all there is no WIAA.
Damn, never mind...where's my phone book...looking for Venture Capital companies...a quick 15 million or so and I can surf forever....
I would pay a penny per page to view certain webpages, this site not being one of them...
What I don't like about the "Penny per page" model is that it could reward sites with poor usability. What would the incentive be for a web site to perform task analyses to see how many pages a user must access to perform a task? It would be *good* for them if the process was difficult and resulted in the user needlessly accessing more pages than necessary to find the information he wanted.
The counter argument is that in a "free market" like on the Internet, sites would still strive to improve usability for fear of consumers getting frustrated and patronizing another site instead. With so many Internet businesses collapsing or merging these day, however, I wonder how long this will be a viable argument.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
...stories like this one wouldn't be so funny anymore.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Let the big corparations charge a penny a page for their business sites. Then when they all go out of business because nobody ever visits their sites, maybe we'll stop hearing about this nonsense!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
With the amount of time I'm on line I'd be broke :( mind you thats only a few pages like slashdot and a few web forums? hey ya! what about web forums? I'd rather pay a one time or monthly fee. Wouldn't that make more sense and NOT a big fee at all think about it say slashdot for example. I'm not sure how many people come here each day but say everyone payed $2 a month for slashdot or some other page they went to. It doesn't sound like much but $2 X the # of slashdot users each month isin't chump change.
Snoozer.
The newspaper on the desk in front of me cost 50p. At 35 pages full size, plus 25 more tabloid size pages of reviews and stuff, I guess that's about a penny-a-page.
But that has like 2000 words per page plus pictures. If, for example, Yahoo news charged a penny a page for their tiny 'news' story pages, that would be ridiculous. But a penny for access to the whole news site on a daily basis? Maybe.
The article discusses the "failed business model" of the web. I disgree. There are some businesses (such as Slashdot) that are doing better than ever.
Most of the attempts at generating revenue while providing free content have been one of the following:
1. banner ads
2. require huge amounts of personal information
1. is just annoying, but most of us have learned to disable them or to ignore them. However, if 2 were more successful, i.e, imagine if the ads were actually targeted enough that I actually started thinking "Gee, if I don't click, then maybe I won't know about something that I would want to pruchase...".
I see the web becoming a more commercialized space, driven by the relative low cost of customization/personalization. If you've ever used a website such as the now defunct moviecritic.com or the still thriving movielens.umn.edu, then you know the power of recommender systems to create a valuable and extremely useful personalized experience.
Why can't business figure out a way to incorporate sophisticated recommender systems into its core model? For one, it's a problem of distribution/packaging. CDNOW has a recommender system for CD's. The problem is, I may like one song on a CD, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the songs are a strong predictor of what I like. Businesses need to sell goods in units that optimize the informational content of each transaction, and then leverage that information to offer a more personalized service to the customer.
Amazing magic tricks
If I am at a site like amazon and I am already paying to get something I am sure not going to pay to see the stuff I am going to pay for. For example If I look at a page for a book I want to buy will I have to pay to see if I want to buy that book. That is like paying to cover fee to enter a book store or toy store or any type of store. To me that is unacceptable
As it works now, the internet is only a means of distributing enormous amounts of information across the globe at the speed of light. If things continue the way they are going now, the most we can hope for is that the internet will become the storehouse of all human knowledge, instantly and effortlessly acessable to anyone, no matter how poor or underprivileged. What a sad, ignoble fate for a scheme that at one time held promise for serving a much higher goal: making greedy opportunists such as myself wealthy beyond the dreams of avarace.
Why should impoverished citizens of third-world nations learn how to filter their own drinking water, when once-proud executives in silicon vally are forced to actually work for a living? It is simply not fair I tell you, and I say we need to change the system now to protect those neglected executives. Forcing people to pay for the privilege of reading tiny columns of text surrounded by blinking banner ads would be a good start.
In short, the internet should not be about sharing human knowledge and enriching society. It should be about making big fat fistfuls of money, and enriching my wallet!
Now, could one of you geeks out there figure out how to make this "penny-per-page" system actually work? I am far too important to bother with such trivial details...
i do not agree.
help out.
-- Daniel
At a penny per page, I would be broke by the end of the week, just hanging out on /.
Plus, the "huge expansion in online content" the article speaks of would never happen. Are you going to pay a penny just to see my homebrew site?
Seriously, most people go to a few select sites that they have found to be worth their *time*. Most other sites are just oddities, has-beens or will-have-beens. All this would do is increase the revenue of webhosting companies, while independent site operators use their new "income" to cover the bandwidth charges they incurred last month.
weeeee.....
Yeah. Sure. Maybe we could all have our accounts managed by Bill's Impenetrable Passport Service at the same time. Since .Nyet is heading this way anyway it's hardly an innovation.
in the article that compaines would spend their megabucks from a system like this making their sites better and offering better service to the user!
from the article: "The Web is nothing like that. Instead, the Web is much more like a book or a magazine. People come to the Web primarily to read and see pictures, and they can flip to a new page or to a completely different site whenever they feel like it."
so does this mean that print advertising doesn't work? strange, i though that's how newspapers made their money.
i think the problem is people's expectations of web-based advertising. just because you didn't get a click-through doesn't mean your brand wasn't absorbed.
everyone is leaping on the phrase "penny per page"
:)
rephrase. think: micropayments
e.g. http://www.millicent.com/
there are 2 key issues people are getting sidetracked by:
1. penny per "page"
2. why should i pay for rubbish?
1. Instead of PerPage, think, per usage/activity. The usage could be anything. Browse a Recruitment site for a week then pay half a cent to apply for one of their jobs, or 1.5 cents if you apply for 3. Pay a quartercent a day to browse the New York Times in full. And instead of A Penny, think, whatever amount is appropriate for what you're getting. Would you pay $10 for paper? Depends. If it's blank, no. If it's a newspaper, no. If it's a book by an author you like, maybe yes. If the prices are appropriate for what you get so you'll consider it.
If it's a bargain, so much the better.
2. Why should I pay for rubbish?
No reason at all. And noone could force you to. If you can get the same for less (eg free) elsewhere, then so much the better for you. The site which is overcharging can either drop the price or watch traffic disappear. It's that zero-switching-costs Free Market thing.
:) I thought this site was America-based
A good MicroPayments system (esp. via a safe/capped Wallet system) could revolutionise the Internet, as long as that system is sensitive to the real dynamics of the internet community, e.g. keeps the minimum charge/increment tiny, much smaller than a penny. Sites would have the opportunity to be independent of sponsors -- think: less annoying banners, fewer good but lesspopular commercial sites disappearing.
The Internet could finally generate revenue directly and according to the genuine usefulness of a site, and not according to its ability to impress advertisers.
another example guaranteed to provoke outrage:
assuming it was effortless and safe, would you pay 0.001 cents each month to access slashdot? would you pay 0.0001 cents to post a comment on slashdot? [or say slashdot WANTS to generate traffic/noise: would you be happy to pay 1cent a month to browse or for free if you post a comment that month? no, bleah, scratch that, slashdot has enough volume already]
i'd suspect a lot of slashdotters would be happy to pay a truly trivial sum to use slashdot, especially if slashdot gave them the choice each time to pay or not. "opt-in -- here's your chance to fund your favourite site"
cheers
darcy
99% of what I find on the web is crap that I stumble across when looking for relevant information. Given that I constantly use the web as a reference for everything I can because I am usually at a computer anyway (Often 12+ hours a day.), my web bills would easily be several hundred dollars a month, most of which would be me paying for what is essentially waste. Unless search engines start forcing users to rate websites for content quality, people would quickly get sick of paying for waste, and the system would die out fast.
Abuse of such a system would only exacerbate the problem. People would load pages with stuff designed to ring up search engine hits for guaranteed clickthroughs. Everyone out there would break up articles into two-paragraph pages to get more clicks. Sites like Slashdot would be flooded with even more worthless submissions by people who actually wanted to get slammed with hits.
And what about those annoying popups? I better not end up paying for those. Sleazy webmasters will go out of their way to trick people into firing off tons of penny a hit windows.
Am I saying that penny-per-page micropayments have no future? No. But it will take some very, very careful planning to make it work.
The only ones who want this is web site owners who want more money. Most of them are under the delusion that their site is actually worth a penny.
I'd be better for the internet turn coorperate free and cost nothing to use and have only sites made by individuals for recreation than cost per page. Most pages aren't worth anything, but they would certainly try to take advantage and get your money for their crap. It would be the end of browsing as we know it. People would figure out fast and the net would become a ghost town.
Imagine going to a site, say www.superlinuxsite.com and when you get there it has a big Microsoft logo, and you paid to see it thanks to micro-payments.
Hey, why not put up a hello world site? It's easy money.
What! next thing you know they will charge us to use the internet. Wait they aready charging us $40-50 FU[K this.
You can't page count an FTP connection. Hmmm... I guess ISPs will have to outlaw Peer to Peer.
And IRC doesn't have a page count.
When I download files, how does that work?
If I view a portal page and it has a buttload of images, and then go to a site with one image, is it fair to charge the same for both page views?
How do you charge for streaming content?
This idea is BS. I'll keep my flat rate.
This sounds like an idea cooker up by all of those brilliant webmasters and businesses that thought they could get rich off of the internet by dumbping a whole lot of money into a web site.
That didn't work and this probably won't either.
Read & Think before you post. It's only polite.
For people who hit the cap, the billing model would simply divide the $20 paid by the customer by the number of pages viewed and pay the sites whatever amount that turned out to be per page.
So, if I know I'm going to hit the cap during a month (say on the 29th), I could just visit my own server the same number of times and get half of the money back?
For example:
Normal Page views by the 29th = 4000
With their formula, each server should get $0.005 per page. If I add 4000 views to my own server, that's 8000 total views.
$20 / 8000 = $0.0025 for each page.
4000 * $0.0025 = $10.
That's $10 for THEM and $10 for ME. The more I view my own server the more of my $20 I get back.
Which, in turn, seems to have failed because of a lack of technology.
"Click here and you will pay $12.00 for a year of access, easily and quickly, no credit cards, etc." well, where is that? I can think of a few dozen sites I'd gladly click for, this one included. It's almost there, click here and bang, paid $5 by paypal, charged to your hidden cc account. But not just quite yet...
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Why not have a pennybutton in the browser which you, if you like the page, can click on and by that giving money to to pageowner... ;)
/K
Seriously, how come somebody have not patented it?
Or maybe somebody has...
In any case, here are some neat income schemes: pay-per-email, pay-per-chat line, pay-per-popup windows!
It's just a BloJJ
This would be a nightmare for me with my "age detector" website because of all the people who would ask for refunds. Even if I opt out the the program and keep my pages free, I'm sure I would still get a ton of email from people asking for their penny back. I already get a ton of email from irate "customers" despite the fact that I'm not selling anything. I get around 20,000 visitors a day and if I had to deal with refund requests for even a small percentage of that it would become a serious burden. I imagine that there are plenty of other sites out there who would want to keep there pages free but would be forced to step up "customer service" if users started assuming that sites are pay per view by default.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
read. So simplistic it sounds as if it could have been written by Katz himself. I wonder if Taco would try this, given his desire to rape the /. user base for cash.
1,000,000,000,000,000 times. No thanks. I'd just move into the library.
The premise of this article seems to be that "there's no easy way to make money from...web sites." There actually used to be an easy way to make money from web sites: form a company and take it public with a big IPO. This whole penny-per-page thing seems like an effort to return to the days of easy money. But just like the Big IPO model, the Penny model isn't sustainable. Here's why:
- By it's very nature, the model encourages companies to maximize their income by putting as little information on each "page" as possible.
- Consumers have no way to tell what they're getting on each page before they get it. People generally aren't thrilled with "buy first, taste later" commerce, which is why you pay for your food after you eat it in most restaurants. If you want web content that's the intellectual equivalent of McDonald's food, then the Penny model may be for you.
- It's not necessary. There are plenty of ways that a web site can help a company make money, even if their web operations lose money. A web presence is often an expense, but still a good investment. How much business will LL Bean do this Christmas season through its web site? How much money will it save in telephone operators and catalogs? How much will it save in the future as it figures out that it doesn't need to send out quite so many catalogs? My guess is that the web is an essential tool for LL Bean and lots of other companies, large and small. AOL, LexisNexis, the Wall Street Journal and many other premium sites seem to be doing pretty well selling information. So what, exactly, is the problem?
- Too expensive. I'm sure the Penny model sounds good to web developers who look at their hit counter, divide by 100, and think "I could make THAT MUCH?!" But the trillions of bucks that the Penny model would generate for web site owners has to come from somewhere, and I doubt that consumers are willing to fork over that much money, particularly for the crappy content that so many sites offer.
- Greed. With all that extra money flowing to web sites, you can bet that other Internet-related entities are going to want a piece of the pie. Your phone company is going to say "if web sites can charge a penny a page, then we can surely get away with charging a penny a minute for local calls." Browser developers will start looking to charge a bit, maybe just a penny per hundred pages viewed. Maybe Intel and Motorola will charge a penny for every billion instructions executed!
The Penny model is not sustainable.
I already hate how some sites give you a regular article, but then split it up into 40 pages containing a couple paragraphs each. All this would do is cause it to be 1 paragraph per page, followed by one sentence a page, etc...
Both arstechnica.com and sluggy.com seem to have figured out how to operate reasonably...
No
I work for a prominent technology magazine's web site and a penny-a-page method would barely cover our monthly hosting costs. Likewise, as a consumer, often times when surfing a site I don't know what will apear when I click on a link and find myself using the back button more often than not. If that is the case will I then be charged for pages I didn't even want to see?
Keep in mind that a penny per page is 10 - 20 times what the average website is getting for ads right now. As a webmaster at a site that gets around 200k page loads per day, I would be more than happy with .001 - .005 cents per page, which I think people might be willing to pay. This would help out struggling websites like mine that are barely breaking even.
This is like Burger King charging for each French Frie. It's not worth the money it would cost to keep track of all of the page views.
need i say more?
The problem with this is that it is a penny per-page. So visiting Google is two cents, one form the search page and one for the results. Then if I want more results it more pennies. Do I have to pay more if I click on a result then return to google? I'm at college, so I don't directly pay for my internet connection. Maybe it would work better if it was a penny per site. So 1 penny gets me all the google I want for a day. $3.65 over a year for one site is a price I'm willing to pay. Web comics i read daily would get the same, so would /.
I just want to know how they are going to keep track of who visited which sites and how much they owe. Are they going to have big servers in the sky? If so, someone will hack them. Are they going to let you keep the data on your personal computer, then someone will change it. No, I didn't visit any web sites. Someone will eventually right a program so you can surf undetected and pay no money.
Why don't they just give up on a business model. Let the internet be the happy free land already. The only way I can see the internet being good for business in the long run is if they nix the web.
We all know the Internet includes much more than web pages. The world wide web just happens to be the most popular application of the internet. If you replace it with something else, watch what happens.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If I actually got something out of the page, then YES, I would be willing to pay $.01 per page. But if not, then NO. Too many web sites try to run you through extra pages now just to get more ad banner hits. The motivation is money. And the advertising companies let them get away with it. Would penny-per-page be any better? I think it would only make it worse. And pages will get smaller.
What about web searches that don't find what you want? What if they find a hundred times more noise than signal? And can we ensure privacy and anonymity (for those who want it) with such a system?
Ultimately, I think it would be bad because people would reduce, probably dramatically, just how much web surfing they do. I'd love to be able to support web sites that need it. But I don't think this mechanism would work for that.
Now imagine how much it would cost for Google to spider the web each month. This works out to about 200 million dollars a year which means the cost of searching goes up, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with the penny-a-page, or micropayment schemes in general is that they all fall under the ruberic of electronic cash, which is patented to hell and gone by one individual - which has a company called digicash (or some such). It is a classic case of a great idea being ruined by the United States Patent Office. The only way something like this works is through decentralization, and the patents make it a given that everything must go through one company.
I've read through most of the posts so far, and there's a trend that I've noticed. Every poster is very worried that he/she will pay more than the estimates in the article, or that there would be a better/easier way to implement such a pay-per-view scheme.
But this assumes that a) you are at your home computer and b)you live in one of the rich countries (US, Canada, Western Europe, etc)
a) What happens if you don't browse from your home computer? Will your company get charged with your online entertainment? In that case, I can only imagine that ALL internet access will be cur off by most companies, or strict surveilance will be implemented to log all employee activity. If it's a university (which is my case), will all the labs be closed for outside access? Because the CS budgets (while greater than the philosophy ones for example), are not huge, and could definitely be unable to pay for this. Again, browsing quotas?
