Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
What if your browser sent the site a cryptographically signed token consisting of the URL, a timestamp, a serial number, and your PayPal (insert random payment service of choice) account number.
The site would forward all the tokens on to the payment service for re-imbursement. Duplicate serial numbers or incorrect signatures would not be honoured and you could peruse your bill and refute any fraudulent claims that did somehow get through.
I think this is quite feasible technically. That doesn't mean it would succeed in the market.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
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
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"
I agree. I doubt that anyone could get away with/ make a profit from, charging for every page downloaded, what about the front page for example? Would you go to a site where you had to pay just to discover if it had any content worth reading? Especially if it could create a huge number of pop up windows to send your bill through the roof and create distrust for all new websites?
/.
I also think the penny a page is rather expensive, it only costs 2p a MB for transfers over the atlantic link so a 100k page should only be about at 1/10th of a penny in transport costs which you've already paid most of with your ISP.
I agree the subscription model looks the best idea, possibly with lite, regular and heavy user rates e.g. 10/100/unlimited articles each month. This would solve both parties problems in having a worthwhile revenue stream and limiting costs. `I think its getting to the stage where the old timers have sites that they would be prepared to pay for the content from and allow providers to invest in improving links etc. My personal votes go for BBC News, Dilbert &
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
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
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?
Ok, I make a joke and keep getting jumped on for it.
/.'ed, so I can't go back and check.)
But let me ask you this, since apparently I'm in a position to defend a damned joke, if you click a link that takes you to a site (There's one penny), then that site opens a new browser and takes you to http://www.teensluts.com (there's another), that one opens a browser to http://www.eurosluts.com (there's another), etc, etc...
Yes, popups are accounted for. But how would they know that these aren't valid choices that I make? Are they going to credit me for every page that I go to and don't go past the 'Main Page' of? Or will they just have a 'Blacklist' that I can surf for free since they'll think it's all just spam windows?
I read over the article, and don't remember anything covering this in particular. (However now the link is of course
So therefore, I stand by my joke (which at the time was only meant to be humorous) as also being topical and relevant to the discussion.
IE. bite me.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
What I am afraid of is abuse on a massive scale. You think those ad pop ups are annoying now? All you need is a java loop to re-open your page a hundred times and BANG...you're out a buck.
what kind of preventative measures are going to assusre this doesn't happen???
Getting around quickly...hmmmm...
Unless a person wanted to go through a payment form to pay their $0.01 per page, (and of course each page of the payment form would cost another $0.01) these payments would have to be done automagically with credit cards, cookies, etc.
This penny/page idea seems to be suggesting that we all enable cookies and give our financial information to every single site that we visit. Because how else are we going to pay them? The mechnanics of getting the money from me to them means that I'm going to have to give up a lot of my privacy, and that's unacceptable.
I know it's getting hard to surf anonymously these days, but why are people so hell-bent to make it utterly impossible?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Kiddies? Stop being such a fucking prig, okay? Discussions are easier to have when you don't respond to obvious humor with name-calling and condescension.
There are very real technical objections to this plan from the sound of it. And frankly I'll bet you any system you set up I can build either clients or servers that subvert it. Will I lose my access? Maybe. Will I find a different way to obtain access. Probably. Look at how hard we've all been going after spammers, are they gone?
Unless they've got a whole new protocol that works nothing like HTTP(S) I can't even conceive of a way to account for page views as a fee determinant that isn't likely to lead to whole host of technical matters, fraud concerns, and probable privacy violations. Not to mention that most sites would require a complete overhaul because under any scheme you can concoct they are either generating way too many pages (splitting articles) or not enough (masking most of the activity in POSTed form fields).
As for the articles, I don't like to spend the time to read every freaking article that Slashdot posts. 50% of them are either too short to be informative or too involved to be useful in a reasonable amount of time. All I need in this case is to hear "penny a page" and I've pretty much got my opinion (based on stuff I already know)-- and it is very likely that some erstwhile Slashdotter is going to post a good summary or highly relevant insightful information as part of the discussion. So if there is information I need to know, I'm likely to get it right here at Slashdot.
I do not have a signature
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 :-).
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."
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.
Don't worry my friend, this is not likely to happen. It's what some of the content driven sites would like to see happen, but it's a pie-in-the-sky type of dream.
The reason for this is quite simple, web site owners do not have a direct billing relationship with their customers. Web site owners can wish that they could wave their magic wands and get the ISPs to bill their customers for them, but it isn't likely to happen. And if it did happen the bulk of the money raised wouldn't go to the web sites and the content creators, it would go to the ISPs. Many ISPs like AOL or MSN host "special" proprietary content that they use as one of their major draws. As far as they are concerned useful public websites are bad for their bottom line. After all, why pay a premium for AOL and their content when all of the good stuff is on the web for free.
If the ISPs did build such a thing then web sites would "sign up" for this ISP built billing monstrosity, and the ISP would retain 90% of the monies generated. These web sites would also probably not be available to the customers from other ISPs. That would leave the content creators with the same dilemna that they face today. Either they can sign on with the publishing company and get 10% of the proceeds from a smaller market, or give content away and live off what they can make advertising to a broader market.
The beautty of the web is that it allows normal people the opportunity to publish information to a very large audience at a very reasonable price. For a lot of people that is precisely what they want.
Many webmasters with popular sites would love to be able to charge serious money (and believe me, a penny a page is serious money, I make considerably more than you do, but I wouldn't spend much time on a web site that charged a penny a page), but by doing so they are completely overlooking how it was that they became popular. These sites became popular because they were free. For pay sites have largely failed. The only exceptions are those sites that allow someone to access critical information that is even more expensive via other means, and even these sites have not reached any kind of broad appeal.
As an example, if Slashdot became a subscription only site it wouldn't be too long before most of Slashdot's users migrated to some other site. There is plenty of competition in this space. And creating a Slashdot clone (even without the Slash source code) would be a fairly trivial undertaking. After all, the original Slashdot was written as a computer science student's hobby. Sure, Slashdot is bigger now, but there is also a lot more software available that has nearly the same features as Slashdot. Scoop, Squishdot, PHPNuke, Fingerless, and a whole host of other software products fit this niche nicely.
Information, especially news, has become a commodity. People that base their business on selling a commodity, whether they are farmers or webmasters, have to learn to live within the profit margins that the public is willing to pay. After all, they can't really raise the price. There are always others who are willing to accept less. If webmasters can't get by with advertising returns, then they had better think about cutting costs (or they had better leverage their popularity into some other money generating venue).
The good news, for sites like Slashdot, is that they allow advertisers to sell their wares to a very precise audience. I have found that nearly all of Slashdot's advertisements are at least somewhat interesting to me, and I have actually clicked on their "advertisers" link several times looking for a particular ad that I had seen earlier. That sort of targetted advertising, especially to a large audience, is worth quite a bit of money, and eventually the advertising agencies will realize this. Heck, here in the United States magazines like Computerworld and Infoworld (and a whole host of others) are given away to anyone that has even the slightest connection with Information Systems. If advertisers can pay enough so that the publishers can go to the expense of delivering paper based magazines, then they definitely can pay enough to support a popular web site.
Eventually good sites with large audiences (especially targetted audiences like here on Slashdot) will be able to pay for themselves and even return a bit of a profit. And smaller sites cost so little that there is little need to justify them. There are several sites that I visit regularly that are hosted on DSL lines. These folks don't need a penny per page view to pay their overhead.
So don't worry, economics are on your side.