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Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: News subscription service Scroll, which is yet to launch to consumers but has received the backing of several top publishers, courted another major player today: Mozilla. The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web and subscription-based funding models. As part of the deal, Mozilla said it would test features and product ideas provided by Scroll, which itself has been conducting internal tests with a number of outlets. Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys, Mozilla said.
I won't be joining uo
I am happy to pay a fair price for content, but am unwilling in any scenario to be subjected to invasive advertising. Netflix is a good example of an ad-free subscription based library of video content.
One of the early promises of the Web was micropayments, remember that? It has yet to happen because the cost of a secure financial transaction is simply too high. I think the best answer is subscription aggregators, who provide access to a libraries of content and track which customers are accessing said content. At the end of the month, the subscription aggregator sends a single payment to each content provider, which represents the sum of all accesses that month.
How about some decent ads, that do not look like fake news, targeted on idiots.
"Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys"
Nooooooo!
Does anyone know the new about:config setting to turn this stuff off?
If you're not willing to pay a few cents a day for a website without remuneration, then maybe you shouldn't have a website. Here's the dirty little secret: All the newspapers exist because someone wants their voice to be heard. No, they're not in it for the profit. That's a means to an end, because newspapers aren't damn near free like servers and bandwidth. All the manufacturer web sites exist because that's the cheapest way to support their products, and you don't sell anything without support. Do you really want the blogs and vlogs that only exist because someone wants your money? People are unwilling to pay for the web because there's already more than anyone can consume in a lifetime. The web doesn't need a coin slot.
and you can advertise to me.
cant you all wait for microtransaction in browsers
So I'll flog it again: "Charity Share Brokerage".
The idea is cost recovery and accountability, not massive profit. Wannabe donors would pledge shares, perhaps $10, toward the project proposal. It might be a proposal for new software, for a solution to the problem described in an article, for running a server for the next year, for another article on a related topic, or for something else. Each proposal would be vetted to make sure it's complete. That means a plausible schedule, a realistic budget, committed resources, sufficient testing, and success criteria. When the project gets sufficient donors, then it gets the funds and the CSB will make sure the results are assessed and reported to the donors and the public.
Time to go see if it's worth submitting the idea directly, but I bid Slashdot the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As far as I am concerned, news sites that won't let you use an adblocker but start autoplaying videos obviously don't give a shit about how much their bandwidth or content creation costs...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I got burned by cable television. If I pay, they'll just put ads in anyway.
... as long as they're served from the domain that I'm visiting. Just like print media up until a few years ago, there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements. I'd have no problem with that. I won't submit any of my computers, though, to any of the garbage ad networks out there (Google, Facebook, etc.).
I don't respond to AC's.
Content ratio to price is.
'Micro' transactions suffer much the same. I'll gladly fork over .99-1.99 for a ten year old movie I want to see again. $14.99? No friggin' way. $4.99? Only if I have an incredible Jonesing for it - which I usually don't.
What, like mining cryptocurrency in the browser? If done right (it probably won't), it could be an interesting alternative.
Looking at multiple descriptions of how Scroll will work, they explicitly say the Scroll subscription fee won't cover individual news site paywalls -- you'll also have to have a subscription to the underlying site to get unlimited (or, in some cases, any) articles.
So unless I'm missing something, the only apparent benefit from my $5/month to Scroll is to get ad-free content (and, I suppose, less anti-adblocker cat and mouse).
"The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web"
I can tell you this without any study at all: People like ad-free experiences, period.
"I wish I could see more ads!" said no one ever.
It costs a lot of money to pay those "anonymous sources" that are 100% factually wrong, but hit the narrative the news outlet wants.
Oh wait, they can just make it up and claim there are "anonymous sources" that told them and it doesn't cost anything?
So what is the money needed for? I can get idiots to post fake news stories that fit various narratives all day long on the internet for free. Hell, if I pick a random one it is more likely to be true than anything from the MSM over the last month.