Another example are the Internet Cafes, which in Europe are far, far more popular than here in N America. How will they charge their customers? When I was in Romania (E Europe), one hour on the net was 50cents, but how much will it be after this will be implemented?
b) This will only work in the rich coutries, where a lot of people have bank accounts, credit cards, etc. In most of the world (which by the way, is very poor), the vast majority of people do not even deal with banks. Cash is the rule. So how will you charge them? If you're going to send them the bill at home, most likely it will never be paid. Not to mention that I really want to see a US company trying to bill a Chinese ISP for web useage. Yeah, that's going to work.
Websites that you have to pay to look at... Hmmm, you mean like pr0n sites. But with a different payment scheme. This will never work - what would you do if the page you loaded was rubbish? are you really gonna take them to court over a penny? no, meanwhile they are making lots of money from doing the samething to millions of people. How could you legally define if the page was good? Then theres the hacking potential - no-one wan'ts to be presented with a bill each month listing every single page they viewed, but if you don't itemise the bills then someone could be taking their share of micropayments from you without you ever knowing (like transferring a penny from every account in a bank). I add this to the dumb ideas hall of fame (now improved!)
- th e-wrong-way(tm)
Dumb Ideas Hall of Fame - in no order
*CueCat
*DMCA
*SSSCA
*CSS (DVD not HTML)
*DVD (the idea of putting badly compressed video on an out-of date disk and charging too much)
*DVD Region Encoding
*SDMI
*CPRM
*Cactus
*SafeAudio
*Building tall buildings to fit more people in and save money (eggs in one basket)
*G. W. Bush for Pres.
*Blair for PM
*Micropayments on websites
*MacroVision (copy protection)
*MS Product Activation
*Dongles (they just get hacked)
*Stupid combinations of devices - (i.e. MP3 player + Digital Camera in one device)
*Anyone-who-does-not-agree-with-me-or-mods-this
*Arresting Dimitry
*Windows Media Format
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
There are several problems with this article.
First, all web sites are not the same. The author, Marshall Brain, is assuming that all web sites are like magazines or books. This isn't the case at all. Charging a penny for each use of google? Do I get charged to use the card catalog at the library? Web sites that do fit the magazine profile are experimenting with subscriptions. This will only be somewhat successful. I read salon, suck.com and others because it was a cheap way to kill time. I wouldn't buy subscriptions to paper versions of these sites, so I'm unlikely to buy a subscription to an electionic version.
Second, books are much more expensive to produce for the same audience size than web sites. I worked at O'Reilly and Associates, so I have a pretty good understanding of the number of folks involved in getting a book into your hot little hands. Think of the paper resources alone. The web just doesn't have the overhead. Did I hear someone cluck 'bandwidth'? Although it's not free (goddamn it), it's much cheaper per viewer than paper.
Third, most web content isn't worth a bucket of warm spit but you can't know this until you've spent a penny. Take Aliens, Aliens, Aliens. I'd never charge for that site. It's not worth it. It might give you a chuckle, but that's not worth copper.
Fourth, Brain posits that his scheme will greatly improve existing web sites like CNN and google. He's obviously glossing over that most folks won't bother visiting these places if each peak is $0.01. (What about caching these pages privately or in a p2p fashion for your friends? Robbing robbers doesn't seem so bad.)
But, there's a more important point: viewers make the site. Slashdot wouldn't be nearly as much fun without the trolls, pundits and occasional gurus. Search engines, as I've said before, are fools for trying to derive revenue from users. The users are adding value to their site. If those giant web indexes were data mined for corporate clients, google might rival IBM in revenue (certainly, they would be Very Well Off).
Fifth, the idea that experts will flock to the web if they can get paid for content is fatuous. Already, there are lots of gurus on the web now. There's no barrier to entry. Some guru's charge money and some don't. Brain's idea is that experts will set up a virtual consultancy on the web. Again, they can do that now. Look at e-diets.com. This idea isn't new and doesn't mean that every site needs to charge for content. Brain's scheme only works if *every* site does shakes down the reader.
Sixth, Brain's instant publishing with instant revenue for any individual who can access the web is a very naive and ill-conceived mantra. The beauty of the web is that absolute freaks can say outlandish things and we can read them for free. Through ISPs, we have already paid for admission into the carnival. Must we also for for each ride?
Last I heard, capitalism is about risk. You pays your money, you takes your chances. Corporate welfare for web sites is just nutty. There's absolutely no reason why crappy web businesses need to be succored; let them die.
Seventh, a penny per page adds up. What if I'm spidering a site? I'm going get creamed. Search engines need to do this and under this scheme I think all of them would go out of business. Further, as a web site owner, I *want* google, altavista, yahoo, etc to be spidering my site. That allows my content to be available to a wider audience. Why the hell would I penalize them?
Search engines made the web usable and free content made the web worth moving away from FTP. I'm a bit cranky from all the hand wringging from crappy, bloated web sites that can't turn a profit. I've seen many sites that do just fine. If you want to make it on the web, get some real content and try harder.
One of the reasons thati've balked at micropayments for individual pages is because of revisions. You'll go to the page, it'll get downloaded to your cache and there it'll remain until you 'redownload' it. Browsers will have to be changed to accomodate the notion that 'if i go to a page i may not want to redownload it' - giving you a revision index that will become unmanageable. Luckily we'll have a new storage medium explosion by then, so the fact that any web-connected computer will need a base of 30gb space won't be so big of a deal.
Then you'll get the chumps that will update something small - like the footer date, to trick you browser into announcing that a new version of the page is available. New browser revision will then start to trickle out that will tell you how many bytes have been changed from the old revision to the new one (if the protocols allow for that).
Next you'll see the emergence of Freenets, where content is not charged for. This will lead to a dichotomy that will cause a split in the net between 'corporate nets' and 'freenets'. 50 years later the prejudice will sift down to the hardware level and the corps will try to dump 'freeloaders' though legislation. They'll use the backing of eliminating 'pirate content' sites, which will post the most up-to-date revisions of any pay-per-view page. A new DCMA provision will come to vote
by this point though wireless hardware will ahve reache dthe same level as 486s and any kid will be able to tinker together mininets that they'll broadcast out of their backpacks as they walk down the halls at school. Teacher's won't catch on for a while, and only the most progressive schools will ban carrying backpacks to class; but it won't matter since those (probalby private) schools will mostly have rich kids anyway, that will buy smaller tech and hide it in a hollowed out book.
...and hopefully SOAP or it's equivalent will allow for the creation of elegent network-mapping tools that will generate data visualizations as you walk down the street and brush by local freenets, getting a 'feel' for the data-fare before you decide to jump in.
-shpoffo
I hope they actually try it. The Great Uneducated Masses bight begin to look else where for information and find the true gems on the net created by people with passion for the subject matter. I get really ill every time I go to a site that is simply a collection of press releases, links to content on other pages and 15 banner adds...
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Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
There's a saying in Latin: "Adde parvum parvo, magnus acervus erit" - add a little to a little, and there will be a big pile. This is both the inspiration for the Penny model and its downfall, as it applies as much to a consumer's spending as it does to a web site's income. Sure, I might only pay Slashdot $0.05 today, but before the day is done I'll owe various web sites a total of $5 or more. My partner will also owe about $5, and our annual bill for web surfing will come to something like $3650 before sales tax. Much of that will be spent just looking at web sites that help us decide where we want to spend MORE money on such things as books, movies, restaurants, computer equipment, cars, etc.
Penny-per-page amounts to a completely unnecessary subsidy for dot.coms, which already rely on infrastructure that's been heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
Plus, if I perform product reviews, then link to several sites that sell those products (and they keep track of my referals) then that would 'work' if not oversaturated. Problem is, many bypass the links to sites because if they have personallized that site then it is lost... so let the user be passed to the site with all their settings activated as if the user had specifically called up that sites page in the first place. Yeah, yeah the privacy issue. However, if I am shoping around I don't care. So I could 'activate' it, like with javascript and such when I want to use it. Default should always be more secure and private IMHO, however. If I ever get spammed, then I never NEVER buy from that company, its just that simple. Don't piss me off, give me good service and competitive prices and I will be a loyal customer.
Typical liberal Democrats trying to squeeze more money out of people and for what? More Social programs for 99% of people who do not earn or want to earn their keep or perform their fair share of work? Utopia will never work when humans are competitive and thrive for status. Elite liberals consider themselves smarter and more intelligent than so-called normal people thus hipocracy. This will kill the INternet instantly. What about companies that are solely based on the Internet, ie Amazon, Ebay, SLASHDOT...??? People bitch about paying $$$ for broadband...let alone a tax on top of that. How come I don't have to pay for changing radio stations? I get blasted by advertisements is how they earn their keep....we pay for Internet Access and still get blasted by advertisements...now a TAX on top of that? Revolutions have happened w/ less taxation....
-------- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. --Ozzy
Since web content is often hard to define as simply a "page," it would make more sense to charge X amount of money for each bit you download, regardless of what it is. With an efficient cache system on your computer (which has yet to exist), you would not have to pay more than once for your bits. BUT, there would have to be some kind of stipulation that we DO NOT pay for any advertisements that are downloaded.
Also, we have to choose one or the other: charge for content, or charge for access. You can't do both. No one should be willing to pay an ISP every month and then pay for the content on top of it. Cable doesn't work like that. The phone doesn't work like that. You pay only for access to begin with... you don't pay usage fees on top of that. Well, there are premium services on top that you can pay for, like HBO or long distance. But you don't pay a monthly fee for local calls and then pay again every time you talk to someone. (I'm sure examples of this to the contrary can be made, but it doesn't change the fact that it SHOULDN'T be that way.)
If they want to charge (which is fair, I believe), they have to do it efficiently and ONLY ONCE.
Implementation could be relatively simple I guess, although not necessarily very private. ISPs I'm sure could monitor your bandwidth and charge accordingly, in place of a flat access fee. You may end up wishing you still had a $20 flat fee.
How the money would be distributed to the authors seems extremely difficult.
The top 1,000 Web sites agree that everyone will switch over to a penny per page on a specific date under a unified system.
The sites need to work together. If some sites switch and others don't, you will get the same problem that happens now when a site decides to unilaterally charge for its content. If there is not a uniform and super-simple billing model (so that users get one simple, easy-to-understand bill), the thing just won't work.
This sounds like collusion to me. Afaik, only major league baseball is allow to do this due to an ancient law that they still operate under that should be repealed.
The community charters a new, non-profit corporation that will handle the flow of cash from the audience to the Web sites. This is the same sort of corporate model that today allows users to register domain names at a standard price. That corporation will be able to charge a handling fee on the penny that each page receives. That handling fee should be capped at something like five percent.
There's no doubt that this piece of it would be fairly simple, but what about when disputes occur. Also, since the web is the most international, unregulated medium in the world, who's going to police & enforce it. In the US we have laws like the Fair Credit Billing Act, Fair Debt Collections Act and many other law to protect consumers. I think it would be a virtual (no pun intended) impossibility to ever regulate the web.
Either that corporation handles billing, or billing flows through the customer's ISP, with the ISPs keeping a small handling fee to handle their costs. Personally, I can't imagine an ISP wanting this responsibility. Do you have any idea what kind of system and infrastructure are necessary to handle fund dispersal such as these? Take a look at any of you major credit card company and you'll get an idea of the size and score of the organization required to handle such a task.
Could this work? Maybe. Do I think I'll ever see it? Nope. If a website owner needs to make money in order to run their site, then they need to do the same thing that every small business man does. Offer a product or service that's in demand. Manage cost. Attract and retain customers and get the hell outta that business if they can't make a go of it! I think the more likely answer to the web commerce issue is subscriptions. A number of site already have them and they are work...Consumer Reports and the WSJ come to mind. Paying websites per visit would be like a store charging you to walk in the door. You should feel lucky if I walk in the door of your store because that's your opportunity. If you fail to get me to buy something while I'm there it's your problem, not mine. Ruger
The top 1,000 Web sites agree that everyone will switch over to a penny per page on a specific date under a unified system.
Can you say "anti-trust"?
The sites need to work together. If some sites switch and others don't, you will get the same problem that happens now when a site decides to unilaterally charge for its content. If there is not a uniform and super-simple billing model (so that users get one simple, easy-to-understand bill), the thing just won't work.
Yes, it's called collusion. Of course a cartel is going to have artificially raised prices, this is precisely why such a thing is illegal.
What if all the gas stations in your state decided to raise gas prices to $2 a gallon? They'd make a hell of a lot of money, is what would happen, and then the owners would go to jail.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
What if had to ask myself before viewing any page, "Is this likely to be worth one cent?". It's a tough question, especially on /., with so much garbage among the good stuff.
Currently, I probably view several hundred pages per day. By my value criteria, I would have to cut that to probably twenty or thirty. It sure wouldn't be worth it to read all the responses to an interesting post. Most of the time, I wouldn't even consider it worth three cents or more to post a response.
More likely, though, I just wouldn't bother. It takes time to answer the question, and it seems silly to waste that time over just one cent. I'd make a static decision about what I would view (probably just news and weather, once per day), and stick to that. Slashdot, with all its interesting and otherwise branches would just leave my habits altogether.
In short, I think any site implementing this will immediately lose almost all of its readers.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
What's a "page"? A request for a URL? That might include graphic requests. What if the "page" is just one big graphic (linking to a JPG, for example)? Does that count as a "page"? Do we only count .html files? What about framed "pages"? There's too many weird situations in this scenario to think about. What makes more sense is to charge people low monthly subscriptions for unlimited content. (safari.oreiily.com comes to mind as a potentially good model for some things)
creation science book
Most of the content on the Web is not worth paying for. But there is some that is. For example, I would be willing to pay between $5 and $15 per week for a news source that covered politics, science, technology, and other serious news with the kind of depth and professionalism that serious newspapers used to be famous for (before tabloid journalism began to creep into even the most respected of papers). I would pay a few dollars a month for The Register, if they would stop running ads and use some of the money to hire a proofreader. I would pay a dollar or two a month for some clever humour and satire, like the Brunching Shuttlecocks. Hell, I would even pay a few bucks for Slashdot.
A penny per page, any page, is flawed because it encourages lots of content as opposed to a manageable amount of high-quality content. It would encourage spamming the Web with lots and lots of interesting-sounding but cheaply assembled documents under as many different aliases and domains as possible (to thwart the eventual domain filtering that would take place). The result would be an even smaller signal to noise ration, something that is already well out of hand.
I said that I would be willing to pay for content. But, currently, there isn't a payment system that offers me the things I need in order to feel comfortable doing so: simplicity, anonymity, privacy, security, and limited liability. Credit cards are bad because they provide none of these. In particular, I'm not going to hand over my credit card and personal information to someone when I cannot in turn verify with any certainty who that someone really is. Debit systems are better, but still suffer most of these limitations.
Cash payments have the advantage of being completely anonymous and they limit your liability to exactly what you pay. A no-questions, no-refunds transaction is fine when dealing with small amounts of cash. But even here, the Web presents new problems. If I have a bad experience with a real-life small-time merchant, I can fairly easily take my business elsewhere. The ratio of respectable businesses to shysters operating out of the backw of their trucks is reasonably high. On the Web, it's harder to tell the shysters from legitimate small-time operators without trying and possibly getting burned in the process. And it's hard to tell if the site you're visiting today is operated by the same shyster who sold you crappy content yesterday at a different site.
Established, respected sites that can easily be traced to established, respected proprietors could get away with charging for content--if they offer something better than what is being offered for free. They can get away with either accepting online payments or the traditional paper invoice method. For less well-known sites, the ability to charge for content will probably have to wait for the arrival of the Web equivalent of cash, and some sort of reasonably strong identification scheme to establish who is behind the Web site you're offerint to pay for.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
Maybe they could do the micropayments through https:// and free through standard http:// so it's up to the content provider what they want to charge for or not.. like for instance if Yahoo! implemented it, they could have a heavily constricted http://www.yahoo.com version and a full featured site with micropayment system at https://www.yahoo.com .. just ideas *shrug*
If you are paying a penny per page or per domain, then every site you vist has to have billing information on you, and also has web traffic information on you. Some sites are less secure than others. How would it be proposed that we do this? By .NET? I hope not. It could be done by your isp, but then again, the sites will still have to keep tabs on the ISP. Besides, what would be the advantage for the ISP to do all of this book keeping? There are so many problems with this idea, besides the price, so I dont think a price cap will be enough of a fix.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Could someone mirror this on a half-penny site?
haven't any porn sites thought of adopting this?
