Google Contributor
google.comThis was launched about 3 months ago. Previous discussion is still available on HN [1].
A fraction of $3/mo? From a company that abandons projects left and right? I'll stick to Patreon, thanks. I'm making about $800 on a productive month now despite there being a pretty small audience for comics about a lesbian robot with PKD problems. I set "no ads for anyone" as my goal for like $50/p, which was still making far more than I ever did from ad impressions. Most people only contribute a buck or so a page but the door is open for a few generous folks to give me more.
Horses for courses - for high volume sites this would be awesome. My immediate thought was "Great - at last Wikipedia can get rid of the annual begging bowl". It could also be a great solution to the news site paywall debate. I'd love to seamlessly reward the sites I visit often, and if Google can automate this, more power to their elbow.
Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their advertising revenue if it takes off too well - I wonder what their cut of revenue is like compared to their advertising business? This model pays them (and the content producer) per impression rather than per click.
here is a comparable data point:
twitch.tv (video game live streaming website) pays it's broadcasters with advertisements and user subscriptions (50/50 default split on subs)
many broadcasters earn more from their subscriptions (dedicated fans) than advertisements.
with increasing use of ad-blocking software, this seems like the right time for this sort of thing.
In many countries, companies have a tax incentive to contribute to charities, up to 1% of their income. Billing this as a normal service to customers then transferring the money to charities after a tax-reduction scheme could be a way to fund the service cost-free. That said, it's extremely appreciable that companies help charities, whatever the scheme.
Wikipedia has no ads to make go away. Google Contributor is only for sites that use Google ads in the first place.
Google wants the power to tell sites that they have to use Google ads before they can get these Contributor donations. That's the whole point. So it will only hurt honorable sites like Wikipedia that forgo ads.
You can declare which ad networks you're willing to show ads from when you set up google ads. It should be entirely possible to include only Contributor.
With AdSense publishers keep 68% of the content ads. I have always assumed very large sites are able to negotiate a slightly better deal.
I can't locate any information on what cut they're taking from the Contributor product though.
Patreon really has been fantastic for individuals and small groups whom people actively want to support. From tons of small creators paying their rent to the bigger successes like Jim Sterling and RedLetterMedia.
This seems targeted at larger, semi-faceless websites which may only be able to survive with tiny contributions from a mass audience. Imgur is probably the best example of that; it's infrastructure that people appreciate, but few want to pay for.
Gratipay is a more community-centered and honorable site compared to Patreon (in that Patreon is a proprietary platform with mediocre terms of service). I do think Patreon does good work in many respects, but it's a shame that they get all the attention when other sites are more deserving.
imgur is backed by its parent company which also own reddit. they are doing fine as reddit simply does not exist without it
What? Where are you reading that? The only thing I could find was that reddit invested a small amount in Imgur and most of the investments have come from A16Z.
Imgur is a stand-alone corporation, and is not owned by the same company that has a majority stake in Reddit.
Imgur has taken one round of VC, for $40 million, and most of that was made up of Andreessen Horowitz. Reddit did participate in that round, but they were a small minority share of it.
That is not true, sir.
I could be missing something but this seems orthogonal to Patreon. Patreon is great specifically for things that aren't meant to generate lots of pageviews, and thus could never get by with ads.
This seems more like a "like ads but better" thing. Google appears to be saying, "Until now, you paid the advertiser by buying their products, they paid us, and we paid the websites. Let's keep doing that, except without the advertiser." Which is obviously great for Google, though I'm not sure how much it benefits anyone else.
This would benefit me, because I don't want to see ads, but I also want to support the sites I visit. At the moment I block ads but I feel bad about it.
Manually donating to each site isn't realistic given human psychology; people simply won't do it. Something more automatic is better, even if it's not perfect. So I really like the idea.
Downsides for me:
- only works for sites with Google ads on them, not for other ad networks or for sites that want to be ad-free
- tracking presumably still happens; it would be nicer if there was some sort of protocol to automatically pay sites anonymously
DO NOT FEEL BAD FOR BLOCKING ADS! Ads are not respectful to you, usually track you, and are generally deceptive, promote shit you shouldn't actually bother with usually…
Manually donating is indeed a problem, but if you want to send a subscription donation, you don't need Google Contributor. And anyway, you should donate to the sites that forgo ads in the first place — they are the ones that deserve it.