Buzzfeed - Cohen was told by Trump to lie to Congress
Covington - White high school kids should be thrown into wood chippers for attacking an Indian man in DC
Smollett - Attacked by white nationalists anti-gay men in red hats
Give it a break, if you don't want to do journalism, you don't deserve to be paid for it.
Everybody drink, we got a Republican crybaby liar who can't figure out that Fox News is the reason his head is stuck in Vladimir Putin's asshole. He likes the view.
or will they have it secretly installed on their machines, like the "Mr. Robot" promo crap Mozilla pulled?
There's ads on the web? I recall there was a brief flirtation with advertizing on the web back in the early 1990's. I haven't seen any advertizing on the web since.
And why would I want to "subscribe" to a web site, as in pay them money, for nothing? They would have to provide something I wished to buy first, and other than those web sites belonging to companies that sell actual physical things I want to buy, I have not found a single other web site that is worth spending a fraction of a penny on.
That is a bit rich considering most of the web runs on free software, which is vastly more complex than your typical Youtube channel, even the ones which are not just clickbaiting, regurgitating and commenting. No, you're not special because you can talk, sing, dance, draw or write well. The web is full of people like you and they all want their works to be heard and seen. It used to be well known that artists are poor people. The notion that they should be well paid stars is an aberration that is going away. Get used to it. Digital data is infinitely reproducible. You're literally competing against the world, and not just the present, all the greats of the past too. If you don't understand what this means for the price of your work, don't become an artist.
I agree! Only the rich, who can afford to bleed money, should have a voice on the web!
Any of that software still has to be created/mainatained, and that's often done from paid contributions.
I suppose you do your job for free too?
Bleed money like $3 a month for a domain, email and web hosting? Yeah, only the rich can afford that.
I have several web sites. They are free and ad free. I have contributed to the Linux kernel. Didn't get paid. I have published free software and free artwork.
I have experimented with various payment models, but I've come to the conclusion that the small amount of money I could make from those things is worth less to me than making them available in an unencumbered way. I know what I want the web to be, and I am doing my part. The only thing I hate more than ads is affiliate marketing. I just afford the cost. It's negligible
Wow really? That's all a business with thousands/millions of users in traffic has to pay for a domain, email and web hosting? Just $3?
Any of that software still has to be created/mainatained, and that's often done from paid contributions.
I suppose you do your job for free too?
Congresswoman AOC pays me NOT TO WORK. YEAH !
Newspapers use both subscriptions and ads, something that is a non-starter for entitled masses commenting here.
People don't want a political gatekeeper between the content they enjoy and their ability to send payments.
No CC brand connected to a political party stopping payments.
No 3rd party payment platform making political connections about who gets users funds.
No payments system that can remove the ability to move funds around.
No secretive banking system to shutdown bank accounts due to politics.
People enjoying connecting in a more direct way with the people who create the content they enjoy.
To support content with funds, long term payments, bandwidth.
Make the internet free and open again. For art, history, politics, reviews, news, projects, hobbies, comedy.
Without needing the political approval of a bank, CC company, platform, political party, government, nation, mil, think tank, NGO.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Basically, yes. You can't mindlessly run your ten layers of abstraction with server side scripting on $3/month if you count users/second. You can serve many ten thousands of users a day on cheap shared hosting if you cache properly. For less than you pay for your phone, you can serve a web site to millions of users. A dedicated web server can easily process hundreds of requests per second. Get back to me when you exhaust that capacity.
Yes.
Hosting the website is dirt cheap, yes. Significantly less than maintaining printing presses.
The problem is that the information on that site costs orders of magnitude more to to produce that it does to present. Reporters, editor, et al, need to eat. If you're consuming the material, it would be nice to get paid for it. I'm pretty sure nobody disputes this.
The problem is what is the best means of doing that? For any given website, I may read their articles daily. Or maybe once a month. Or maybe only once a year. How do you charge for something consumed so sporadically? I'm certainly not going to pay a monthly subscription for something that I rarely use.