You can literally have FREE and I *MEAN* FREE memberships, allow the users to browse the thumbnails, then they only pay a penny for each FULL SIZED image they view.
make sense?
Clearly 1c/page is way to expensive for much content (anyone reading this fine message for example
The issue is that it won't work from a technical point of view. No one has proposed a practical billing systems where the cost of dealing with each transaction is in the penny category. Never mind the privacy and access rules - you can bet this billing system is going to require you to enter a credit card number.
So I offer a challenge - some one come up with a reasonable secure system, that allow micro (sub 10 cent) billing, is anonymous like cash, is deployable, is available to people other than Americans over the age of 18, and costs at most 0.1 cent per billed transaction. Seriously, got an idea on how to solve this, I imagine my employer (Cisco) would seriously help make it happen. Send me some email.
PS. I would also like to use this system to charge you 5 cents to send me an email - Can you imagine how that would cut down on spam?
Sounds like we need a better way of spreading the bandwidth so that they're NOT hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. Unfortunatly, current caches aren't the answer, so only the mega ISP's such as AOL & @home are making a difference to the bandwidth utilized.
Moderate size web page, included embedded objects: 100Kbytes, or 800Kbit
1Mbit bandwidth & shelf space: about $400/mo
Typical average daily throughput for a web site that serves 1Mbit at midday: 0.75 * 1Mbit == 750Kbps
So total pages served in a month:
750*60*60*24*30 / 800 = 2,430,000
At 1 cent per page, you'd gross $24,300 for the month.
Total cost of bandwidth per page:
400 / 2,430,000 = $0.000165
And you thought the dot-coms were out of hand before...
Actually, there's an even better reason to spread an article across 2 pages instead of only one. (No, this doens't work for articles across more than 2 pages.)
Spreading an article across 2 pages allows the web site to compile statistics on who actually *finished* reading an article.
Loading a page for an article that is complete in a single page doesn't tell the web site if you actually finished reading the article. Loading the second page of a 2-page article is a much better indicator that you actually read the entire article.
That is useful information for content providers.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
where do I insert the coins in my computer?
what will be the conversion rate for other currencies? do I have to break apart if the conversion turns out to be non integer?
when can I get the IntelliCoin usb inserter for all these coins?
what if I don't have any cent pieces. will they give me some change? or will there be a "keep the change" button on all these great websites I will visit daily.
where do I get all these coins? imagine, people will need like thousands of these coins per month. this will pose a serious logistical problem to the federal reserve banks and such all around the world.
Can someone make a penny worm and let it grow to trillions and then deposit it to my swis bank account.
Penny per page on your whole site is just asking for trouble. People will simply go to your competition that hasn't implemented the penny-per-page model.
And what about eCommerce sites? Why the hell should I be paying them just to browse through their selection. Will I get a 6 cent discount on my item because of the cost of simply ordering the item. Especially since I could place my order by calling their 800 number for free.
This whole model is cooked up so that "content provider" sites will finally have a business model. Places like cnn.com, anandtech.com, tomshardware.com, linux.com, slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, and sourceforge.net (just to name a few) all have a similar problem. They don't make any direct revenue from the people that browse their sites. This is simply a business model failure similar to the 2-out-of-3-step open source company problem.
1. Put up a content providing site.
3. Profit!
It just doesn't work. These places are struggling with bills, trying to make it work by selling advertising space. Some sites are backed by a company that already has a real stream of revenue from a non-internet source.
The solution is to start to charge people for using their service. The current model is like giving newspapers away for free. You can't expect to make a profit by throwing money into a product that people obviously want, but not charging for it.
The biggest difficulty is finding a model that people won't instantly shun. I don't think it's a matter of monthly/yearly subscription fee vs. pay-per-page. It's more likely the fact that by cutting off non-subscribers at all, you're preventing new people from seeing what your site can really do. Not to mention the fact that people don't like taking the time to fill out forms if they don't have to. (Like the subscription form.) Single login could take care of this problem, since you could simply be told that proceding will automatically charge you x dollars per unit of measure (page, month, year, hour, etc). You click yes or no, and you're done.
Single login has security issues though. I'd never trust any single entity to maintain the single login system for the entire internet. MS or not, putting the power into a single entity would really make things difficult. We'd be better served by a DNS-like setup. This would distribute the task amongst several entities. Plus it would need an authority to make sure everyone plays nice (an ICANN, if you will). The authority could set certain rules in place (like the necessity to support a common format so users can easily and securely transfer their single login between providers, and rules about always giving consumers the option to switch providers at any time).
I guess the real point is that free web services will never generate a real profit. Advertising will help, but you can't base an internet company off of it. The solution is to obviously charge for using the services you provide, but you have to make a reasonable model that customers won't shun. And finally, to make it all work efficiently, we absolutely need a single login facility. (It'll run without, but each site would have to put together it's own system, making it costly.) And for single login to work (and be accepted by the public), we need choice. Multiple providers, providing a standard protocol to businesses that wish to use it.
You can tell everyone for this silly notion is some money grubbing bean counter that's been using the internet since the boom in the early 90's or less.
Everyone that's not favoring this is an internet fossil like myself and remembers what the internet was like before our first spammer friends (The Green Card Lawyers). Hold up your 'Spamming the Globe" coffee mugs everyone.
My point is that I pay enough $$ to my ISP, why do I want to pay more $$ to content providers? I would easilly spend an additional $40 on slashdot, ESPN, and Fantasy Sports a month...easilly.
What if you are a job seeker? Are you going to have to pay a penny a page to look for a new job? Yeah...please. In this bad economy, the unemployed would be shelling out insane amounts to find work.
This model doesn't work, and the internet will become what most other cool things is this country have become....
FOR THE OBSENELY RICH & ELITE.
Gates will get his only wet dream come true. It won't be the internet anymore. It will be Gatesworld or Micronet or something equally as disgusting. I can hear Robin Leach now. "The internet. Once for the average Joe on the corner, but nowwwww it's the same crap but costs you 10 times as much."
One cent a page indeed...give me a break.
The world would be a better place if everyone wasn't out to make a buck.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.
A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:
Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?
Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?
Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.
Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?
Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?
Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?
Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?
I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.
Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:
"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."
On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?
And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.
I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.
Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.
Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.
Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).
>Absolutely charging $.01 per page is a bad idea.
/. members, as "power users" would be in the minority, and as a result, the major ISPs probably COULD pull off a penny per page.
>My mom might look at a few pages per week, but I
>have two machines on all the time each with one
>or 2 browser windows open.
That is the important point. If AOL's average customer is like most parents who only surf, say, cnn and hotmail/aol... this price might be good for them. I imagine in this case, we
But I whole-heartedly agree that $.00001 is much better for people like us.
My server
Given how so much of programming of any sort operates in the US, I find it amusing that they expect something like this to work.
Most things have a low entry fee, usually free (broadcast tv, radio, free internet access [netzero, juno], free local newspapers, etc.). Then you can upgrade to better service (cable tv, satelite radio, normal dial-up (ad free), broadband, newspapers, magazines). The content is paid for by advertising or by the fees that you pay to gain access. Rarely do you get asked to pay additional money, except on the Internet. I think advertisers have become too fixed on click-throughs etc. I look at ads on pages, and for the most part I ignore them until I'm in the market for that kind of product. This applies to TV as well. I don't pay attention until I want to buy something.
They should count the number of hits to their pages and sell those to the advertisers vs click throughs on ads. Click throughs are useful for gauging if your content is being sent to the right crowd though. So ultimately I think that trying to get me to pay more for content that I only really care about if its free is foolish. The sites that really matter to me are ones that I can and will fork out my hard earned money to, however that is limited to my budget and I can't always afford everything I want. The system is good at disseminating information to everyone freely or cheaply and that is the value of the Internet (for me at least). Take that away and you have something that more and more people are willing to ignore because they can't afford it or choose not to pay for it.
Once again, the commercial greed machine is attempting to tread on the Internet. Perhaps I'm just a luddite, but wasn't the Internet developed so that people could FREELY share information with eachother?
/. then I have highly overestimated their reasoning ability.
Let's see.. at my current rate, this would cost about $300 per month, assuming an average 1000 pages loaded per day. Now, since my web server gets about 1000 hits per day, this should all balance out, right?
Not quite, because I'll have to pay the pay service provider for transaction processing, etc. as will the other web site operators. So I'll probably net about $50 per month and the other $250 will line someone else's pockets along with a righteously moderate stipend to various government agencies, I'm sure. Also, since I am lower volume, my cost per transaction will likely be higher and my profit margins lower. And I have now become what I despise: a greed mongering profiteer.
Would people please stop trying to capitalize on the Internet? Go back to Wall Street and leave me and my network alone! Don't get me wrong, I'm not against commerce when it comes to durable goods, but to me this is blatantly antithetical to the spirit of the Internet: free and open information exchange.
Finally, if CmdrTaco or VA think for a tiny fraction of a nanosecond in their wildest fatigue-induced late-night hallucinations that I will pay to read
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
The better solution is a subscription model, and only through web pages with valuable content. Just like a magazine, I should be able to view what I've paid for unlimited amount of times.
Not to say there aren't problems with this model either. It'd be a pain in the rear end to manage the database that says who paid for what. So it is either have a really complex database, or lock someone from all data when their subscription ends, regardless. Also, figuring out a fair price to pay is a bit tough. Should it be a yearly subscription, just like a magazine? Should there still be ads for those who subscribe? After all, I pay for magazine subscriptions - and those still have tons of crappy ads in them.
Unfortunately, the only way to find out what will work is by trying it... and that puts people who want to try it at risk of it not working.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
how about something that lets you "pay" the sites 1 penny - just a button to press if you liked useing the site - i would press it
crimson
This could be the killer app for Passport.
Microsoft could set up a Micropayments Program which authors could join for a small fee (smaller than MyServices.Net, one hopes). Microsoft could also keep a percententage for themselves, say 10%. Ker-ching!
Microsoft would have your credit card details, so it could debit you once monthly for all your surfing, and credit the authors once monthly. Because all the microdebits and microcredits are accumulated into larger monthly debits and credits we're not talking about lots of itty bitty credit card transactions.
Authors who want to be paid would probably sign up to the system in droves, leading in turn to a larger uptake of Passport.
One problem - common to any micropayment scheme - would be ensuring that users get value - think of micropayments crossed with infinite pop-up ads!
Peter.
I would literally give up the net if things got that bad. The original spirit of the net needs to be recaptured, we're really losing it when talk about charging penny a page- SHEESH.
That would pretty much be the end of sites like anonymizer.com or any of those silly filters that convert web pages to swedish-chef.
Google's cache would be sued out of existance, as would AOL's caching-proxy. Squid would be in violation of the DMCA.
Libraries would stop offering internet access.
All those annoying articles that are split into 5 pages to force you to view more ads would be split into even more pages.
Computers would be cracked to set up illicit proxies. Employers would ban all web surfing.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I recall a system prototyped (developed?) by Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq, soon HP?) called Millicent - as in "milli-cents". It had something to do with an inexpensive way for companies to charge for web and other Internet content without the billing system's cost overwhelming the amount being charged. This seems like a candidate here, if this penny-per-page (or $0.0005/page or whatever) system comes about. IMHO, I hope it doesn't. Anyone have more info on Millicent?
Don't these business people realize that penny per page wont work?
Everyone will just stop browsing the websites which have this. Maybe, just maybe if all the ISPs in the US stopped charging for access, I might go for this. But otherwise, I pay enough as it is just to enjoy being able to access the internet.
I know for a fact I will never implement something like that on my web servers... It goes against what the internet was created for - free exchange of information in a reliable manner.
Suddenly the gopher protocol looks very appealing again...
Brielle
to answer the question - no, i'm cheap :)
although for some information it could be interesting..
Digital had developed a system for this years ago already, it was called Millicent.. don't think you'll find a lot of information about it though as it never had any marketing around it.. they've developed the system but external brokers were going to deal with the payments.. afaik this never was set up..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
This idea has to many flaws.
1. It will be to expencive to implement and develop something like this. If it's done it will cost a LOT more then 1 cent/page.
2. Searchengines will not be able to index pages without beeing charged 1c for every page.
3. How are shools going to pay for this? Schools have already problems getting money for computers that the students can use.
4. What is a page? How does site that uses frames going to be charged? And if a site uses a 100 's will that be attract a charge of 1$?
And what about #includes?
And sites like slashdot that adds new content on top of old? Archives?
And sites that uses JavaScripts that makes the page reload every time something is klicked?
5. Popup's? Should we have to PAY to see those X11 adds!!!!
6. Should i really have to pay amazon a cent to shop at there site?
7. If there is a central organation that takes all the money and hand it out to the siteowners how can it be guaranteed that the site owner really get the my 1c?
8. How about this: A worm infects a computer and starts to download a website over and over again to give a scriptkiddie a small fortune every month!
And there is about 1000 more way's to trick this system. The options for fraud is endless.
9. Most times when you search for something you discard the first 10 pages before you find a site that have the info that you are looking for. Should i have to pay for all those outdated/faulty pages that i didn't whant to read.
10. 404's?
11. The idea is just STUPID!
Just my 2c ehhh... 1c!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
This scheme completely ignores the difference in value of content, and assumes that every page is "worth" a penny. I know I would pay a lot more for a page of the Wall Street Journal, say, than for a page of goatse.cx.
Why can't we just let the market decide how much something is actually worth? If a site is good enough, people will pay to get at its content, though certainly not as many. That's the tradeoff for sites that decide to charge, and many of them are willing to accept this.
Kyle
[ home ]
Depending on how something like this would be implemented it could really cost a business a lot.
Let's say $2.00/person/day = $60/person/month.
100 employee's = $6000/month = $72,000/year
5000 employee's = $300,000/month = $3.6M/year
There's no way web access would remain enabled.
Plus can you imagine a ticked off employee that wrote a script to download pages 24/7 every couple seconds, and running up a huge bill over a long weekend.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
seriously tho, a lot of us depend on documentation online. especially in the open/free software crowd, it would cost an arm and a leg to access documentation online.
i know, i know, not all site would participate. but for how long?
We need micropayments. but at the same time, we need to be careful to not break the fundamental essence of the thing called the web (ie. http). as soon as this happens, i would want to know which links will cost me money. this will eventually lead to people being a lot more cautious on link-clickage. this in turn will lead to pretty much a static normal page full of plain text. quite a contrast from an inter-refrenced world of web-pages that it is now.
The author has detailed a problem - that typical business methods don't work on the web - in particular Adverting. (I don't agree with his ascertion regarding commerce - there's a lot of porn out there being sold to SOMEONE).
So the author, in his infinite wisdom, looks at other business models and wants to change the web.
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG
The other SHOULD be considering what strong points exist for the Web and building new business models to use those point to meet customer's needs. Too hard? Tough, then he deserves to be broke. (What did you expect? That it would be EASY???)
Good grief, some people think the world should be handed to them on a silver platter.
Just reading some RFCs and FAQs at my favourite site for this and I see that they've lost funding and are asking for donations.
It would be a pity if this site died, as it's a genuinely useful nerd reference info site - if you've ever used it I'd ask you to consider dropping a couple of bucks their way...
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
I like the idea of paying for good content, but I feel that payments should not be enforceable.
If a user refuses to pay a given site, then the site owner could restrict that user's access.
This way, fears of fraud can be allayed, and good Web sites fill find it easy to get some revenue.
Also, let every site owner decide their own prices, that has always been the way a market works.
only problem is shipping/ hanndling and exchange rates
Quite often I use the internet to find answers to problems that I am having, so I'll search for possible solutions. During the search I will view 100s of pages potentially, but the vast majority of them will have NO pertinent information. Would I have to pay for all of those useless pages?
I would like a "Pay by Choice" option - A simple "Give-em a Cent" button on my web browser - but I am firmly against paying for wasting my time.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
why the fuck should i have to pay a penny, especially when browsing comerical sites (such as amazon), when i'm spending money there anyway?
and how are they going to charge people who don't have credit cards? as far as i know, most people (in the uk at least) still use the 'free' isps that don't have the ability to charge their customers.
if you set up a website then it's up to you to work out how to finance it, whether through banners, or whether through a subscription charge. don't automatically assume that i want to pay for the privilige. if you're not making money, then tough shit. you should have thought of that already.
and does anybody else appreciate the irony that the story was split into EIGHT fucking sections?
