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.

Comments

But would we...

[weslocke]

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!

;^)

Re:But would we...

[arkanes]

From a technical point of view, how do you tell the difference between a GET that was fired because the user clicked on a link and one that was fired because Javascript told the browser to do so? Or better yet, because Javascript fired off an onClick() event?
This sounds more like PHB requirement - "Oh, and it needs to have ponies. People like ponies."

Re:But would we...

[sphealey]

The billing mechanism should track for and eliminate charges for that, as well as for pages that auto-refresh themselves, error and non-existant pages, pages arrived at by pressing the back button, duplicate pages and so on."

Alas, not so easy. Even legitimate web site designers have spent the last 6 months figuring out ways to increase their number of pages loaded. Take a look at infoworld.com: once one of the most usable technical sites on the web, now a page-hit monstrosity. Yet all of the clicks required to navigate the site are "legitimate", in the sense that they aren't designed solely with the purpose of forcing a click. Deviously, yes, but solely, no.

sPh

Re:But would we...

[ichimunki]

Well, okay. I kept an open mind for at least a little while on this. I took your criticism to heart and tried clicking the link. What a waste of time that was-- it appears my internal BS filter is still working fine. After refusing four cookies from the linked site I get an article entitled "How Penny Per Page Might Work". This isn't a good title for a technical proposal. Thankfully, it's not a technical paper at all, it's just a bunch of hot air.

It's a solution in search of a problem. The author makes a weak attempt to convince us there is a problem with the economics of the web. Well, frankly, there is no problem. So far a bunch of overpaid pseudo-techies have shown amazing skill at draining venture capital into advertising and corporate perk buckets and applied almost no real business know-how to the problem at hand. This article falls clearly into the "imminent death of internet predicted" category.

Need I continue to criticize this proposed utopia and the numerous things the author failed to take into account? I mean, he didn't even consider that for traditional news sources the web is a godsend in terms of being able to track which pieces add value to the publication. Even if a local newspaper ends up entirely online (not likely) in the next couple of years, they have better information on their customers' reading habits than ever before in life! I would expect this to translate to huge savings in terms of how to report, what to syndicate, etc. And in time, those online versions of real world publications will probably go to subscription models, many already have. Many others have already gone to a pay-per-view model on archives.

This ain't rocket science, it's web design and basic business management. Yet you want me to read 8 pages of fluff about it before I'm allowed to have an opinion on the proposal? This proposal contains a few pie in the sky suggestions and a couple of sketchy illustrations-- but none of it is even necessary without a more demonstrative proof of the assertion that the web is broken and needs fixing!

This writer didn't even take into account that any business relying on page views for revenue is going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forecast page views in order to maintain budgets. How better to drain the resource pool at a company than to introduce such an incredibly random factor into the most important element of the revenue equation.

Shall I continue, or will you, the ever-savvy article reader and close-minded dismisser of the SLASHMOD, remain unswayed by my arguments against this proposed scheme? Would you care to find the rest of the posts I've made on this topic and counter my objections to the "penny-per-page" proposal?

What's a page?

[Asahi Super Dry]

With dynamic server-side page generation, how do you determine exactly what a "page" is?

Re:What's a page?

[pos]

Especially with search engines in the state they are, I might hit two dozens pages trying to find what I'm really searching for. I have no problem paying for the information I want, but I'd be annoyed at paying for content I don't want simply because they haven't indexed it properly.

As Clay Shirky pointed out, not to mention the fact that you are adding another thing to think about. Another decision to make every time you reach for an href link.

The web is alredy too costly from a user GUI standpoint in that every link you click wastes about 5 seconds (YMMV) of your life. That's the real reason people hate sites that split their stories up into pages. The last thing that will fly is adding another thing to consider every time you click a link.

The only way it would work is by offsetting all of these "costs" with something. I think only "Damned good content" would work, and since this is the internet we're talking about here, for most sites it simply will not fly.

-pos

Re:What's a page?

[jmccay]

Not only that, but what if you hit the back button that goes to a server-side page that was generated on the fly, but you had already visited?