And because the internet is so democratizing, there are a bajillion different sites available that you can read at any given moment. And because it's all an even playing field, it turns into a Hunger Games style fight for eyeballs and revenue. In addition, the current situation incentivizes organizations to produce content that their perceived audience wants to consume, rather than content that is of actual value. That is how how train wrecks like Info Wars and Brietbart have managed to get such a following despite the fact that the "content" they produce is of such shockingly low quality that their viewers are less informed than people who don't watch/read news at all.
So we have a classic economic situation where supply grossly outstrips demand. And there are no checks and balances to help narrow the available options because people arn't interested in checks and balances. There is literally no solution possible that won't have a bunch of people jumping up and down screaming "censorship!" or "bias!". There is no way to regulate the field without that regulation being perverted by some future party hell bent on autocracy.
Solution? I have no bloody idea. All I know is that the unfettered democratic approach to content creation and news in particular, just isn't working.
So you're saying that nothing but amateurish and redundant entertainment is on the web? That entertainment isn't worth anything at all? That because there already is some good content from the past, we shouldn't support folks who make new content?
And what is it that you do that's worth being paid for, exactly? Is it being part of the Internet's mechanisms that are ultimately funded by ads? If so, you're just as useless as those artists. The only difference is that you feel superior because someone is still willing to pay you for your substandard work.
The only people who have the right to bitch and moan are the ones who don't have time to waste here on Slashdot, because they're out there making a real difference to the world. We're just wasting time between watching those YouTube videos and then calling them useless on an equally-useless forum.
Throughout history, artists have usually been poor. For reference: Carl Spitzweg - Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet). This hasn't stopped people from producing poetry, paintings, music, etc.
Many of the most widely used programs are available for free. Writing software is a very intellectually demanding and tedious task, but the web runs on free software. Why do so many people insist that other contributions to the open web must be monetized or they won't happen?
The socialist governments of Europe pride themselves on regulating television programs. There has to be a certain amount of intellectually valuable programs and movies from European countries. Do you think that's stopping people from watching "talent shows", Bachelor and other crud? If the free availability of many times more quality content than anyone can consume in a lifetime isn't enough to make people choose better content, then asking them pay for that content won't do the trick either. They will still be able to read Info Wars and Breitbart for free, because hosting a web site is dirt cheap.
That's all a business with thousands/millions of users in traffic has to pay for a domain, email and web hosting? Just $3?
He was referring to having a "voice" on the web. It doesn't mean that millions of people, or anyone, will listen to it.
Your websites are a hobby. Your contribution to Linux is a hobby. Your free software is a hobby. Your free artwork is a hobby. It's fine to have hobbies, but what puts food on the table and a roof over your head to support your hobbies?
And what is it that you do that's worth being paid for, exactly? Is it being part of the Internet's mechanisms that are ultimately funded by ads?
Some time ago, I had a conversation about this topic with Slashdot user bingoUV, who recommended that people who can no longer make a living in information publication might try working in a butcher shop.
Which host are you with? I'm currently paying a lot more than that to WebFaction for shared hosting. And do these "hundreds of requests per second" include the video whose play button the user has clicked, or are you considering only text and small images?
there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements.
This works for Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But before you recommend requiring the ad-supported web at large to adopt their business model, please consider the following nothings:
1. A publisher selling ads on its own website has to somehow convince advertisers that the publisher exists in the first place, is worth the advertisers' time, and can detect and not charge for fraudulent page views or clicks. If a web publisher hired you to market the publisher's ad space to advertisers, what steps would you recommend taking to do so?
2. Interest-based advertising pays three times the CPM compared to context-based advertising according to a study by Beales and Eisenach.
I'll gladly fork over .99-1.99
The problem here is that the banks want a flat 0.30 USD for each transaction on top of a percentage of the total. This is true of both credit card transactions and ACH (checking account debit) transactions. This encourages merchants to reduce the percentage of revenue that goes to bank fees by adopting business models that increase the average transaction total. That's why you see monthly or annual subscriptions on news sites instead of pay-per-article.