Why can't you do both? Some people will still use Patreon, some might prefer Google contribute... Or is Google insisting on an exclusive contract?
One of my favorite space news webcasts, TMRO, uses Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tmro
They are making $952 per episode, which is more than what annoying ads would pay.
I've been interested in Patreon for a while. Do you think there is a space on it for people running websites? I've only ever seen it used by webcomic artists.
Patreon is mostly good if you're doing A/V production, to offset the time/opportunity cost involved.
In the context of HN, I do not think Patreon would be a good fit for programming. Mostly because programmers who have sufficient skill enough to receive a following probably make enough money in their day jobs such that the money earned in a Patreon would be a drop in the bucket. :P
Many websites have been funded through Kickstarter, though.
Exactly. This idea only needs to be moderately successful for a standalone company to stick with it. It needs to be hugely successful for Google to remain committed to it.
I'd go as far as saying Google are negligent (or malicious) for trying it. They might kill any startup doing the same thing, and then they will inevitably shut this down.
Well to be fair, it does say "experiment". I read that as "We can terminate this thing at anytime and you should expect as much"
Sure, but what effect does that "experiment" have on the other companies that are dedicated to the idea? It doesn't matter what Google calls it. Google could crush those companies and still eventually consider this opportunity too small to be worth their while.
Hmm, then what can Google experiment with that doesn't carry the risk of harming a preexisting smaller company? I guess only things like self-driving cars that nobody else is doing?
I don't think the principle is that they shouldn't harm smaller companies. There is no problem with their current approach if they don't feel social responsibility, but if they do (and they claim to), then the current approach does seem a violation of that. I don't have all the answers as to how they should approach this, but it's not difficult to see that something is broken in how they are evaluating new products & services. It's not just that they end up abandoning a lot of them; it's what they do inbetween, as well. They seem to lack commitment to them.
Examples:
Could they really not have transformed Google Reader into something valuable?
Did they really promote Google Wallet for Digital Goods sufficiently to expect any sort of success from it? (I used it and the UX and fees were the best around; promotion was non-existent)
Did Google Helpouts get enough of a push, either?
This new thing is great if Google are going to get behind it and stick with it until it's successful. Their current track-record suggests that they will not.
Which makes it just like Wave, App Engine, etc. until it's proven - early adopters take the risk
They just shut down google wallet. It's not clear to me that you could count on them to stick with this.
No they didn't. Are you confusing it with the Android Pay API?
They did just shut down a specific part of Wallet:
Link?
Http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
So this seems like an automatic version of flattr[1], except you get the perk of no adverts in return.
What I wonder though is: what happens if I visit a site that I don't want to support? Can I say no? Otherwise this just invites clickbait even more.
Exactly what came to my mind. It seems to be just like flattr but you don't get to choose if the site deserves your donation or not.
Or exactly like Gratipay (formerly gittip) https://gratipay.com/
Except that Gratipay is an ethical community site, whereas Google Contributor is only about rewarding sites for annoying people with ads such that people are willing to pay for them to go away. Google Contributor is about Google pushing everyone to use their system only. So, it's actually not like Gratipay at all, except for the idea of ongoing donations, which even Paypal had long before Gratipay ever started.
How do you think this encourages click bait "even more". How would you avoid click bait? Magazines that you deem "not click bait" get granted more money? Who decides what's in this worthy category?
Even before online advertising, it's not like tabaloid magazines didn't exist and make a lot of money.
If people spend their time on a website, why shouldn't that website be worthy of money.
If you went to a site and didn't like it - don't go back there again. Why is it fair for you to visit a site repeatedly and only give money when it publishes an article you like? It's not like you can sign up to the NYT and only pay for the articles you liked that month.
Good point - can anyone with an account tell us if you can white/blacklist sites?
Sure. You can blacklist sites. I don't believe there is a whitelist option at the moment.
Wouldn't you be providing ad revenue anyway?
A way for this to work would be simply whitelisting sites you want to support on your adblocker of choice.
At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.
About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
There are however two problems with ads. You touched on one of them - intrusiveness/user experience. But there is another one - many ads you see are made to trick you into spending money on something you don't need and/or sell you something suboptimal (E.g. that camera you just saw? It's probably not a good fit for you, but it's definitely the one that the vendor can make most money on selling) and/or just lie and try to scam you. The goals of advertisers and users are not aligned, and until the former stop trying to scam me, I will continue to block ads.
> Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.
Can't disagree with that. In case of Wikipedia, their obnoxiousness actually makes me want to not donate on purpose, and I'd probably do that if it wasn't as valuable for me as it is.
> I believe this is true - even if annoying, or unsustainable, we owe something to the fact that people at least believe they can make money this way.
I think it's a mixed bag on that front: we owe some good sites, but also a big part of web spam, to the fact that people believe they can make money through "internet content creation". Beyond the outright spam (content farms, linkspam, etc.) there's also a lot of really low-quality content put online primarily motivated by a hope of pulling in ad revenue.
Yes please. I say, good riddance.
You are looking at this from the point of view of the user (where ads are not a big deal in exchange of consuming the content for free), but step for a moment in the content creators' shoes. While Ads can still be profitable, they grow less and less efective year after year; almost every other monetization model possible is superior for an internet product nowadays. You can easily run a blog with millions of hits per month and still not make enough to work on it full time. It's shitty if you are the content creator and can only monetize via ads.
You are 100% correct, in fact the margin keeps shrinking. A good example would be YouTube where content providers make $6 for every 1000 views. Your cut as a content provider will keep shrinking.
I would prefer to look upon advertising as a stepping stone. We needed the advertising ecosystem when the Internet had a bunch of neat ideas and didn't really know how to monetize any of it. Now we're starting to get far more robust payments systems and a more solid understanding of how to offer value add in exchange for money.
Advertising was a huge boon while we transitioned from a wilderness state through a frontier phase, but we're past that now; I really hope that we progressively step down the advertising we do in favor of microtransactions of all kinds.
> About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations.
As a counterpoint, there are definitely content creators on Patreon whose fans are donating enough on a regular basis for them to have a steady income. I haven't really looked through a large number of them, but the ones I pitch into have a pretty tidy monthly amount: not as much as I make as a programmer, but certainly a living.
> At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.
I look at that more of a necessary evil, kind of like the pollution from the industrial revolution. It got us this far, but now it's time to look for sustainable ways to make use of this growth.
On the contrary. Regardless of what people SAY they want when discussing ads on forums, when faced with the choice of getting content for free with ads, or paying and not seeing ads, people vote with their mouse and choose free with ads.
One might say that advertising has been a hugely POPULAR way to get awesome free services on the internet.
I don't think any normal internet user would consider ads in that way, only the lesser of two evils. People "voting with their mice" and choosing to install ad blockers isn't really a ringing endorsement.
When I visited wikipedia today, there was a small widget that let me set up a monthly payment. I have never donated before, but I liked the idea of a small monthly amount so I signed up for 3 dollars. Hopefully, they get to keep more of that money by cutting out Google. Bonus: no tracking.
Except non-awful advertising doesn't appear to be a stable equilibrium. Inventory is essentially infinite; publishers see ever-declining margins; we see ever more intrusive advertising. Plus the usual stories about people getting what they want -- lots and lots of clickbait. Yuck.
It seems kind of convenient that the replacement for ads on the web is just a different thing that requires google to track everyone all the time.
This is actually about pushing Google ads! The idea is clearly that sites are required to have Google ads normally in order to participate in Contributor!
So, this is the opposite of people paying to reduce ads. This is actually a scheme to promote more ads.
People who want to donate to creative work should donate to projects that treat us well by forgoing ads and privacy-invading tracking. Google Contributor is a donation system exclusively for projects that engage in these anti-features. It's a ransom / pay-to-stop-being-annoyed, which means it is rewarding sites for annoying you in the first place.
Personally I prefer the Bitcoin version of this, autotip. It is a Chrome browser extension that automatically tips sites Bitcoin when you visit it.
That way I essentially am just tipping sites that I want to visit as I visit them. You can also blacklist sites, set tip amounts, etc.
https://priestc.github.io/Autotip/
On the development side implementation was very easy. All it takes is a meta tag with a bitcoin address and you're good to go. I built it into a social blogging site I've been working on, so that when you visit an article the bitcoin address used for tipping is the author's. Here's a post I wrote explaining it:
It's great that that works for you, but this works for normal people. Kind of a big difference.
I would love to see something like this for the actual software that runs the web. Things like OpenSSL, PGP, FessBSD and the other critical software that makes it all possible but almost all users will never visit there webpages. There would need to be some other way to allocate the funds, maybe by checking some form of header metadata to see what software websites are built on.