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It's pretty simple. If adverts on the web were better targeted, they would work better. If I watch the soccer highlights on TV in the UK, I don't expect to see an advert for a California motherboard maker. Yet, this sort of thing used to happen with most websites and all too often still does. Websites should be far better at serving their target audience. Maybe that will mean users having to (shock, horror) reveal where they come from and what their interests are to a (shock, horror) centralised organisation/company who then serves this info up to sites, but that's surely the way forward. If I saw adverts that I was actually interested in, I'd be more likely to buy the products, companies would be more likely to make money off web advertising, investment in the web would be higher, etc. What am I missing here? Why hasn't the penny dropped? :-)
___________
PocketGamer.org - For Gamers on the Go..
wow, so ftp works peer to peer now does it?
The technical nightmare aside, this idea may be ok for content-only-providers, like newspapers or even slashdot. But merchants and the like would certainly not do well with this concept.
From the shores of sunny California,
Jan
> Ask any merchant that takes credit cards and they'll tell you it's not even worth their effort to take the cards for transactions less than $20
Humm. . . everything I sell on the web is less than $20.
Micropayment doesn't work. Several years ago I tried to sell a game program for 50 cents using the First Virtual's system. Nobody bought. Then I started accepting credit card and raised the price to $2 Then many people started buying. If anybody reading this is a shareware author trying to sell through the web, I highly recommend that they apply for a credit card merchant account.
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
I see they need to justify going to whatever high
quality school they went to to produce webpages.
so what if I visit 100 webpages on average every day? A dollar or more a day 30-31 dollars a month yea right. thats more then my ISP costs! F that.
it's like radio why pay for somthing thats been free forever?
Darling faciest bully boys,
I do not wish to pay a penny per page, you bastards.
Signed,
AC/Young Ones fan
No.
One thing the article forgets: I don't pay in a bookstore to look at a book. I pay to get the book permanently. Before I plop down my money I can open the book up, see what it has to say and see whether I want to buy it. What they're proposing is to charge to open the book up and see if it's got anything useful in it.
The penny-a-page might work for someplace like the Motley Fool, where the content's already know to be good enough to be worth paying for if you're interested in that subject at all. It won't work for general news sites like CNN or Yahoo News, where the material's nothing that can't be gotten for less from other sources ( trade rags, newspapers, TV news ). Some people might pay for the convenience, but the failure of the subscription model in that area tells me that Yet Another Subscription Model probably won't fly either. And forget about it for e-commerce sites. That amounts to charging your customers a toll to come into your store and look at what you've got to sell. That'll just drive people to the competition. If you're selling things on the Web, you're selling product. Your Web site's a way to let people buy your product, just like a storefront. Treat it the same way.
As far as books in electronic form, riddle me this: why should I pay $10 for a book I can only read on a single low-resolution piece of electronics and can't sell when I'm done with it, when I can pay $7 for the same book on paper that I can take anywhere I want, not have to worry about breaking it if I drop it or sit on it, and can sell to a used bookstore or give to someone else when I'm done? The answer to that'll tell you why e-books, and e-music, and e-video, tank in the market. Penny-a-page won't change the fundamental dynamic there.
You are all talking about avoiding being stiffed by the websites. What about the situation from the webmasters point of view.
How do they deal with search engines, or services like google that provide cached copies of pages??
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
I could just see browsing to a site only to have zillions of boxes pop up all over my screen. They could nail people for like a Quarter at a time.
There are very few things that I am willing to pay for on the web. Information is not one of them. Goods or services I will pay for. But nothing else.
I can see some promise in the basic idea of the whole concept but it would definitely need some work. The penny-a-page idea as it is stated I think could ruin the Internet, since one of the big reasons the Internet has grown as large as it is is because of the fact that the majority of it is free. Personally I browse a decent amount of websites and am exposed to a lot of new ideas due to somewhat random browsing, but if I knew I was to be charged for each page I would limit my browsing enormously. I think the model the way it is could change the Internet from an almost entirely free enterprise system to a place where only the largest sites continue to get visitors. I think a more viable solution would be to develop an easy system to charge a very small amount for certain pages with defined content, either per viewing or subscription-based. Maybe a nickel for a detailed news story for which you're provided a synopsis, or $1 a month for a search engine. If the site is worth the money then most people will be willing to pay that small of an amount and if it's good enough for a lot of people to visit the cents will add up. As far as the comment in the story about all these brilliant ideas going uncompensated...if you have something that's worth money don't give it away for free unless you know what you're doing.
I can make tons of money just by- click here to read the next page
ok, so why doesn't how stuff works implement this and see how many millions they make?
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
For my penny, I would have a list of "about 236,000,000" web sites that include the word "not." (Doubt me? Try it yourself.)
I tried it. And got 251,000,000 results. Leading the list was GNU's Not Unix. How poetic.
Wake up.
Do I get charged? Does the library?
What happens to the stuff that is "free," like library and government information?
Is there going to be some RIAA-type organization taking the pennies per page and marginalizing any info source that doesn't conform to their "digital-media protection" racket?
As far as this goes, AOL has the right model: access to content is payed for by access to the network; essentially, you are buying a subscription to their content/service.
No way! ... this would obviously not be the case if there would be some system similar to "penny per page" charging people for whatever information they are looking for and the result would simply be that the gap between the working class and upper class would grow even larger than it is today. How do you expect people from poor countries to be able to pay these fees?
What I think people need to understand is that one of the great things with the WWW is that almost all information on it is free for anyone no matter what income you have
Information should be free for anyone who looks for it!
This could make proxies save more than just bandwidth, and it could change people's surfing habits dramatically©
If this happened I could see people mirroring a lot of content on freenet or other peer-to-peer systems©
There are many sites that will not want to participate in the penny/page deal how will we keep up with which ones pay or not? A better idea might be to make isps pay for access on a monthly basis and the web sites can allow all ips that the isp has. This sounds to me like a better solution to me.
...metered e-mail. Up to 100k will cost ya $.10.
Shall I pay 1/2 penny ? This does not seem to be either viable or fair model.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I am working on something similar in my FYP actually.
After I did some research on micropayment, I make a conclusion that it is not the technology itself that makes micropayment not feasible, but the willingness of people to pay. People won't pay as long as they can find some alternatives. So, the key is to price each page at a very low price. The price should be so low that you won't bother to find the alternatives. It is just like the first time you use your mobile phone. When mobile phone is first introduced to the market, instead of using it all the time, you may still find a telephone booth to make unimportant calls. As telephone charges becomes lower and lower, you won't bother to do that any more. That's exactly what the seller needs to do to make micropayment works! Different business should have very different pricing. For example, google can set the price at 10 cents for 100 search while news.com can price its article at 1/10 cent.
Business at first may not be able to maintain a revenue, but when more and more people familiarize themselves with this model, they will be able to make real money.
Hell no! I would never pay that! I already pay $45. / month for access. The internet and the information on it must be free for everyone, especially because access to it is certainly not free.
Mike
Let's say I search for "Flippy flappers" on google.
In my search for info on "flippy flappers", I go through 3 pages of results before I realize that I'm getting bad hits, so I change my search to "Doh flippy flappers". Shit. Change that to "Dog flippy flappers". after sifting through 3 pages, I find that I really need to refine 'cause google still is giving me crap. Soon searching gets EXPENSIVE. People will no longer search, but maybe go to a directory model and google ends up going out of business.
Example 2:
People stop going to cnn.com because while they are interested, it's not worth the money. CNN ends up taking down their web site because they don't have enough hits to cover costs.
Etc. etc., etc.
The industry will spend BILLIONS finding out that the pay for page model doesn't work on a whole.
The problem with the advertising model isn't advertising itself - it's that the industry hasn't clearly understood value of good sites and content. What does that mean? Well, frankly the VALUE of a page view on something like salon.com is much higher than something like teenbeat.com - here's why. Salon readership statistically tends to be 23-38, college level educated, have a houshold income of 90K, etc. Teenbeat tends to have an audience of girls age 10 - 16, making nothing, and have a minimal education. (I'm making up web sites, demographics and numbers, but you get the point. I don't even know if teenbeat.com exists.)
Currently, salon and teanbeat charge the same for advertising because the advertiser (or ad agency) claims that they won't pay salon's rates since they can advertise on teenbeat cheaper because they don't understand the idea of VALUE on the internet.
They also look at bogus information like click-through in a vain attempt to try and judge ad impact. This is a bogus concept. Since you have databases and records of clicks / hits, they think that somehow those hits / clicks have meaning. They don't. advertisers need to change their perceptions and ideas before the advertising model will work again (and it will.) They need to think "Billboard", "Brand / product recognition." Get your name out there, and when people are ready to buy a server, they will buy Compaq instead of biffco because they know who compaq is.
That's it. It really is that simple. Salon can and should charge more because the Value of the impression is higher than that of teenbeat. They are not charging enough. Neither is yahoo, cnn, zdnet, slashdot, etc. The fact that these companies all cut their ad rates is hurting them ALL exactly the way that airlines are all hurt by low prices.
Right now, internet advertising commands less than 1% of advertising dollars, yet consumes 30% of peoples time spent in media (TV, radio, magazines) and is increasing every day.
The market is HUGE, but mainstream advertisers have not caught on yet which is why you don't see ads for Ford, Pepsi, Levis, etc. The strong sites will survive and thrive in time - just not today.
A penny per page does not present a large barrier to the payer, and it pays a nice amount to the Web site.
Depends on whether the site is doing anything you can't get eleswhere. I would say that paying 1 penny for a Google search will be acceptable to most people since its so much better than any other search engine. You have to pay extra for a premium service in any other field, as long as they reinvest the cash and stay sufficiently ahead of the game then it could work.
But as for paying a penny to read something on CNN (or any other news site). If you buy the print copy of the Sunday Times (UK) you get about 500 pages (counting all the supplements) for 50p, and the quality of the journalism is far higher - so suddenly it doesn't look such good value.
I would also be concerned that it would persuade to many sites to split long articles into piddly little sections so that they get more money - there are quite enough people doing this already just because they mistakenly think it makes them easier to read.
Are we nutz, I would never pay! Maybe I am too old school but who the hell decided that paying for pages was EVER a good idea?
I have a page w/ lot's of great info, not for profit but for the advancement of man-kind.
The inet is for distrubution of knowledge NOT $$$.
I am so tired of corprate AMERICA's attempts to take over the Internet. Make them pay they are the ones who want $$ not us.
-gekoner
would i have to pay a penny for every time i read some users comment on slashdot??;)
The author of the article seems to think that a penny a page isn't much, but he's overlooking a few things:
I don't mean to imply that that the author is stupid for suggesting this idea... if he didn't come up with it someone else would have. It just so happens that this particular idea can't hold up to looking at it in the context of how the real world works.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The internet was designed to be a free comunications medium from the ground up. It was ment to be open. another case: I know many children ~age 10-16 who use the internet constantly for games, school research, comunication, etc. they don't have the money to pay a penny per page. the only way they afford the internet in the first place is on a monthly fee paid to an isp from their parrents (which i personally think is too much).
I personally think that isp's shouldn't charge for internet access. I currently use Juno's free service to connect to the internet and hack my way arround their stupid banner software because it shouldn't be there in the first place. i'm not hurting anyone by doing so and to me, the banner software is unauthorized code to be running on my machine just as a virus or trojan horse.
the internet was made to be free (as in speech) but should also be free (as in beer). - i also believe this should be so for every comunications medium.
we've spent too long waging wars simply trying to manage the resources of our little blue planet. we are not black, white, gay, strait, catholic, protistant, jewish, american, japanese, german, italian, sweedish, polish, chineese, korean, etc. etc. etc. we are humans!!! look at the big picture. we are extreemly insignificant beings in the universe. so please, i emplore you. discontinue violence, oppression, prejudice, greed. the time is right for change.
--Cpgeek
May the coffee god Smile upon you!
It actually might be a disincentive to index their content properly, because they get paid for false hits just like they do for real ones. So unscrupulous webmasters would go looking for popular search terms and then try to get their pages to show up on those terms even if they have nothing to do with them. And you thought search engines were bad now!
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
would many of the objections people have go away
if instead of compulsory paying (with all its
potential for abuse by unscrupulous web sites),
you donate whatever amount whenever you feel like.
the ideal UI would be a button on your browser
that you click when you want to donate while
you are on *any* website. in this scheme the
user is in complete control with no potential
for abuse by the website. ofcourse now the
middleman managing the donations has to be
completely trusted.
i just feel people would be willing to donate
willingly for any item on the web that they would
like to see more of in the future,
it's like tipping a street artist, but while
most street artists cannot afford to give up
her day job now matter how good she is,
mainly because in the physical world you
can attract only so many people on a street corner. on the web the potential audience
is orders of magnitude more.
I think that How Stuff Works is a great site , but this idea sucks , subscriptions are the way to go, if your content is good enough , people buy your content , but penny per page sucks , it costs to much , people will use the web less , even less advertising revenue. I can understand the author wanting to get paid for his effort, but I dont think penny per page is the way to go.
If you want revenue sell stuff or have subscriptions.
I wouldn't pay a cent for a page I couldn't see before hand. In current page usage, most people find information either by a priori knowledge (they have it bookmarked, or remember the site), or they go to a search engine. To make a sweeping generalization, most people find information on the web through search engines. Another sweeping generalization: most people click on at least one of the first 10 links that the search engine returns. So most people would pay for a site they don't actually know is useful to them.
How do you buy a book? You either go to amazon, look at the user ratings, read the synopsis, and decide this could be the book for me, or you go to a book store, read most of the book and you decide, 'this is the book for me.'. in both cases you've had access to real information that helps you to judge the relevance of the book to what you want to know.
The web does not give us this luxury. A search engine returns a brief description of the site (typically the first x characters it finds). You can't judge the website content until you've actually looked at it.
Maybe its just me, but I've got enough consumer scepticism to know "buyer beware" is a rule to live by. I'd never volintarily pay for content that could just be garbage.
You can bet that any intermediate would try to take their cut--the "web master" would only get a tiny fraction of that if anything at all. Besides, such a flat pricing model is too expensive for some sites and too cheap for other.
We have a free market that decides these things. I'm all for offering support for micropayments, but a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn't appeal to me.
i can just imagine what spamsters would do... and the popups...
perlgolf: the only place where shorter is better
There have been many interesting comments surrounding this "penny per page" article, so I thought I'd add my own voice to the mix. Since I use a dial-up connection and tend to batch-surf I only grabbed the first page of the article so I cannot comment on the specifics involved in this particular piece. However I spent almost five years working in the micropayment industry (the company I worked for went bust earlier this year) so I think I can pass on a few insights on this subject.
The idea of "pay per click" is not a new one. IBM have done a considerable amount of work on this, and had a working system several years ago. This was achieved by having a big billing system to collect payments and special URLs in web pages to indicate to a plugin that a payment was required.
This system failed to sell, probably because IBM marketing drones wanted to use it to sell more mainframes for the back-end billing system. The latest I heard (about a year ago) was that it was being spun out into a new company.
IMO "pay per click" micropayments are a slightly flawed approach, since surfing is no the only thing you can do on the 'net.
Micropayments face two very big challenges, which are as follows:
1) Money
You need to have it to spend it.
Credit cards are the current standard payment mechanism for the web, but kids can't get cards, and nor can many adults. Additionally credit card companies won't accept low value payments since it costs them way too much to process the transactions.
Alternatives do exist which are designed to cope with low value payments and more broadly accessible, but they too have their problems. There's probably over 200m electronic cash smart cards in circulation now, many in the hands of kids, however very few card holders have a card reader attached to their PC. There's also web-based payment accounts, however there needs to be a way of charging up these accounts which either requires pre-payment (often involving a rather expensive infrastructure) or a billing arrangement.
2) Fear (and a lack of imagination)
It takes a great deal of imagination of the part of a VC now to back a micropayment company. They fear that they will loose their money, and recent history has proven this fear correct.
It also takes a great deal of imagination to come up with an idea for a web service that isn't already available for free elsewhere. The fear here is that somebody will copy the idea and set up a free alternative. Also there's the fear that nobody will have the money to spend on the service.
