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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'
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'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
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.
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?
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.
©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!
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.
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 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.
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:
-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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Can you say 'I have been Trolled' ?
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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
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!
Would "warez" sites start mirroring pay sites?
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 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.
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 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.
No silver bullet, just a bagful of clips.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
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).
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.
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
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}
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.
But that's for toilet paper.
That stuff's expensive. Maybe I should diet or something...
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.....
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.
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.
Exactly! Look, at doodie for example. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay a penny to look at that page.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I hit refresh on the Slashdot URL a few times an hour just to see what is new.
Read & Think before you post. It's only polite.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
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
Well, that is one of the inconveniences something like Passport was supposed to help. (I'm saying something like because I certainly won't trust my data to any company with a security record like Microsoft's).
Yes, you'll have to register. Just like you register on many web sites now. Slashdot for example. So even without a central login system, there's not really any additional effort required.
"Then you have the additional issue of whether the page site is viewable with your particular configuration of browser, monitor, graphics card and OS."
Exactly. And that is why more work needs to be put in many sites. For my hobby sites, I don't really care if IE6 users choke on my HTML or if a little Javascript could make the site more comfortable. For a site where I need customers, I work really hard so that even Netscape 4.x users will have the full benefit. So, a subscribed site will be expected to carry a little more 'polish' than your average hobby site.
Try me. Go to hitchhikers.de and see if you can find a non-buggy, relatively common browser which doesn't display the page correctly. This is a commercial project (not subscription based however) and so I pay attention to the visitor statistics: 50% IE, 40% Netscape (4 and 6), 5% Konqueror, and every browser that is above 1% will work.
Home Page
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...
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.
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 :-).
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
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!
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."
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.
- 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.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.
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.
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...
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/
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. :-)
In a penny-per-page world, google's caching system would probably be outlawed.
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It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
that's a nice idea on the first look, but the question is:
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 $15, it wasn't worth a check, a stamp, an envelope, and the time and effort to combine them.
I'm not a big poster, and my comment will probably not be read by many because the mod will be low, and there are already too many people posting their 0.02$ 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?
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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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
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.
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.
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.
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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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 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 &
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.
"[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.
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.