I don't like the idea of paying anying on a per page basis. I pay my ISP already. I don't want to pay for evey page access. I also don't want to pay for those stupid pop-ups!

What about you public computers--such as those cyber cafes? How would you insure that someone else doesn't use your acount information? What about the poor who might not be able to afford these things? There is too many possible problems. This is just another reason for companies to steal more money from consumors.

Mirrors?

[Procrasti]

So, the website gets 1 penny from the mirror operator? That's what I call Return on Investment!!

A navigation nightmare

[TreyHarris]

If people are compensated for the number of pages visited on their site, the current tendency to split information into multiple pages will get much, much worse.

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.

Pay per view

[Contact]

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.

Penny per page = nuts

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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...

What exactly is a "page"?

[pointym5]

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.

Caching...

[BMonger]

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.

No more google...

[XaXXon]

©2001 Google - Searching 1,610,476,000 web pages
* .01 = $16,104,760 .. for EACH refresh of their current database.

That's REALLY expensive

[MxTxL]

I don't know if i'm a typical net surfer, but i imagine I go through probably 500 or more page views a day. That's probably on the high side.... let's say it were just 200.... that's 2 dollars a day. Doesn't sound like much, but in a month that's $60 bucks. That may not sound like much, but think... if your dial-up ISP charged that much, you'd tell them to piss off. If your cable ISP charged that much, it would be on the pricey side (though not entirely unreasonable) now if this price were on top of ISP fees... well, that makes it difficult for the working underclasses (me included) to afford being on the net.

Hell no on that idea!

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[dead sun]

I have to say that I agree on that matter. Not to mention, who is going to do the administrative overhead of figuring out who to charge for what page access and where to send the bill. A hundred seperate 5 cent charges to a credit card? Yeah right, it costs the businesses more than that to place a credit card charge, which is why most places won't accept credit cards unless you spend 5-10 dollars. And if there's a central agency they're going to want their cut. I think the whole idea stinks.

And don't even go down the road of how I could spoof a frame from a large company to my own website, showing that I have a request a second from say, GE or something. The potential for dishonesty is just as frightening. And then where do you go to dispute charges, and are you willing to dispute 10 or so of these to a largely ineffectual body every single month? I didn't think so.

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[pagsz]

Actually, the article mentioned the possiblity of a price cap. Here's the quote from the article, from the Q & A section:

People in the U.S. tend to prefer a flat-rate model to a pay-per-unit model. Could there be a flat-rate model with penny per page?
Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month. If they looked at less than 2,000, they would pay only for the pages viewed. 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.

While it was put in context of the preference for a flat-rate, it could aslo prevent people from running up insane charges each month.

Thank you for wasting your time by reading this comment,

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[killmenow]

How about this for expensive:

According to my squid logs, our office generates on average 5000 page hits per day. Considering it will not cache any asp, php, cgi, perl, python, etc. page as well as any page with the no-cache headers, the effectiveness at limiting actual page reads goes way down. So, we average 26% cache hit rate.

That means at this site alone (we have three others) we are actually loading an average of 3700 pages per day. At $.01 each page, that's $37/day, $185/week, $9620/yr for one site.

In other words: No, I won't pay $.01 per page for Internet content.

Besides, what is it with this freaking push for paying for content?! But for a few "premium" channels, TV doesn't work that way. Time and time again, people have shown their unwillingness to buy into these plans. People are willing to pay for ACCESS, not CONTENT. I don't pay $.01 per song I listen to on my radio...I don't pay $.01 per show I watch on TV...so why would I even begin to think paying $.01 every time I read the reg is acceptable?

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[Hobbex]

Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month.

This is not implementable - if it were implemented, people would clearly just run proxies to pool everybody's requests through a single machine (not to mention that it is impossible to enforce a single machine per identity to begin with without going for sinister methods).

This is typical of the sort of, not just technically, but logically flawed ideas that always come out of these pointless pipedreams not motivated by reality but what people NEED or DESERVE. If any solutions to the actual problems are to come around, then they need to start with the realities of cyberspace, which the penny-per-page idea clearly does not.