There's obviously a fear element linked in to credit card companies and accepting small payments, with the accompanying increased fraud risk. Money can solve this problem, by issuing smart card credit cards and upgrading the payment networks to cope. This is expensive though, so there's the fear that the investment won't be worthwhile.
There are of course considerable links here with the music industry; selling MP3s has the potential to be the (first) killer app of the micropayment industry. Personally I think the current position of the music industry is self-defeating: by preventing people from buying digital music they increase the demand for services like Napster and Gnutella. (I could go on to explain why secure formats are a waste of time, but I don't want to bore you.) Music sales could drive people to get electronic cash cards and card readers, or open micropayment accounts.
The web works now. If you do not wish to provide "free" information, then you can charge. www.wsj.com, www.asptoday.com and numerous other sites charge a subscription fee to view some (or all) of their content. My site is free and ad supported. Why? We want to provide a service but need to generate revnue for hosting, content, etc. If advertising dried up, we would either scale back, charge our readers, or give up.
If more sites are having financial issues, they should stop working "@ the Speed of Stupid" and revisit their business model.
- The fraud possibilities are endless. Given the creativity of spammers, I can barely imagine how many creative rip-off schemes would be hatched.
- Short of fraud, we have the dilution of content issue. At last! Web pages that really fit on a cell phone browser! I can imagine websites that are modelled after the M$ registry editor -- countless drill-downs before you see anything useful (or so I'm told).
- If we had the technology to do this, imagine the tax implications. How many government entities would be looking to collect taxes? Do they collect tax where the pages were created, where they were served, where they were viewed, or the states whose lines carried the traffic? Why not all of the above? Where would it end?
- How long would it remain at 1 cent? What prevents "consolidation/escalation syndrome"? (check your cable TV bill for a demonstration).
- What differentiates between useful content and crap? Why should both be compensated the same way? Even though the useful pages would win out over time, there would be a tremendous incentive to create [even more] junk content.
- The average web page is 10 to 30 percent advertising; these ads have no place in a "pay per click" environment.
- What happens where we have public web access (schools, libraries, etc.)? Who pays then? Do the rest of us have to pay some kind of idiotic "universal service charge" to subsidize the people who can't pay?
- Much of what you see on the web is provided for free, by people who created it for free (you are reading this message, right?) Once the concept of payment is involved, everyone all has to get paid. Just how much money can be collected for other people's thoughts, without those "other people" wanting their share?
In my opinion, this proposal takes the worst concepts of telecommunications & entertainment services and attempts to apply them to the web.* if it was linked to a central site like PayPal
* if I can have some kind of limit in case of
security problems or just over-surfing
I think stuff like Tom's Hardware is definitely worth $.01 a page. It's content that you won't find in traditional media (newspapers, magazines).
Page is an undefined and quantity and is therefore exploitable by both ends of the transaction. Uncool.
How about a penny per meg(+/-)? Bandwidthis what costs, so therefore that should be the foundation for our payment system, IMHO. People pay their ISP's for the connection on their end, but the only reason they want a connection is because of those maintaining servers. Perhaps the ISP should be responsible for charging their customers for bandwidth and kicking the cost back to the sites that the user went to proportionately. There could also be a cap as this article suggested, so that it may end up being less than a penny per meg, but that it still gets distributed evenly across the sites the user went to.
This solves the porn site pop-up problem, too, as you can usually kill out of those before any substantial amount of data has been downloaded, even if 100 "pages" have popped up. Plus ISP's (moreso than single users) would address fraudulent charges.
Browsers could include a little meter on the status bar as well, so they could get an idea how much they were using.
Obviously this is not as cool for the masses as the current system of getting everything for nothing, but if something isn't done to help out the content providers soon, we'll have a tradgedy of the commons on our hands.
Peace.
So I get into some pron site that has been disguising itself as a real web site with its address (whitehouse for example), and now not only do I get forced to view disgusting pictures, I get charged for it too! And as their popup ads drive on into oblivion, I get charged a penny for each and rack up a 50 cent bill just for typing in a wrong address. Lucky me!!
I just don't see how this can be controlled. The wide scale implementation it would take is an incredible task.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
You got it right in the third paragraph, but the phrase is "nip it in the bud," as in to cut off a flower before it blossoms, not "nip it in the butt," as in to pinch something in the ass.
While doing a sanity check, I stumbled on this list of common errors, as well as this list of not-so-common (funny) errors.
I just set all my computers at work (~300) to have their startup page load a frame from my personal website, and refresh it once a second. By the time anybody catches on, I'll be retired.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
The only paysite method that works is subscriptions. Wall Street Journal and pr0n sites agree on this one. A second method that sometimes works is donations. Thats it!
The fact that most sites aren't worth the bux has nothing to do with the payment method. It's just that most sites aren't worth the bux. Slashdot is worth something, but it's the exception!
sulli
RTFJ.
Capitalism makes you jealous, and makes you hate your fellow man... gotta be something better.
God spoke to me
The author abviously doesn't understand how the internet works. There is no way to charge a penny per page since there is no definition of what a page is on the internet. I think it would have to be done by data amount but even then how would stop people from setting up web caching servers and the web site owners from inflating their sites. Also, who would be responsible for collecting the payment? The ISP or the web site owner? Would you need to sign up in order to view any page on the internet? This idea is riduculous no matter how you try to figure it out. You would in essense need to change what the internet is to accomplish this... then it would not be the internet anymore, but instead some service like Compuserve or AOL or Progidy of the old days. I wish people would stop trying to change the internet into a commercial vehicle.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
You will be paying a penny for a steak and a penny for Ramen noodles.
Issue #3
How do you know the content is any good before you pay? Not only are you paying the same price for the steak as for the noodles, but you don't know which it is until you get it.
I wouldn't mind paying a penny a page for some things, as long as it didn't cost X dollars of my time (t) to set up.
Of course, that leads to Y different companies touting 'solutions' which only increase the hassle factor (Y*t). . . fear of the problems involved before the inevitable shakeout/standardization is probably what is keeping more companies from getting into that space.
So we're back to nothing. Foo.
I am wondering who would be in charge of tracking the pageviews and mapping them to the correct surfer. Would this be the same person/service/ISP/software that would then handle the billing?
It seems to me that this may be implemented by big websites that have the resources to do so quite quickly. Many of these big sites do not need the revenue as much as the smaller sites who can not afford to implement it in the first place.
Sites will be more profitable. ISPs will charge more because they can. Small revenue sites could suffer. The net would potentially become corporate-centric.
Of course, ISPs may introduce a new business model where they handle all of this overhead and keep the profits, or use them to subsidize the cost for the smaller business. We may see a few such ISPs, but it seems like a one of those things (like much of Capitalism) where costs are taken in by the common surfer, while all profit goes to already-established big business.
I'm working on a micropayment system I called "millibank". You basically move $2 or so into the account using credit card or ATM transfer, then use the 'online cash' to buy things of very small value (it would be possible to have arbitrary accuracy).
;)
Some millibank concepts:
-users generally do not pay to access a site. They pay to increase speed, remove ad banners, and support the sites that they like. Example: you pay 5 cents a month to support a webcomic.
-credit card numbers/etc are NOT stored on the server, for security purposes. Normal accounts have a $10 cap on them by default.
-Everything can be done using regular HTML. The user clicks on a link which redirects them to the millibank server. It checks their identity and either grants them access to the other site, or denies access. Raw HTML can be used for this, or CGI can be used to prevent one person from gaining access and then giving the URL out to everybody.
-Objects are priced so low that nobody cares about paying them. This helps to reduce fraud.
-Vendors can set up their accounts so that when any specific thing happens to their account (ex: a person buys something), a cgi script is called. Or an email is sent to a certain address. Or data is sent to a certain IP. Data sent to the IP / CGI can include such information as username, ammount, etc. (but no password
-You can buy things, transfer funds, donate funds to a charity ('buy'), transfer funds in/out of bank accounts, and allow servers access to your funds (with a maximum cap. Example: $1 out). Imagine being able to play a game of Quake where every time you die you lose a penny, and every time you get a kill you gain a penny (with a 50 cent or so loss cap, of course).
If anyone is interested in hearing more or helping out, email me.
darkphotn@yahoo.com
-All your base are belong to the man.
1. Editorial slant
Is that so? I think the web's okay, but that's just IMHO.Was it just me, or was Marshall Brain just so freakingly enthusiastic about the concept of a penny-per-page micropayment system?!?! I definitely noticed that... He did seem very interested in the penny payments. It came across in several places, especially at the end:
And, of course, the final sentence of the article:
Someone tell me that's not a conclusion to an essay/editorial. The entire article starts off fine, but as it progresses I see that Marshall Brain seems to be in favour of this system which will "amaze all of us".Don't get me wrong, if he likes this system, that's wonderful. More power to him. But HSW isn't exactly an opinion site. I was hoping for a slightly more objective view.
2. "A penny isn't that much"
I beg to differ. I've seen a few people make a similar point... All things aside like chopped-up pages, etc, while I was reading the article I thought about my daily page-viewing habits. I read approximately 20 webcomics daily. That's 20 different pages *minimum*, never mind if I want to read what the artist has put up on a news subpage. So guess maybe a quarter total, daily. That will become $7.50 a month so I can get my daily comic fix.
And of course, there's Slashdot itself, if it were to move to the penny-per-view model. I reload /. frequently during the day. Then what if I want to, say, read the comments? Follow the links? No offense to /., but I could end up handing over relatively obscene amounts of money to them because I'm an information junkie. I'd sooner pay a subscription fee - I'd know that would be cheaper. I think the same could be said for lots of other people here.
So for just /. and the comics alone, I could be paying an additional $20-30 a month on top of my already not-cheap DSL service.
3. ADS.
If we're paying, now, to view content that was previously funded by ads, I don't see any reason why the number of banner ads currently polluting the web should stay the same. If I'm going to pay to look at a site, there shouldn't be a need anymore.
But, rather than ban ads altogether, tone them down. Return to the simpler times when all we had were the normal ads at the top of the page, or whatever. But reinstate the idea of a banner exchange. (Remember LinkExchange, anyone?) Marshall Brain talks about resonance and how that will help generate page views. I think a simple banner exchange - free of charge - would be worthwhile instead. I could live with that.
4. Website hosting
Look at a site like Geocities, Freeservers, whatever. The ones that offer free hosting. You'd have to think that they'd join in on this. So what about the sites that are hosted on one of these places? Do they share in the money generated by hits to their pages?
For that matter, if I were to put a website up on some space provided my ISP, could I get money for that?
5. Avoiding the payment
It's happened before and it could happen again. If the majority of the web adopts the penny-payment thing but some sites don't, there will be copyright wars. People will put content up from the pay sites on the free sites. More or less the Napster situation.
6. Currency
Not everyone who uses the web uses the same currency. Exchange rates will have to fit in somewhere, as well... For instance, I live in Canada. As some of you may know, our dollar isn't worth much compared to the US dollar. So you can bet that even though I would be paying one penny per page view, my total will be considered possibly a lump sum. Guess what? I get to pay the exchange rate!
If you look back at my second point where I estimate that my normal surfing habits will be $20-30, if you translate that to Canadian funds, that becomes $30-45, because the majority of the sites I look at aren't hosted in Canada. For me, this is more than unacceptable.
7. Poor students.
This is my last point, and I'm only including it because I still sort of fit the category. Students rarely have significant amounts of cash. I know I didn't all through high school. Living at home with parents who not only pay the ISP fees but surf themselves, how would this have worked for us? I couldn't have paid for my page views, so it falls to them. So it would go with many others... Especially people who have more than one child.
So those are my thoughts. Comment as you will. But if this system comes to pass, and depending on how widespread the system is, I'll either look just at free content or move away from the web altogether. Perhaps I'll rediscover the joy of newsgroups...
There is no escape from The Muffin.
Some years ago, Teletext type services became available over the phone, and had a charge system of varying costs per page. These services were known as Prestel in the UK and Minitel in Franmce. Minitel is still going strong AFAIK.
:-)
Anyway the number of times I hit reload on Slashdot to get "First Post" would cost me a fortune!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
There are a few considerations:
1) Does this mean I'd have to register a domain name in order to get paid? If I have personal content pages on geocities, or my ISP or wherever, how would the billing agency know that *I* am the owner of the content.
2) For international content providers, how would the money be transferred to them?
Anybody think the venerable Google Cache would survive this?
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Only
sulli
RTFJ.
If they had to pay a penny for each page that they index, they would either run out of money, or their content would rapidly fall out of date.
One of the wonderful things about the net is that you can often wander into new places. For instance, I was looking for a driver the other day, wandered into sites about building drivers, and then into sites about efficient low-level C coding. The problem with the PaP scheme is that I would have been much less likely to explore a new area (which might have been worthless) had I been forced to pay for each access. This is the major problem with the scheme, as it changes the web from a medium of exploration to a medium of delivery.
That is all.
the ISP?
the web page owners?
how would you calculate it?
sounds far fetched to me...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
By the same token, you could just create all your websites with very small or hidden frames that refresh their content every second. You could even make "money pit" bomb pages which open up frames recursively only stopping once your computer runs out of memorr/resources and crashes!
You could send links to these pages via spam emails or better yet, just include the html in the email to link directly to your site.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
The second somewhat odd idea is that the whole scheme is costless and should be run by 'a non-profit corporation'. Why is it that people who are suggesting ways to make themselves rich always seem to think that everyone else should work for free?
In practice the cost of running a pay per view system would be much greater than 1 cent per page. Each payment transaction is by its nature statefull, maintaining state requires storage and CPU. Implementation of the system would be non-trivial. Cybercash invested tens of millions in their cybercoin system.
The privacy issues are very hard, as are the customer service issues as users deny visiting www.kinkyporn.ch etc. What most people do not seem to realise is that the more privacy the customer has the harder it is going to be to solve those customer relations problems.
The Chaum Patents are beautiful pieces of cryptography and commercially worthless. Digicash could never get the system to work for an economic transaction cost. There was in practice much less privacy than was claimed. Each transaction required a lot of CPU intensive processing. The patents were sold when Digicash went under for a very very large sum, I doubt that the purchasers will be willing to donate them to a non profit corporation.
The problem of fraudulent payment claims is definitely not solved by the suggestion in the Q&A. As with much of the rest of the proposal the suggestion is essentially 'magic happens here'. Yeah quite.
I also have difficulty believing that the author understands the issue of the banking regulations governing money transfers.
Micropayments might well happen, indeed they are probably likely. They will not be introduced through a non-profit corporation set up by a cartel of major web sites however. Nor will they be universal. Only a small number of sites have content that is worth paying for.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If
sulli
RTFJ.
It sounds like half of an idea. There is payment for content which is worthless without eyeballs. Why is ther no payment for eyeballs? I get pages I never wanted, how should I be compensated?
1. The average publisher benefits from the transfer more than the reader. That is because the average user spends most of their time at a few commerical sites that seek to change opinions and advertise. They will continue to make "content" available. If they don't, too bad.
2. The average user is already paying for the physical network. They pay phone bills, complete with new internet taxes, and they also pay ISP fees. This is where the money for the physical network comes from. At my house the combination is about $200/month, enough to buy a small car.
3. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I'd never charge people to look at my site.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
In addition to all of the hogwash of problems, no one mentioned ads and popups... Obviously, the use of ads and popups would probably impose some technical problems. What about, say, ANY page that pops up "extra" that the user didn't request for? On the other hand, if there was no good way around it and everything was ideal, maybe ISP's/websites would find a practical way to remove popups and extra ads for users browsing their pages. If they did this, then I might be interested. It's one thing to use ad-remover type software; It's another to NOT HAVE to use that kind of software. = )
Pay per view content models are inefficient because (1) they result in artificial shortages of something which is available in unlimited supply and (2) most of them fail because they can't charge enough to meet their fixed costs, while those that succeed are not the ones with the best content but the ones who have figured out how to obtain a distribution monopoly (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.) and they wind up with windfall profits which they would never have been able to obtain without a monopoly. This results in needless rationing of information, lack of compensation for those who are truly creative and innovative, and gross overcompensation for the small number of groups that wind up in control. No matter what the cost per unit of content the economics are the same.
How about a model where goods and services such as computers and Internet access are taxed, with the money going into a trust fund, and the elimination of copyright altogether (dreaming, I know)? Of course some people will be screaming "what, another tax, no!" but which tax would you like better, a tax for public funding of content that would enable you to access anything you wanted on a sustainable basis at no additional cost, or the RIAA / MPAA / Microsoft tax you are currently paying for the privilege of being bilked, not to mention having your civil rights taken away by content industry purchased laws such as the DMCA not to even speak of the ten times worse if it ever became law SSSCA?