Requests for static files are very easy to handle, so easy that they're usually handled by reverse proxies before they even hit the web server. Static web sites are very fast even on very cheap or free shared hosting. Most web sites which struggle under heavy load are CPU bound, because web authors use unnecessary server side scripting and don't worry about caching until they see their first surge of traffic. Serving large static files on the other hand tends to be bandwidth limited. You can have Cloudflare cache your site for free or very cheaply. I am currently hosting with several different providers, but if you want one name, I recommend Netcup, a hosting provider in Germany.
I vastly prefer advertisement over subscription. A subscription service is an eldorado for data collectors. (I avoid add blocks because somehow, we need to pay for the content). It is today technically quite easy to fend off the data collectors on websites (if not subscribing) and avoid getting profiled and getting targeted by personized adds but in a subscription this is impossible. I personally would not like that a service keeps track of what, when and from where I read it in which order. If one wants to get away from advertisement, there should be a micro-payment mechanism which allows to do that without having your reading habits ending up in a data base and in a few years sold or worse, just made available (data breaches can happen anytime). It is a good assumption that whatever reading data I produce somewhere as a user of a subscription service will be publicly available sometimes, somewhere or sold. If some subscription service can do that and assure that no personal information is collected, we can talk. There was something nice about good old newspapers and journals as there is something nice about cash: it is not the case that a few data collectors constantly watch the reader over the shoulders or keep track about what you buy. We only start to wake up. The recent data scandals with websites or apps which have been discovered to collect personal information and sellling them without consent were just the tip of the iceberg.
People miss reality because of the bullshit, corporate marketing is end to end psychologically destructive and manipulative bullshit. The internet itself in reality is an advertising platform, people produce the content to demonstrate their skills, products and services, to attract customers. Simply psychopaths are making a mess of it, forcing the worst kind of real medicine side show advertisements, lead by the USA, the Union of Shitty Arseholes, when it comes to their cabal of corrupt corporations, running the joint into the ground.
The idea is for companies, individuals, education facilities and government to put themselves, THEMSELVES, directly forward by creating and putting content online. Selling internet content to sell advertising, is not the bright, those companies should be directly sponsoring content to demonstrate their worth, they used to do it, then psychopathic bean counter took control and said where's the profit (confusing advertising with for profit content) but then spent even more on indirect internet advertising after being scammed by the likes of Google.
If google advertising had any real worth, why are they advertising the shittiest products on the internet, in point of fact, marketing logic is totally ignored, do not advertise your quality products alongside shitty products, because they get a free ride and your products are made too look worse by association. When immediately after you high quality ad, the customer get served a snake oil add for giant erections (makes you bullshit looks as bad as their bullshit) and the is a platform wide affect.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So think Adobe = EXTREMELY EVIL.
Not just data collection, but there should be an option to buy the thing also. I should be able to decide not to have to give up my identity to subscribe to something if I don't want to.
Data Collection = Microsoft = Impressively EVIL. Not just Windows 10, but Office. Yes, Office, requires you to have an unecessary yet evil Microsoft account. When you install Windows, they go through great lengths to NOT encourage you to create a local account. I can't express in words how evil this and other practices are.
It's sad, but my and others I know default stance = Do not trust tech companies.
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
Quite famously, Fox News was owned by Rupert Murdoch (part of the group owned by and under Rupert Murdoch's control, News Corp). So, no: the Fox News you love to hate was not a publicly traded corporation; it was a private corporation owned by a foreign billionaire.
As of this coming June, though, Fox Corporation will be a separate entity (as a result of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney).
It's still pretty much owned by the Murdoch family, though, since they own 39% of the voting power in the corporation, and Murdoch is still at the head (although now sharing power with his son Lachlan).
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
You think it would be a better place if private billionaires owned all the news?
I see no remaining value to old-school news companies. They've all become propaganda outlets for one party or another, and stopped pretending otherwise a couple years ago.
With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say, And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet - there's a stubborn effect of believing broadcasts and print, no matter how often we're reminded it's all lies.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
....With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say
Yep: "interesting". Crazy? Sure, that works, long as it's "interesting".
True? Unnecessary.
And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa.
You make joke, yes?
All the evidence is to the contrary.
The studies showing this aren't controversial.
Yes, not only are these studies not controversial, they don't exist at all!
Try this one: http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-...