The first reality of cyberspace is that you do not pay for information. Information, once created, can be copied infinitely, so generally available copies have no value - regardless of the emotionally motivated arguments about what creaters NEED or DESERVE. 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.

The second reality is that there is no possible mapping between identity in cyberspace and identity in real life. A single person can be present as a hundred identities, and single identity can represent a hundred people. Any sort of model that includes ideas about any action "per person" is doomed, as is any model that gives an identity negative trust (that is one where an identity can be treated worse then a previously unknown one).

The third reality is that all information is equal. If a model measures information in any other unit then bits it is stupid - because one off units like "pages" mean nothing about the actual contents or the the cost of transfer. It is short sited and ends up relying on user hostile (read evil) software to enforce that "page" means the accepted norm.

However, that is not to say that the problems facing the web are not real. It did not bother me when pages paying millions for content creation folded - paying for content creation hoping to control the information is stupid, so those pages (like the music and film industries) deserved to fall. However, what we are seeing now is the Web reaching the point where pages like this one are folding under their own popularity - because even though they have no costs for creating the content, they are unable to pay for the service of providing the page - that is a real problem.

Everybody who has ever sent an SMS (cell phone short message) or made a local call in Europe knows about overcharging networks. The costs are set not by the actual costs of transfer, but rather by what the companies controlling the networks (usually oligopolies) find they are able to charge people. That is ridiculous and destructive - but it seems that the Internet is the opposite - an undercharging network.

The simple truth is that we should be paying when we visit a website - not for the content - you DO NOT pay for content - but for the cost of transfer. It is unfair and unrealistic that a large part of the cost of transfer should fall on the publisher, rather than the person who benefits from the transfer.

Systems that do not reflect economic realities are dangerous. While the idea of paying a charge on every single IP package routed sounds like a nightmare to many Internet anarchists - the truth is that the fact that we are not paying is gearing up to be a real threat to free speech online since community run services are seizing to be sustainable. The price should be fair, and much lower than then the penny-per-page proposed above, at least for most definitions of "page" (server transfer costs seem between $.001 and $.01 per Megabyte at the moment) - but I fear for the future of the Web, and the net at large, if it does not come about.

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[rela]

Systems that do not reflect economic realities are dangerous. While the idea of paying a charge on every single IP package routed sounds like a nightmare to many Internet anarchists - the truth is that the fact that we are not paying is gearing up to be a real threat to free speech online since community run services are seizing to be sustainable.

Cough cough. Sorry but free speech doesn't mean that we have to PAY YOU to speak or even that we have to listen at all. It simply means that you won't be prevented from going about speaking if you so wish. Social freedom != free bandwidth.

The price should be fair, and much lower than then the penny-per-page proposed above, at least for most definitions of "page" (server transfer costs seem between $.001 and $.01 per Megabyte at the moment) - but I fear for the future of the Web, and the net at large, if it does not come about.

Oh, you -fear-. Okay, I'm suitably caught up in the crisis emotion now and willing to open my wallet, especially to keep afloat such QUALITY sites like goastse.cx, Alli's busy world, The I Hate Myself Poem and Diary, and the home page of everyone's favorite band FuckYou(TM), etc...

I'm sure I'll be moderated as a flame or something, but ask a stupid question, expect a sarcastic answer.

As far as 'economic realities', you're obviously ignorant of one: This would cost a ton to implement, and no one would want to play along and pay a flat rate for content of, well, let's say VARIED worth.

I would suggest making donations to free sites that are struggling might be a better idea. I have (*GASP*) actually done this myself, as I feel that someone that goes to alot of effort to create good content because they WANT TO morally deserves payment.

Okay, I'm dragging on here. Here's a summary:

Nice idea, but nobody's going to play along.

What about caching serves?

[4444444]

I fpages are cached how do they get payed?

No.

[Snowfox]

No. I wouldn't pay a penny per page so long as similar material was out there for free. And I would go out of my way to look for free material under a penny-a-page payment model.

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.

Re:No.