The question is how would that money be distributed? Nobody wants some committee, whether public or private, to decide who deserves to get paid for being creative, and no committee would have the wisdom to make such decisions anyway. However, why not use a free market approach? Let current content aggregators and distributors, and any new ones that emerge to fill this niche propose ways to distribute the money and let the people decide which way(s) make the most sense to them and serve their interests. So, the RIAA can propose to take 95% of the money it gets and keep it, and give the other 5% to whoever looks the prettiest / handsomest holding a microphone, and your local public library can propose to have an elected jury to distribute the money it gets, and some other company can come up with a metering system, and you decide which idea you like and who gets to distribute your money. This way people who are being creative and innovative can get paid again without having to sell their souls to media companies and without having to figure out how to manipulate page views, members of the public, whether rich or poor, can have access to all the information they want, and the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc. can go to hell. :-)
I Get
sulli
RTFJ.
Quick ... Let's file a patent, and maybe we can pull a percentage of each penny! This idea will never see the light of day.
A mandatory penny per page? Bad idea. If google.com went up and started forcing you to pay, would you? Or would you get pissed and go to a competitor? And the idea of companies on the internet banding together and forcing users to pay money...baaaaad idea.
Also, just how much would these solutions cost to implement? Would they work on, say, the computers at a school. If you're on a school computer, who pays for you to surf the web?
Contrast this to a system where users have the option of paying very small ammounts to any site they want, and the website designers can simply sign up for a micropayment account, type in their pricing info, and copy n paste a URL over to their website to allow users to pay for access. Simple, easy, inexpensive.
-All your base are belong to the man.
The NetBill project at CMU's Information networking Institute was working on this six or seven years ago, but the project has been defunct since it lost NSF funding in 1997.
http://www.ini.cmu.edu/NETBILL/
Cybercash bought the rights to some of the patents, since they accidentally infringed on some of them.
A Cut Of
sulli
RTFJ.
Every one of you is paying dearly for your web already. You pay the phone/cable ISP company at home and you don't want to know what your company pays.
Well, I suppose that per byte charges would be a good way to kill free software. I mean, just long enough so that Bill Gates owns you all and the MPAA can start streaming movies at you for more than you'd pay a theater. Think about it, begging for new and better ways to give your money away is stupid.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It would be pretty trivial for an ISP to count a user's HTTP requests (excluding images and whatever) and bill a penny apiece for them. What would be non-trivial is distributing that money to the thousands of web sites the users visited. There's no incentive for an ISP to participate in that system unless it gets a cut of the money, because it'll have to shoulder the expense of billing, logging, and paying for all of these microtransactions.
The other issue with this system is that it assigns an identical value to all web pages, which is incorrect. A standard rate for all web pages eliminates the incentive to produce quality content. If I can make advertising money off mediocre content and subscription money off great content, I've got an incentive to produce great content. If there's a standard price that's independent of quality, why bother? Price controls are a useless measure for such a varied commodity.
Finally, there would be privacy issues. Do you really want your ISP keeping strict accounts of how many pages you download from who?
Lets keep a (free beer) free flow of information, even if alot of it is false. The great thing about the web is you can learn from MIT, Caltech, etc without having to leave your home, socioeconomic level, or even capable of understanding it.
In a penny-per-page world, google's caching system would probably be outlawed.
Riiiiight, and so javascript popups, windows that spawn new windows on close, forcing people to click through 'sponsors' (read: porn) to get to the meat of a site, splitting a single document into several pieces each separated by ads, and requiring a working email to send spam to before allowing access, need I name more?
If anything, the internet gives ways to make advertising EVEN MORE intrusive.
The entire tone of this article is irksome to me, even with assurances that popups and redirects will be free, the very idea is silly, especially considering we all know that the adds will stay even if people are charging for page views (cable TV, anyone?).
And, of course, the content. Most pages simply aren't worth a penny.
Nice idea, if you're a PHB, but they've got a hell of a tough sell here.
I have to pay 7 pounds a month for unlimited 56.6k modem access to the intenet, and I view much more than 700 pages. Do the maths! I'd rather pay 7 pounds a month instead of 'penny a page'
Slashdot Micropayments
sulli
RTFJ.
don't know about you- i ALREADY pay for internet access. $20.00 / month. if they want to make the internet a 'toll road' i will find the nearest exit.
A penny per page? No, that's not a good idea. A "page" isn't really a quantifiable concept -- it can be made as long or as short as the author wishes. Charging per page-view would merely incent web authors to make their pages as short as possible to generate maximum income.
The penny-per-page principle is never going to work.. It brings in too many complications and there are way too many avenues for abuse.
But subscription services can still work. A lot of websites have gone into the subscription model where people pay for the service for a period of time - but they need to allow some flexibility to the customer in determining these periods of time.
There are a lot of people who probably don't want to subscribe to a website for a month - they perhaps needs a single document or a bit of information on a particular day. These people can be served if these websites come up with more fine grained subscription policies - they could perhaps provide temporary subscriptions for a day or two, accesses to specific documents or information etc..
Also, subscription policies can be easily implemented unlike any penny-per-page type of revenue model.
Just my 2 cents..
For My Comments!
sulli
RTFJ.
-Why does everyone think in terms of pennies when talking about online currency? Use 1/1000th of a cent. I wouldn't pay 1 cent per page, but what about 0.1 cents? 0.01 cents? 0.001 cents?
-People use different currencies on the internet. A micropayment system should use only one currency at it's core. At the present time the best currency to use would be the US dollar. CGI/etc could be used to adjust rates to a viewers native currency.
-If it's difficult, nobody will do it. A micropayment system must be easy for a user to sign up for, and easy for vendors to sign up for.
-If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. A micropayment system should not require the vendor to use CGI/etc. Some vendors can't. It should not require that the user download a plugin/etc. Some users can't (example: on a library or school or work computer).
-You need people to sell things with it before it catches on. Use keenspace.com for this. I'm on the mailing list there, if you think up any good micropayment system, lemme know and I'll pass the idea along.
-Proprietary stuff sucks. A micropayment system should allow new companies to compete using the same protocols. Example: doesn't matter whether you use yahoo or ms or company x's banking services, you can still buy stuff using micropayments.
-All your base are belong to the man.
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It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
fraud
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It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Simply put, won't work. It is just another stupid idea in a long line of "let's make money using the web" ideas.
1) http protocol was not designed with business in mind. It was designed as standard for simple exchange of information. The infrastructure was not designed for this.
the system that they are proposing has so much potential for abuse that it's not even funny. From both sides. A site can popup 100s of simple popup window everytime you come to a page. if they get paid a penny for each what is gonna stop them from doing this? they already popup 10 adds each time you get to one them. each window opening another 5 when you close one. There is nothing in the infrastructure to prevent this.
Not to mention all the privacy issues involved here! Tracking all my sites? I don't think so.
The web was designed to be free keep it that way.
You IT types want to generate paychecks provide real programs like pates to allow the use of java w/o being elligible to geting sacked. You don't want to program ... I don't want to pay. Get real or starve.
What I'm afraid of is that everyone is getting used to the metered model because of cel phones, and I'm going to suffer as a result....
-David
I mean, a penny a page sounds good and all, but they were just about to phase out the penny. If they adopt this plan we'll have pennies for at least twenty more years.
1993: NCSA releases Mosaic browser
1994: Netscape founded, W3 consortium meets
1995: MS introduces their own DOM with IE
1996: Marketers discover web, shit hits fan
Business models based on "intellectual property" don't work. That's why all the dot coms are going belly up--businesses that actually sell tangible items (Thinkgeek, Best Buy, etc.) generally do well because they sell things, not because they have a "web presence."
Talking to you, business majors: the internet is not here for you to make money. Keep your business models where they belong, and leave the web to what it was designed for: the open exchange of information. In short, get out. And take your fucking pop-up ads with you.
-Legion
I could see paying to for a site if it provided content (like /. ) but what about a page that just givs out information is it fair to expect me to pay for a peek at a manufactures on line trouble shooting guide for a piece of hardware I just bought from them? Should I be expected to pay when I try to find out details about a product I'm thinking about buying? Even worse do I have to pay to download drives for a buggy product a company shipped before it was ready? I don't have a problem paying for sites that provide me with something in return but I'm not about to start paying a subscription for things like support and product information.
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
An example of new information might be a live feed of a rock concert, talk show, or lecture. Later recordings would be freebies, but the live feed could give paying customers the opportunity to interact while the event is going on, like when you call into a radio talk show or ask a question during a lecture. Here you're paying for not just getting the information when it's fresh, but also the opportunity to have your interaction be part of the permanent recording.
The Grateful Dead used to invite concert-goers to bring tape recorders. Anybody could make a recording of the concert, and sell copies or give them away. What the Dead charged for was physical attendance at the concert. This policy doesn't seem to have hurt their income too badly.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Two problems:
All of their examples are of pages that you want, but most pages you see are not actually content. Would you pay a penny for the google search page? A page of amazon search results? The page confirming your credit card info? An extra cent each time you want to preview a submission? A web page is not a unit of content, but a unit of interaction, and it's the content that the users want.
The comparison to books is apt, but their characterization of books is grossly wrong. If you go into a bookstore, you will find that all of the books are free, so long as you only want to browse them. If you want to read them longer, you can get them from a library. Why do people buy books? Because they've determined that they want to have their own copies.
The sensible model would be for sites to have "buy this content" buttons. They'd let you pay whatever you wanted, with a suggestion and a minimum from the site, and the only effect they would have is that that button wouldn't appear for you again. Sites would only have them on pages that they thought were worth paying for (or nobody would click them, and people would get annoyed). You could decide whether you actually liked the page before deciding to click the button.
Consider: each Onion article gets a button next to it. If you enjoy the article, you click the button and pay them a cent. You look up Afganistan in the Brittanica. If it has the information you want, you click the button and pay a dime; if it isn't up to date enough, or is too vague, or is just the same as the other sources you've found, you don't. You read a web comic. If you're just sampling it and you're not interested, you don't pay; if you read it regularly, you click the button each time. You do a google search. Each time it finds a site you wanted, you click the google button (and the site's button); for all the search results that fit the query but weren't quite what you were looking for, you don't pay. You download an MP3 from a band site. If you like it, you pay a couple of cents. If you like it enough to keep it to listen to frequently, you pay a dollar. If it didn't come through correctly, you don't pay anything.
The essentialy idea is that people will pay for things they like, even if they don't have to, and even if they don't get much out of it. Of course, this also requires convenience; I would pay for, say, web comics, but the accounting and the payment cost more, in time doing boring stuff, than it's worth. Nobody paid for shareware because, while the software was worth $15, it wasn't worth a check, a stamp, an envelope, and the time and effort to combine them.
um, despite the wacky unatural idea that information can be owned and the US fucked IP 'industry' Content on the web isn't worth a penny per page. Either from a value standpoint or an economic standpoint of market forces like these vicious mink.
The supply is far too high, so hi infact to drive the value to zero
Paying for viewing webpages? That has to be the most laughable, ridiculous idea I have ever heard.
99.9% of the websites out there are not delivering original, worthwile content. No, they're not even worth a penny a pageview.
The author uses current-day numbers to show how profitable websites could be. If the web moved to a pay-per-view system, you can bet that the amount of hits even big sites like google will drop off dramatically. The amount of users that would pay pay-per-view fees or even a flat amount would be dramatically reduced. I know that instead of surfing 50-100 pages a day, I wouldprobably surf only when I absolutely needed to. Websites would be closing as fast or faster than last year with the entire banner ad revenue fiasco. Instead of everyone being able to have a free voice, only big, corporate websites would prevail.
A standard search on google will yield hundreds of results. It very often takes visits to multiple pages before finding exactly what you're looking for. Why should I spend money visiting sites that are not answering my need?
Then there's the whole issue of copyrights. Currently, for any given movie, band, tv show, etc.. there are thousands of fan related websites. These are , IFAIK, mostly free to visit. The website owners generally don't profit from the site. Charging a pay-per-view fee would change all that. Fans could now be making money directly due to copyright materials owned by a movie studio, tv network, etc... Having such a website will then break many copyright laws and would the sites would be shut down faster than a whore house in Vatican City. Currently studios, etc.. mostly turn a blind eye to such sites.
The web grew because it was a place where you could freely speak and freely view other people's thoughts, etc... Remove the free from it, and you would bring the demise of the web as we know it.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
It doesn't seem to crazy to predict people having to pay for bandwith. Isn't this how the palm VII charges for its service, a certain amount for each byte transferred. Its certainly better than charging for time connected to the internet.
Since many web sites are charged depending on how much data they send out, it doesn't seem like it'll be long before ISPs start charging for how much data users take in. DSL is collapsing which could lead to people saturating the(currently fast) cable modems. Lets maintain high speed and increase revenue by charging for data transferred.
And it'll cut down on all the clutter in web pages too!! Everything in lite mode.
I hate this idea, but I don't see how it won't happen.
... no
Everybody's already mentioned the obvious flaws, including spreading content across more pages.
I spend most of my online time either looking at non-commercial web pages, or usenet.
Another problem with page-based: it's page based... and the Internet is sort of moving away from that, and content is delivered in different ways to different devices and purposes.
Start with Microsoft.com !
Google currently has indexed 1,610,476,000 pages. According to my logs, Google makes a complete crawl about once every two to three weeks. So, every twenty one days, google accesses 1.6 billion pages. Google probably crawls 76 million pages per day at a cost of 760,000 dollars. Additionally, Google hits the first 10% or so of my web site every week. If this is typical, it brings the total crawls in three weeks up to 1.9 billion and ups the pages crawled to about 91 million per day. This leaves Google with a measly $90,000 a day. So, under this system, by cutting the sevice they provide 10% by doing fewer crawls, Google could double their profits. This would discourage search engines from providing the excellent service they currently do.
Ohh, but search engines should get do do it for free. Watch and see how quickly I write a proxy that indexes pages as I browse them and provides a search feature for the 7 people crazy enough to go poking arround in my high port numbers each year. Inevitably, free pages for crawlers means free pages for everyone using the new FreeWeb DistributedSearchEngineAndPageRatingAndIndexingSys temBrowser.
In my opinion, any micropayment system that I would suggest would have to have the following characteristics:
1) A flat monthly fee.
I'm not talking about subscriptions for various sites. I'm talking one fee for the entire internet. I pay my $5.00 for the month and it gets distributed to all the sites that I visit, with those that I visit the most getting a higher share than those I just go to once.
2) Transparent. I do not want to enter my credit card number every time I go to a web page. Let me pay my $5.00 a month to a single location and have them pay the sites in my behalf. They wouldn't even have to give the sites my credit card number.
The only way I could see this is if ISP's handled the individual transactions. They take a piece of my monthly fee and dole it out to the web sites I've visited. But this is never going to work, unless we make some big changes in the infrastructure of the Internet or our attitude toward it. The reason for this is that the ISP can either pay the sites by cutting into their already thin margins, which they won't do, or adding an extra charge to my account, which would make me start shopping around for a new ISP.
I don't think these obstacles are impossible to overcome. But right now I don't see us getting there any time soon.
I'm not a big poster, and my comment will probably not be read by many because the mod will be low, and there are already too many people posting their 0.02$ but.....
Here I go:
I would not go for the penny a page model but would be willing to see other ways of making money.
Example:
I would like to see extremely low cost ISP's.... Bringing us back to the pay-by-the-hour model. This is for the people like my grandmother who just checks her e-mail and nothing else. Maybe it would cost her only a few bucks a month (if that).
I would also like to see more sites where you paid for content.... but at an extremely low cost.
Now Before You all Jump Out the Window...
Here's the skinny...
I would pay for slashdot. But at a low cost. Make it extremely enticing. Like $0.50 a month. What's that, $6.00 a year. No big deal to me, or about 85% of you either..... Now take $6.00 x %85 of the people here.... That's the annual revenue of slashdot.
But Why?
Slashdot is free because VA Linux is helping us out, along with the good effort and time of lots of people and coders. What if we loose this? Then what?
