Would You Pay A Penny Per Page?

nebby writes "How Stuff Works is running an article regarding the "penny per page" model for web site compensation. It sounds like a very viable solution, being simple to understand, transparent to use, and fair to the webmasters and users involved. The only downside to it is that it would require a massive effort on the part of web sites, standards bodies, and/or ISPs to switch over. I know that methods of online payment have been brought up before, but in searching on Google I found no information about any groups or companies looking seriously into moving to this model. I was wondering if any such groups or initiatives have been put together, and if not, why not? :) It doesn't take much to imagine the possibilities of what the web could become if this were put in place ..." Penny-per-page actually sounds like one of the better micropayment ideas I've heard, but is just as vaporous as any of the others so far.

Comments

But would we...

[weslocke]

Have to pay a penny everytime we get into one of those damned porn sponsored click-fests of opening windows?!

Aggghhh... my credit card bill's high enough already!

;^)

What's a page?

[Asahi Super Dry]

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

A navigation nightmare

[TreyHarris]

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

I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.

Caching...

[BMonger]

I'm not down with web servers and ISP's but I would think it would be good for an ISP to cache common url's that people goto (i.e. msn.com for people that don't know how to change their default start page). So if my ISP is caching msn.com and I go to msn.com but never use msn's web servers then who gets the money? My ISP or msn? MSN made the page but my ISP is "hosting" the page.

That's REALLY expensive

[MxTxL]

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

Hell no on that idea!

Re:That's REALLY expensive

[Hobbex]

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

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

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

The first reality of cyberspace is that you do not pay for information. Information, once created, can be copied infinitely, so generally available copies have no value - regardless of the emotionally motivated arguments about what creaters NEED or DESERVE. If one is working on a solution for getting people to pay for information online, then one can be sure one's solution is broken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

[Snowfox]

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

Call me a pessimist, but my belief is that businesses are incapable of handling this kind of thing responsibly. The moment we go to penny-per-page, we'll start to see things artificially segmented across a dozen pages, and all kind of fluff and noise between the front page and any useful pages.

Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested.

One problem, and a quote...

[weslocke]

It's also not going to add up to very much per month. People who log on to check stock prices, look up the weather, read the top news stories and so on might look at 25 or 50 pages a day. They would pay something between $5 and $15 per month for Web content. But let's also take the worst case scenario. Let's say that you sat in front of your computer 8 hours a day and looked at a new page every two minutes without interruption 20 days per month. That would cost $48 for the month. That is the worst case scenario, and it is unlikely anyone is going to do that. The cost will be minimal for just about everyone

I just popped through 6 pages in about a minute and a half reading/skimming this article. One page every two minutes? Do people actually read that slowly?

If I'm looking for something, I tend to have two or three browsers open... usually one on Deja that does near constant Usenet searches. Their estimation is about 240 page views per day. Heck, I can almost kill that just on Slashdot within the course of a day.

Won't work

[Masem]

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

In the internet medium, what happens if the routing decides to go south while that page was being delivered, requiring me to reload? What happens if I click a link on that page that took me to some place off site to read more about something, then when going back, the browser was forced to re-request the site again? What if I want to use that page as a reference, bookmarking, but being charged a penny ever time I accessed it?

(Yes, there's ways to bookkeep around all these problems, but I doubt that most sites would figure out all the right nuances).

There's just too many technical problems that can happen that a pay-per-page scheme can work. Instead, if those sites that cannot continue to fund themselves on banner ads should either look into 1) getting a better targetted banner ad provider, just as how /. has done, which will have a much better click-thru rate for your site, or 2) adopt a pay-per-term such as Salon has done for premium content. In the latter case, if your content is that good, you'll thrive (as I understand it, Salon's Premium is doing well, given their good content to start with), but otherwise, you'll flounder (and maybe for good reason).

And in the end, while I don't do it know, a web site with content and delivery like Salon would be worth about the same price as a magazine subscription for a year (eg $30-$40/yr) as long as it's unlimited access to the site.

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

[brunes69]

Take me for example. All thse numbers are being extremely conservative for me.

I'll say I surf an average of 2 hours per day. Thats 120 minutes per day, or 7200 minutes. Now, assume I spend around 30 seconds ona web page before clicking a link to view another (This is a VERY high estimate for me). Thats around 240 page views per day, or $2.40 by this "penny per page" scheme. Thats 72 dollars per month, in addition to my 45 dollars per month for my DSL connection.

And this is being conervative! I can easily name days where I spent upwards of 8 hours online, roughly half of which was viewing web pages. This is much too expensive, I'd never go for it. Maybe 0.25 cents per page is more reasonable.

Cripples universal access

[DullTrev]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the great things about the web the way that information can get all around the globe quickly? Paying a penny a page would be irritating for most of us in the western world, but it could effectively close off huge sections of the web to citizens of developing countries. Say you "normally" view 5 pages a day on each of 4 or 5 sites - if you're living on $5 a day, are you really going to pay 5% of your income to view US news sites, UK informations sites, etc?

charge the spammers!

[Alien54]

Even if someone _could_ make all service providers switch over (not likely) the odds are that the first adopters would get creamed on this.

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.

How did this get posted?

[Carnage4Life]

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

90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.

Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:

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

This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.

No.

[rknop]

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

It would lead to the next RIAA/MPAA

[eyeball]

A hypothetical article from the future on the downfall of the web:

In the beginning it was a penny per page, theoretically to just recover the cost of serving the page. Then a few sites decided their content is worth more, so they charged a few more pennies. Soon pages costed a dollar or more.

Meanwhile thousands of people had already been copying the content to their local disk to view again in the future, or perhaps share with a friend.

Since web sites were finally making a little money, large contect companies began buying them all up. In the end only a handful of companies owned a majority of the contant on the net. Prices rose and rose.. The actual authors were of course being paid only small fractions of a penny.

All of a sudden the price/page hits a certain sweet-spot where the cost is higher than the value, and people start file-swapping pages. The WWWAA (World Wide Web Association of America) was formed to 'protect web page author's rights'. Lobbyists were deployed, campains were launched, laws were passed, and copyright protection mechanisms were put in place and made illegal to circumvent.

F that.

Eastern Europe Perspective

[kptBlaha]

I live in Eastern Europe. My income is about $400 per month which is above average in this country. I have a university degree and am not stupid or lazy. I just live in a poor part of world. I cannot afford to buy any western books or subscribe to any magazines. Web is the only source of information that I have. Web completely changed my world because giving me information freely. I am extremely afraid that someday such scheme will be adopted.