[Uruk]

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

I agree with your points about how companies would segment articles to make you pay more, but at the same time, I don't think this idea would work either. What if you're mirroring an FTP site - should you pay $0.05 for sucking down 4GB of data in a day while the loser who just wanted to buy a t-shirt from the online site pays the same?

Also the larger problem is that both of these ideas, (yours and the penny-per-page thing) are too web/HTML centric. Is a 5MB shockwave file a page? 10 pages? What about mirroring an FTP site? What about embedded audio in a page? What about downloading trial software?

My guess is that if any micropayment system is put in place, a lot of content will start to migrate away from the web to other formats. (NNTP, Gopher, FTP, whatever - just something free as in beer) After all, Web != Internet

Refreshing? Visiting Again?

[frankrachel]

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?

Penny-a-page equals bye bye Google?

[Snowfox]

What does penny-a-page do to spider searches?

It would be too costly for Google and friends to index a site which demanded a penny for each page read.

One problem, and a quote...

[weslocke]

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.

Won't work

[Masem]

If I was charged a penny a page for a physical medium item like a newspaper or magazine, I know that 1) there would be no physical problems in delivering that page to me and 2) I can use that page over and over again.

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.

not a good business plan

[Anonymous Coward]

most days you couldnt pay me to visit slashdot.

OK, may not sound like much but....

[brunes69]

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.

Cripples universal access

[DullTrev]

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?

two issues

[asv108]

One characteristic of the Internet that was not mentioned in the article is competition.

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.

How did this get posted?

[Carnage4Life]

I was very interested in seeing how anyone would come up with a Micropayment proposal that would have all the problems of previous proposals, well if you havent read the article don't bother there's nothing of worth in it.

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:

1. How exactly will websites bill you a penny per page? Who will handle transactions so small because credit card companies and banks don't seem interested.
   
   
2. What about frequently visited sites? Slashdot probably generates a hundred pages a day for me considering I check it every hour, read comments and check my user history for replies to my comments. Between Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News there are probably another hundred hits. Using a penny-a-day I'm paying 2 websites $30 a month.
   
   
3. How will a person's web usage be metered for billing all across the internet without some sort of extensive and intrusive user monitoring?
   
   
4. A penny per page would be expensive for people in third world countries?
   
   
5. How exactly are people who browse from internet kiosks or libraries supposed to be billed? Are websites supposed to now have front pages that lock you out until you enter your credit card number or must everyone who uses the 'net sign up with a central authority before being able to browse the web?
   
   
6. How exactly do they expect the top 1000 websites to form a coalition?
   

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.

All the web is supposed to be good for is money?

[Philbert Desenex]

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.

What if the WWW just reverted?

[Lurkingrue]

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.

It would lead to the next RIAA/MPAA

[eyeball]

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.

Eastern Europe Perspective

[kptBlaha]

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.

Re:Eastern Europe Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Web completely changed my world because giving me information freely
The web gave you nothing. People chose to put information on the web and make it available. Those same people could have chose not to do so. Those people gave you that information. The web facilitated that. This is the point of the internet!!

The status quo works fine. All those people clammoring for new laws (UCITA, DMCA) and new schemes like this are just lazy. They want to put everything right in your face, and put their hands in your pocket at the same time. Well, as Ben Franklin was fond of saying, "You can't have it both ways." Put your content on the *free* internet, or don't. If you want to make a buck, then sell something.

Note: if you read this comment you will automatically be debited for $0.02 (USD).

Re:All the web is supposed to be good for is money

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Re:This sounds like a completely dumb idea.

[beebware]

No Google would probably go bust.
Why? Okay, don't forget we will be paying 1p per page, but so would Google to index the sites. People only go to Google because it's fast (it'll be even faster with more income), it's comprehensive and it's up to date - if it's going to cost google 1p per page to index sites - I can't see them really jumping to be the biggest search engine at the cost.

x10.com generates more revenue than Microsoft...

[fmaxwell]

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.

Oops, it won't work

[broller]

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.

Issue #3

[schon]

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.

Killing exploration

[frank_adrian314159]

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.