Finishing Points:
By designing some sites like this We would be pushing and asking / demanding better content. Up to date information. Top of the line technology. If a site wants to be free and can afford it. Like my site, and many many many others... then great. But advertising does not work. This we know. But give me a site with an extremely low monthly / yearly payment with demanding content... And people will pay
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Eventualy it will happen. but i don't think it will happen as international agrement deal, Ithink it will start at places that host multiple web sites that will be looking for to move away an advetising based income and will probable first offer it as banner free alternative to its readers. Then they will probable add in the ability for the payment system at one site to be used at all the site they host, ie if you make a 10 dollar deposit for siteA on hostA you will also b able to draw from it while on siteB on HostA.
After the enevitable bugs get worked out and they gain unuf acceptance to be profitable and more move to use this system then you will start to see agrement between site that will alow you to pay at siteA on hostA and be able to draw on it at SiteB on hostB and then perhapse even see the formation
of some kind of trade group to work out standards
and rules to make it easer for new sites to join.
as for the prediction that sites will split up thier pages more to get more money, yes i think that will be a problem in the short run but as most people will be more consuse of spending money than they are of spending time (as in dealing with banners) that you will eventualy see a shift to sites that offer more content per page and go for having more viewers reading a few pages cheaply rather than a few viewers reading a lot of pages expensively.
i also think that search engines will be exemted from payments at these site or they will find that they will just be exclude from the search engines and will have to pay to have there sites advertised by alternate meanse (some Quite expensive), a possible exeption would be search engines that offer cached vertions of the pages, but the simplist thing to do would be to stop offering cached pages.
Wayne.
typos&mispellings=iwenttopublicschools
Redhat to Debian backto RedHat to Gentoo Religion - Arguing over who has the better invisible friend
I hate to admit it, but this idea does have some merit and could work if certain guidelines were layed out. While I really don't like the initial thought of paying for every web page I visit, I, as a web site owner, understand how hard it is to make money (to just pay for the hosting costs at the very least). So here are my thoughts on how this could work...
1) An organization seperate from any ISP or web site operator would be setup to govern the whole penny-per-page payment system.
2) Each web site would submit its domain(s) to this organization for inclusion in the payment system, also submitting any pages they do or do not wish to be included (such that maybe just articles on a site would be charged for viewing). This also enables a way for sites to opt-out of the payment system
3) You would only be charged once for any page, unless that page was dynamic in content (i.e., source code pages on Planet Source Code)(maybe exclude web site home pages from being charged for), in which you would be charged for each page view. A modification of this might to only charge a per search fee for search engines and sites such as PSC.
4) As stated in the article, there would be a maximum amount you could be charged per month, say $20.00.
5) The organization would have to develop some way to track you, maybe a browser plug-in that automatically tracked page views. If you didn't have the plug-in then maybe you would have to manually login to some sort of tracking system...
6) The plug-in would also be able to detect pop-up windows and other trickeries of the sort.
7) You would either be billed directly by this organization or maybe by including the charges into your ISP bill (hopefully ISP's could lower their monthly charges somehow, maybe by compensation from the organization, since all this web sites will now be making all this money...).
8) Hmmm... I think that sums it up...
In practice the system might work like this:
1) User opens their web browser and goes to the Slashdot home page,
2) The browser plug-in checks to see if the Slashdot domain is participating in the payment system. The user does not get charged at this point b/c they are on the home page of the site, which for (hopefully) obvious reasons should not be charged for,
3) The user then clicks on a link on the home page that takes them to an article,
4) The plug-in checks to see if this page is to be charged for or not,
5) The user is charged a penny (or however much) b/c this page has been found to not be exempt from the system,
6) The user then follows a link from this page to another, which resides on another domain,
7) The new page automatically opens a dozen pop-up windows,
8) While the user is charged for the new page, b/c it is not a home page, they are not charged for the subsequent pop-up windows b/c the plug-in recognizes them as such.
9) The user later receives a bill from the organization or their ISP for that months charges from the payment system.
Obviously there will be ALOT of specifics and safety nets and such to work out if this system ever went into effect, but I think that it might actually work given the right cost and the option to opt-out for web sites. I know we all love FREE, but it can not last forever and it would be wise of us all to develop this system now rather than waiting for it to be forced on to us in terms that aren't beneficial or reasonable for the general population. Just my 2 cents (for the two pages I've viewed so far, not counting the home page of course)...
i think the title of the article is off. instead of am i willing to pay it should be "are they ready to roll it out and start charging?" informal polling shows that folks are willing to pay for /. or toms hardware or other geek sites (being a geek those are the only ones I'm interested in) and penny arcade has consistently met their goals for donations. so folks are ready to pay. just get it in gear.
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I create my own dynamic websties. How would I classify a page? Would it be for a certain view of the document or just the document?
On the other hand, AOL would get their two cents for every visitor they have because of their unprofessional pop-up. Not only will they pull money from users, but also from non-users. That would stink!
How about other sites like Ebay? Think how rich they would get just in one day!! Would I also have to pay for view pages with AvantGo? In the age of information, that would put a damper on my education via the web, or put a complete stop to it.
I would pretty much go back to snail-mail if a charge per page was inforced on me. M$ may just try that in the future.
Some pages will always be free to view (gnu.org, microsoft.com, irlgov.ie) :-)
Some sites will always be more expensive to view (I don't want to think about what the most expensive pron site would be)
The author has control over their data and can't be forced into a pricing system
Everyone would go mad if we had a pop-up asking us about the microcharge for the next page every-time it is different to the last one (and parents would go nuts trying to let their kids view any pay site without holding their hand every second (not all parents are *nix admins
Move along, nothing to see here!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
So, you're basically saying that we have no right to express our cultural differences?
this is not what i am trying to say at all. What i'm trying to say is everyone should be free to express their cultural differences withought fear of being pissed upon by other cultures.
Sorry, your optimism sounds like it comes off a cereal box, or that you were spoon fed ideology in 'social studies' class.
Without idealism there is nothing to hope for; without hope there is no future.
May the coffee god Smile upon you!
Doh! Anyono should know by now that any idea that requires centralized rule to switch over (if only everyone would...) is guaranteed to fail. Change can generally only come about emergently, i.e. plant a good idea and hope so many people will pick it up to gain critical mass.
Shame on them to say that selling products on the web and selling advertising space are ineffective business models, when this page has both. The real problem with most websites has been that the material wouldn't be sellable in any other media as well. The fact that sales were done over the internet wasn't the cause of the downfall of groceries over the internet. Groceries over phone or mail would be considered equally crazy. A company that wants to make money over the internet should have real content that would be worth paying for. Considering most webpages turn out to be useless or not worth paying for, this business model is doomed to failure, plus the electronic economic model would be difficult to implement, just imagine a toll booth at every intersection on the roads. I think people will find that the traditional methods of making money in mass media will work for the internet. Advertisers will pay for advertising space where there is real content. This is why you can't sell $1million adds on the public access channel.
As long as I get a penny from each advertiser on that page!!!
After all lets face it... Paying didn't exactly remove commercials from cable now did it.
Once you start paying for anything on a per use basis, the price inflates. period.
Does anyone realize how quickly a penny a page will add up to real money? It could easily become more than I'm currently paying my ISP! Forget it!
What about public places like a library where there can be in upwards of 8 terminals all linked to the internet with people viewing pages. I can't see how the library would be able to afford such atrocious rates. . Would they get a discount? And if so, who else would be elidgable for said discount?
Do you have stairs in your house?
I can see it now... a normal 1 page article broken up into 5 pages. They already do it now, but if they got paid by the page... well, there's just going to be a lot of unnecessary pages..
Plus, I look at about 200 pages a day. That's $60 per month. That's ridiculous..
on top of crippling the all important universal access, it simply isn't practical. The overhead involved in accounting and collecting such payments is way too much; it just doesn't work out. See the mojonation project for examples of why.
The Case Against Micropayments
Big Business would like another way to screw more profits from us, would they not?
Most web pages are selling something - why should we be charged? - They should be paying us.
You will have TiVo charge people for adverts next.
Pure information pages will be broken down to give less information - making you HAVE TO click more pages to find what you are after.
A pathetic attempt by the suits to help Corporate Greed.
Incidentally, the simple solution to trademark and domain name problem is hidden by the United States Department of Commerce and United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. Please visit WIPO.org.uk to see it.
I wouldn't pay.
I'd rather lose the content.
proof of Osama's guilt..
The idea of the internet, wasn't that to make information avaiable to everbody? regardless of they'r technical skill or bank account? OK admitted a penny isn't much, but I would not pay it, I wouldn't even pay 1/100000000 of an italian lire.
If a website isn't able to survive on commercials alone the webmasters should start to reconsider running it or maybe start thinking of a better way to run it amybe with other contents. This is called evolution and will amke the internet more eficient.
When the day comes that this is put to work 'i will have to spend all my time on usenet instead plain surffing, and I hope that alot of people will do the same thing.
Instead, what most of us "tech types" do here is discuss how or why micropayments won't work, using examples that touch on, without really getting into the nitty-gritty down-to-earth facts regarding, the issue of negotiation.
The payment models we have in the world today, those that work anyway, all reflect what is practical regarding negotiations between market entities (people plus corporate bodies).
Each such negotiation requires a significant effort be made consisting of distinct thought-processes ("minds", "brains", whatever) making private assessments regarding valuations -- of not only the items being explicitly negotiated over, but of various comparable items.
E.g. when you decide to make an offer on a new or used car, you exercise a vast amount of intelligence, or brainpower, to consider not only how valuable the car is in the overall market to you as a generic buyer, but how it stacks up vis-a-vis other choices you have regarding how to spend that money. Sure, maybe another model costs only $400 less, but you, and you alone, can consider that $400 in terms of how many CDs to buy to feed the stereo in it. Meanwhile, the seller is performing similar computations, so to speak.
And, for more effective negotiation, you're both likely thinking about how the other person is thinking, or valuing, their end of the deal. If you think the dealer is more desperate to sell than he lets on, you might be more willing to push for a lower price than you're actually willing to pay.
In most negotiations, it is generally foolish to start out by answering the (perhaps-implicit) question "what are you willing to pay for this thing I can sell you?", though, in specific situations, that can be appropriate (ditto for the corresponding question from the buyer).
Getting back to micropayments, all of those proposals seem to ignore, or hand-wave, the importance of this kind of negotiation process. And most of the valid objections to micropayment schemes come down to "but that scheme skips the negotiation process", without saying so in so many words.
So here's my suggestion. Instead of, or in addition to, criticizing micropayment schemes on the basis of detailed technical arguments, focus tightly on the negotiation issue, since that's where the rubber really meets the road. Pose questions such as this:
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Further, I think any scheme that assumes some kind of universal, constant value (price) per some other arbitrary unit (such as a page view) is doomed to failure simply because, the latter being arbitrary based on the whims of communication wihle the former being arbitrary based on economic concerns, there's too much freedom in those two independent worlds to try to tie them together with a brick. It's like tying a ship to a pier with duct tape, expecting the pier to remain anchored to shore, the ship to remain in (tide-tossed) water and even leave port, and the duct tape, to nevertheless continue holding them together.Isn't a micropayment ultimately the outcome of a "micronegotiation" between a buyer and seller?
What mechanisms exist in your scheme that support components of negotiations other than the mere exchange of a small amount of currency? What components are left out?
Doesn't your scheme essentially put a buyer of a product (e.g. a web-page viewing) in the position of having to trust technology to make negotiation-related decisions for him, beyond its present role of facilitating communications?
If you were totally blind and relied on a seeing-eye dog to help you navigate a city, would you also trust that dog to negotiate for you -- to decide for you whether and how much to pay for items such as groceries, clothing, an apartment, and so on? Or is there some other type of animal -- perhaps a chimpanzee -- that you would trust to perform this role for you, in situations where you found it inconvenient (or worse) to do so yourself?
To what extent has the kind of technology your micropayment scheme depends upon, overall, succeeded at mimicking thought-processes, social behavior, self-organization of individuals, etc. in the animal kingdom: has it reached the level of insects (ants, bees); of schools of fish; of amphibians and reptiles; of mammals; of primates?
Given the likely answers to the questions in the previous two points, why do you think people will be willing to trust technology less than beloved pets, considering how much "dumber" that technology is when it comes to socializing and interacting effectively with humans?
When technology is claimed to be reaching levels worthy of trust for purposes of handling negotiations for humans, will it be developed using funding assuming a closed-source model or an open-source model? Which model is more likely to be trusted by humans -- one that is easily "trained" by its creators to pretend to act on behalf of human clients but really steers their business towards friends of the creators (a la Windows XP) or one that is easily examined to ensure that it is truly acting solely on behalf of its client, or owner (a la GNU/Linux)?
As another poster put it so well, proposals for economic reform based on "NEED" and "DESERVE" are, generally, doomed. A ship may "need" and "deserve" a safe place like a pier, which in turn may "need" and "deserve" a wonderful ship people can walk onto, but the two will part ways quite frequently, live in two very different worlds, and, regardless of what the duct tape "needs" and "deserves", it cannot change that fact.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
What if the PPP Non-Profit skimmed some money off the top and kicked it back to the ISP's? This way, you pay for the pages you view, but your ISP bill is reduced because you're only paying for things like email bandwidth or whatever.
Personally, I don't like the model, but this makes it less objectionable, I think. If I paid only $20/month for my cable modem then I'd be more willing to pay for the content on the web...
But alas, I don't really care about making the web profitable. I'm hoping a few big companies stick around and are profitable so e-Commerce can live a bit. Other than that, I don't care.
nickel and dime is bad enough, but red cent me to
death?!
Face it the Net only works because the content is
for the most part free.
The essence of the Net is leaping from one site to another as the info flow takes you.
If you have to start dealing with paying at every
site that catches your fancy, this will kill the
Net more than anything MS could do.
The cream of the cream might be able to get away
with charging a buck a year for unlimited access
to all the sites content.
The larger public is already getting bored with
the whole internet thing except for very specific
uses like email, sending photos.
Turn it into a penny page hassle minefield and the only surfing they will be doing is on TV.
A non-starter
At one point in the article, they state that the worst case someone could be charged $48/month. How would this be billed? Would I get pages and pages of all 4800 URLs that I visited? That'd be great... Page after page after page of 10/28/2001 10:56:25 -- http://www.ramdomsite.com/foo/grendle/frodo/frotz/ news_b32fa1bfc473f05800d0.html . How do I dispute something like this? Its not like a phone bill where you can look at a number and say, I don't recognize that number... Could you honestly look at that URL and say, I didn't go to that page? Especially if www.randomsite.com was a site that you spent a lot of time at. Nope, too much room for abuse by the billers, count me out.
Well, the reason I posted this was to see some constructive critism. About 80% of the posts I've read didn't bother to read the article. I agree, the article itself proposes a un-doable solution. However, I feel it could be expanded upon.
:)), begging for scraps, or plastering dicks and tits all over the place.
:)
A lot of people here say they want the web to remain free, etc. etc. Bring it back to the way it was, and so on. The bottom line is, tons of sites that would form a niche part of the web and be beneficial to the community are knocked off the radar because they cannot afford the hosting. Sites like MSN, CNN, and yes, Slashdot, stay up because they are members of a few elite that can afford quality hosting.
A small, trivial, compensation for sites from many hands would make a HUGE difference. Not enough to make a profit, just enough to keep the site running. As such, it would have to be proportional to the number of visitors. Ask any webmaster who has tried to make a decent sized community site/hobby site/etc and they'll probably tell you that they were doing it at a loss. Hell even the ones that are up are only up because their webmasters have been dropping unnecessarily large amounts of cash and/or they've sold out.
Now of course, the Slashdot population will yell in response "We didn't ask them to do it! It's their problem if they can't afford it!" Well, of course this is true. But the question becomes, wouldn't an extra 5 or 10 bucks from your wallet each to pay for the hosting of sites you find on the web be worth them not dying in a few weeks? Wouldn't you rather Malda, Lowtax, or whoever spend more time writing/coding the site than stressing out and sucking dick for money so they can provide you with something for free? I've been fortunate enough with my hosting, being entirely donated, but just the experiences I had with half-empty make me realize how much it sucks that someone can't come up with a good idea for the web and not be able to deploy it without reaching into their wallet (I'll give you my time, but I won't give you my money!
Of course I wouldn't expect people to pay an extra $100 a month for this. It wouldn't be necessary. Come up with ideas. For example, a client side program that logs the hits and sends information about domains to the ISP and the ISP forwards the money.
The idea is not to worry about how people will circumvent it (they will) and how people in "non-rich" countries will afford it (they won't be involved.) Over the long haul though, the extra dollar here or there thrown to sites by non-circumventing users would make a HELL of a difference. A penny might be too high. A page might be a bad measurement. Get past the damn details and try to see the point!
I agree that there are flaws in the design of this model. You're right, the web can be free, but I am of the opinion that with the amount of bandwidth and people using it the untapped potential if left completely free is enormous. If individuals with ideas could just execute them without worrying about hosting, the results would be amazing, IMHO. Chew on that, and instead of bitching about why this won't work, acknowledge why we do or don't need to help web admins show us their work, and propose a means of doing so!
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I haven't seen any comments about this (then again, I'm pretty oblivious to everything) but how would places like libraries and educational institutions that offer public internet access deal with this? Seems like any sort of penny-per-page scheme would totally defeat public internet access, either that or you'd be swiping a credit card before getting on the web.....which is just stupid. I doubt that colleges (as an example) could cope with paying the bills of everyone using their public terminals.....just a thought...
Brian
"Lost in oblivion -- dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom" ~Fight Club~
Or would it be a centime, peseta, 0.01Euro or 1 matabele gumbo bead?
"If one is working on a solution for getting people to pay for information online, then one can be sure one's solution is broken."
Ugh, there are better ways to write than using "one" four times in that context. I'm not even sure what "one can be sure one's solution is broken" means exactly. Using "one" in writing is like talking to someone while intently looking at something else. It's very distracting, disconcerting, and inappropriate.
Buskpay - A Decentralized Meta-Payment System
The idea is to have little text files that list a variety of payment methods and stuff like contact information. You use these to make a big list of all the penny-donations you want to make, and worry about how to pay them in a batch later. $20 batches of tiny donations are much easier to handle than donations individually, so practically anyone could set up a business to do this, once a couple thousand people wanted to use it regularly.
The web is fine, reports of it's demise are generally coming from people who failed to get rich off it.
yeah, but think about how quickly web server worms would get patched. "what do you mean my ISP bill was $17,000 dollars last month?!?!"
everyone with secure servers (who put up a 'page') would make extra money. think of it as a redistribution of wealth from people uninterested/ incapable of security to those who are.
i'm using this technique of charging per page views on my site right now, and it's working out fabulously.
although i'm not charging a penny per page, i'm working on a count of $0.0005 per entry on a page (define("COST_PER_ENTRY", 0.0005);), so a page with 10 entries (the standard index page) will cost $0.005, or half a cent.
it's not compulsory - it's honesty box styles, and people aren't penalised for not paying up - it's just a suggested amount.
so far all the users have been very receptive to this technique, as it fairly accurately suggests a 'donation' relevant to the person's actual useage.
have a look - http://www.sensibleerection.com/ [warning: adult content], see what you think. so far it's been incredibly successful, and i'd recommend anyone else who's running into nasty bandwidth costs to give it a try.
US Dollar?
Aus. Dollar?
Pound?
Yen?
Rupee?
In the case of sites like Yahoo and other major sites with mirrors everywhere... would it be cheaper for me to view the same content on an australian server as opposed to a US server?
given the strength of the US dollar... foreign participation in US content sites would dry up overnight and the services they provide would be replicated locally.
Kinda defeats the purpose of the all pervasive, access from anywhere Internet if you've got to check your conversion rates every time you switch pages....
'sapientia potestas est'
I already pay some USD 200-300 for my web content. I subscribe to services that are good, and that usually means that I get content not available for free as well as getting the content that would be available for free without banners.
I would definitely hate automatic micropayments. I don't want to pay microsoft additional whatever it'd come to for getting upgrades from their website.
Or consider how many small apps nowadays use http to fetch data from the net.
I don't have any idea about how much I surf. Because I'm always connected - at home, at work - and mostly have some browser windows open, and so I may just check a page or two when waiting for a compile to complete or whatever.
Consider this: how much is slashdot worth to You? I'd pay eg. USD 20 / year for slashdot subscription. That's less than a penny a page, and about 1/10th of what I pay for my newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat). But I wouldn't pay more for probably ANY website than that 1/10th of the newspaper, because no website, however good it is, will provide me 1/10th of the RELIABLE content. How about TV? I think I pay some USD 40 or so a year for TV - I don't have pay channels. Would I pay more for a single website than for the 10-20 TV channels that are in the basic bundle I get? Nope. No way.
If I get real, archive copies of material, then I'll pay more for USEFUL sites. But, the reality is different: I subscribe to a magazine and get their subscriber web service as an extra. I get archivable content (paper, some CD-ROMs), and I get dynamic content not likely to be referable five years from now. Of course I could say that I subscribe to their web service and get the magazine (and CD-ROMs and stuff) as an extra. If good informational websites want to go that way ("Subscribe to the website, subscription includes bimonthly paper copy of the feature articles AND CD-ROM archive every year!") then they'd be treated as magazins with the web service as an extra.
The 402 status code is for "payment required" pages. It can send HTML back to the browser, just as a 404 code can. What does this mean? This means that, if browsers bothered to implement this, your site could return a "402, payment required" message, along with whatever "incentive" HTML you wanted. Perhaps the first 3 paragraphs of your article. The beauty of this scheme is:
I think this is a viable option that just hasn't been put to use yet -- the 402 code is still listed as "not yet implemented" by browsers. Perhaps those browser vendors should start thinking about it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Most pages I end up going to have nothing worth reading and I leave quickly. A penny a page would add up to lots of dollars a day just to find out that the pages are useless.
Many search engines have picked up Keywords and categorized pages as having content about a subject which is only in the keywords, not on the page. If one is going to start charging, how about applying truth in advertising (or indexing)?
This is America, Capitalism at its finest.
It's just down right stupid and idiotic to try and charge people per page view.
#1 If your not making money on your website and you cant afford it, guess what "TOUGH SHIT"
Who can't understand this?
#2 Companies know by now that some of them need an internet presence, they will pay to keep their sites free
#3 Good sites with good content "will" have people who pay to read that content, just like newspapers.
It will be user / pass based like every single porn site out there.
I really don't see any reason to find a different way to pay for websites you like viewing, its such a moot issue.
--- Common sense goes a long long way, it's a shame more people don't use it.
...this could work, with some modification.
Yet another brain-dead idea from Idiots Anonymous. What's amazing is how many people think that this is even remotely sensible.
Yeah...pay for every page. If you want to go ahead - subscribe to web sites that you want to pay for. But don't think you're going to involve me or my credit card in this moronic scheme.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
would be one in which companies pay us, the readers, $0.01 per page view. Without us, who would read their articles and view their pages? That way, horrible writers can still have an audience.
Then evry Tom, Dick and Harry would create stupid websites and get them up in a hurry just to get payed! I mean imagine all the crap that would be on the net! Oh, wait, that already happen..... Dumbest Website Ever
x/0=x
So what denomination would we use? Would this also be taxed since this sort of transaction would technically fall under the realm of "purchasable product"?
grep >= ! == $your
This is an excellent point. However, this assumes that we need a central server that requires tons of bandwith to support a community of users.
Not so. There are many distributed systems where the cost of bandwidth and computers is shared by its users. Usenet was an early example, something like Freenet is a more modern example.
We can use the computers in our homes to build communities that are not based on the central server/web idea. Then the cost is shared among the users and for each person the cost is reasonable. We each pay for the bandwith ($30 month for cable modem) and we provide our own "content".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This would be great for promoting new effcient files formats. You use a plug-in to be able to serve up smaller files and when I also enable that plug-in my bill for visiting your site goes down.
I hate people like this... they can make private theories all they want but when they start to get in the way of the common good I object. To me the full potential of the web is the way almost anybody who can write rudimentary HTML tags in an editor and afford dialup can put out a web page for the world to see. It doesn't scale so the whole world literally isn't going to be seeing it, but so what?
I'm glad there's a lot of other people who won't put up with this nonsense, because I consider it a very hostile, sociopathic thing- to define all of life only in terms of its business model and whether it turns a profit. I realise there are people who think like that- but keep their hands off the controls please!
Answer: No.
Reasons: (and proposal at the end)
1. It is too expensive for almost all pages anyway.
2. Variable pricing needed to make business sense i.e. to reimburse authors and copyright holders. Maybe a penny per page is an acceptable way to initially calculate a subscription to a newspaper or magazine, but there is no reason to require integer rates, nor is does it make sense to assume national currency. Currency fluctuations are another ball of wax.
3. Bizarre to hear "per page" when we are getting into the broadband (per play) and wireless (opportunity cost) era.. obsolete scheme.
4. The Net does not belong to America, or to mega-corporations, or to marketing weenies. Almost any price that makes sense to its promoters is an unacceptable high fee and restraint on trade to other countries' citizens.
5. Makes it impossible to practically run a new search engine, indexing/mapping service, or Sherlock session without requiring the accretion of yet more information and business schemes. You can't scan pages automatically without downloading them. So forget intelligent use of Perl's LWP, or unix's wget, or CGI, or mirroring software. Google.com may be the only ones to survive if they sign lots of contracts allowing them to search sites, and nobody will be able to create a competitor.
6. Redefining the terms client and server based on relative upstream-downstream position ignores realities of computing and networking, and is a transparent attempt by business people to put one over on consumers. PC software can be client, server or both, and the idea of "downstream" only has meaning within the context of a passively received service. Packets flow both ways, and any host can be the root server of its own private network or VPN. If we are talking about "per page" in particular your IP address has nothing to do with whether you are buying or selling.
7. The easiest way to get money from consumers for online services is to embed it in a utility bill they are already paying every month. The idea of giving local ISPs, phone, or cable companies political power (defining upstream-downstream and client-server based on their position on the end of the 24x7 network) on top of the money they will make as a percentage of such a monthly commercial services fee is unacceptable, irresponsible, and also impossible to support as that ISP would have to provide reasonable alternatives to all content on the Net. The result of ISP-controlled topology is uncompetitive pricing for stagnant content offerings.
8. "Penny-per-page" is bigotry of port 80 and seems to imply that only a web browser software package could participate. What we need is a way to pay for generic data, whether it is a web page, an encrypted key, or code controlling a live operation, and not implicitly bind that payment scheme to how the data gets into your hands.
Conclusion:
This is a good way to destroy the Internet. So long global mind. Bye-bye third-world education. Goodbye Free Software, Free Services, Privacy, and Hello Microsoft Passport.
A good example of a service that is a runaway success is NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode. A no-brainer, unimpressive service, it's just a menu of sites.
But as it happens, they are also the phone company and when you buy your i-Mode phone, you agree to
i-Mode fees. All they have to do is provide links to content within a framework that you already understand is commercial.
The reason this exists is that NTT worked very, very hard as the nation's phone monopoly to kill the Internet for a very long time (I know, I started an ISP in '94 - one of the first few in Japan), and these moneys were spent on opening up the wireless market in an unsophisticated marketplace.
What happened is, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, i-Mode is huge, and the company is the only success story in Japanese business today. The person who started the service admits it was totally luck, but now they have leveraged themselves into the one e-commerce portal in Japan. Nobody else is doing much (except kiosks now in convenience stores, which I was involved in building). At the moment one very interesting service is selling games for Java phones, which lets you download a selection of arcade games into your applet folder in your phone for 300 yen (under $3) per month.
The rest of the world can be more sophisticated. ISPs, cable, credit card, and other companies have a good location - not with regard to the packet stream, but with regard to the stream of bills they send you. These companies could provide a unified, undifferentiated line item that is your net wallet. There is no reason for the entire network to be balkanized, or for arbitrary metrics such data size, session length, or time of day in a given time zone, or exchange rate in a given bank to hold sway.
Of course if individuals can hold their own electronic money certificates then wallet software on the pc is useful. But consumer pcs are generally a dangerous place to put money; they crash and so on.
The one service that is absolutely necessary is a central payments server which will provide a single point of billing for the consumer while signing electronic invoices for commercial content with every content provider. Possibly "1 cent per page" might be one of the payment schemes this server could support, but it would be unnatural for this "automated wallet proxy" to decide how much content is worth. Whether the product is a newspaper, a song, a long distance call, or a day at the library, the company selling the product should be able to set its own fees (or choose to be free) on an otherwise free network.
It seems very likely (I do not have inside information to support this idea though) that DoCoMo's work to enter the N. American market will be to set up a similarly billed i-Mode service. There is not a lot of time left if you want to design your own future.
did ya actually look at the page? at the top is Category: Arts > Literature > World Literature > British > Shakespeare > Works
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I was actually playing around with the idea of making my own public internet terminal a while back. I made several different prototypes all with the focus of being truly O/S independant by making the payment systems in hardware.
The first model had a trackball, with the mouse button wired to a coinchute for the penny per page model.
The second model used a relay, KVM switch, a coin chute, and an accumulative timer I bought from happ controls. The relay would switch between buttons on the KVM, and would hold the button down depending on how much money was inserted. It's default position had nothing hooked up (no KB or mouse)
Point is this though, unless that penny is paying for my terminal and connection, no way in hell i'm going to do penny per page. I can see myself sitting in a bar, paying a penny per porn instead of playing the touchmania machines.
Ok maybe this comment wasn't that funny insightful or flame, thanks for passing by it though.
..Slashdot? Yep, a page is worth much more than a penny.
Would I pay for.. Microsoft.com for those evil IE updates so that I can read DirectX documentation? Less fun.
Would I pay for any personal page? No.
For those who think they already pay their ISP for surfing, sod off. In every sophisticated country we pay for the phone line and extra for talking. It's only fair to pay for what you use. Still, only a portion of them can be charged and that must be indicated clearly before "logging on".
Whee, a good system like this could save us all from those stupid "free tours"; it could be simply "first time for free". Anyhoo, pay per click is better than first $XXX and then see if you still want to click.
"[3] Charge accounting would most likely be done by uour ISP who -already- has your credit into."
You have to be kidding. The ISP's including the one I work for would simply say you want to be paid you bill the user yourself. We do not want the hassle, extra workload, and overhead needed to implement a system of this nature.
There are many problems with the "Automatic billing" payment system. Many businesses have noticed unrequested and unauthorized charges on their phone bills by "Directory publishers" who decided on their own that the business wanted them to publish a listing for anywhere up to 1000$+ You would have the same type of problems with unethical websites billing for supposed page views.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
did ya actually look at the page?
What do you mean "the page"? The Google Web Directory entry you dug up? No. I don't use their "Web Directory." I have a bookmark on Google's Advanced Search and I type text in there. You obviously want some pre-packaged, AOL/Yahoo-like, tree-structured, pre-digested, categorized listing. I wanted to search for every occurence of the phrase "to be or not to be" and find out how many times it was used on the web. Your link did not provide that information. The Web Directory is for clueless people. Here's Google's own description of it:
While Google's regular web search is likely the fastest way to find information on a specific subject, the Google directory is particularly useful when you're not sure how to narrow your search from a broad category.
If you're going to be a smartass, you need to be better at it.
As a general thing, I'm against a pay-per-page model. As others have said, it's too open to abuse via script fu and layout (want to bet that, if pay-per-page becomes popular, you'll never see a vertical scroll bar on a web site again?).
Besides which, I already pay monthly subscriptions for a number of premium sites. Maybe some months I'd be saving money on a per-page billing system, and other months I'd be spending more. But under a subscription system, there's no way I can accidentally blow my rent money surfing a pay site - there's one single discreet financial hit, and that covers me for the month.
Of course, it's my conviction that most web sites aren't even worth the oxygen their creators consumed while building them, let alone a cash payment. Those less misantrophic may have another opinion.
It comes up when you do a search it show relevant items in the directory and you know what I will take my info any way I can if it is the right stuff I don't not use something that can give me what im looking for cause of my biases. I use win2k pro cause its good for administration of win2k servers which exist in the real world and you know what else I have hummingbird and telnet and ssh for the Linux boxes the right tool for the job if yahoo's pre packaged stuff will work and google come up with nothing than that's -1 for google
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
It comes up when you do a search
But not if you use the Advanced Search -- where you can easily enter a phrase. Try it and see.
I will take my info any way I can if it is the right stuff
But it wasn't "the right stuff". I wanted a count of how many times the phrase "to be or not to be" occurred on Google-indexed web pages. What you provided was information about Shakespeare -- hardly the same thing.
According to Google's own FAQ, "The Google directory contains over 1.5 million URLs." BFD. The regular Google search has over 100 times that many. And that's why it's almost always the right tool for the job.
i was looking for Shakespeare references
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.