Is 1-3$ enough? If we had to invoice "the internet" and OSS to users instead of financing it with ads, wouldn't it require something starting above 1. $40/month for the charity websites and 2. $600 per machine (the equivalent of the cost of Windows) for OSS software?
Its better than nothing as a supplement to the funding some OSS software already gets. It would be nice for the internet community to be able to fund the internet infrastructure without having to have any idea about all the projects that make it possible. I'm not saying it will work as a sole source of funding but may of these projects are desperately underfunded and could do with some revenue. I think may users would be happy to donate to the projects that make the internet possible.
"As a reminder of your support, you’ll see a thank you message - often accompanied by a pixel pattern - where you might normally see an ad."
Why not remove the frame entirely for participants? Since each website has to opt-in to this, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to remove ads "transparently" (ie without the user ever knowing they were there)
Don't underestimate the psychological value of reminding people that they've done something they want to feel good about. As long as it doesn't add to page load time, a reminder saying "thanks for donating to support this page via Google Contributor" in place of an ad helps keep this program in people's minds, keep them willing to pay, and help them think about it at some time other than when they see the cost charged.
Indeed. It's a little thing, but even a small icon at the top of the page that tells me "I'm supporting this site with cash, I'm awesome", would be a small self-esteem boost; a reminder that I do reward the author whose content I benefit from, and a nice feeling that he's getting my money directly. Just keep it unobtrusive.
Come to think of it, where I'd really like to have it is the browser - say right there in the address bar, next to the RSS button (please, please bring it back!). This way it will be unobtrusive, in a consistent place, and won't interfere with the page layout. Win-win for everyone.
Presumably because the specifically-sized iframe might be part of the site's design, and Google doesn't want to muck with it if the site designer might have been too lazy to foresee the problem (because Google would be the one getting blamed.)
They could obviously tell the site the ad should disappear with a JS event or somesuch, though, at which point the DOM can rewire itself.
It might be for technical simplicity: this method requires no more work from the site designers, who are often contractors or otherwise expensive, and off the top of my head I don't know how they could do this kind of disabling on the client side without allowing someone to make a plugin that tricks the site into thinking it is in addless mode.
The pattern is what worries me most. It should be understated and transparent. More visual noise seems like a distraction.
Finally someone took the initiative. I guess I'm glad that it's a company as big as Google.
There are already lots of sites that run on donations; what's missing is a standard model for doing so. Maybe with Google's backing we can make a stronger push towards making donation-based revenue the norm.
Whenever you think "nobody is doing this", you should start by assuming you're wrong. You really think that in this giant global world, nobody has thought to build a standard way to support sites with donations? There's already a handful of sites with decent history already. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean nobody was already doing this.
I would only use this if the first time I appeared on a website it asked me whether I wanted to add it to the list of sites I wanted to explicitly support.
That may seem intrusive, but otherwise this is going to (further) encourage content farms ripping off Wikipedia or just posting random material and optimising the hell out of its rankings (yes I know Google actively tries to stop this, but it just doesn't work well enough).
It's really important to distinguish money coming directly out of my pocket at someone else's whim, and advertising, where I need not purchase anything if I'm not interested.
Maybe not the first time (before you've seen any of the content), but generally, I like this idea.
This severely breaks down when you find a site you disagree with. Say you go on some anti-vaccines blog just to find after reading through a bunch of articles that they are a part of this program. Can you take your money back? Or what about a political campaign site for your rival? Or the Westboro Baptist clan?
The same problem exists with ads, though. By browsing a site with ads, you're supporting them.
Not for the majority (by number) of websites as you can not click on the ads. Websites tend to be a CPC model for all but the larger websites. Larger websites tend to mix CPM pricing with sponsorship & affiliate deals.
Yes, but psychologically most people won't think of ads in the same way as they would of the "thank you" banner you would see when contributing to the site this way.
Only in a very, very small and indirect way. And you can solve that problem by installing and ad blocker and whitelisting sites.
It's still very small if it's one pageview in your entire month, and it's that fraction of a couple of dollars. I'd be surprised if this gets anyone significantly higher revenue than ads; that doesn't seem to be the goal.
I suppose that if you're running an appropriately-designed ad blocker (i.e., one that prevents Google's third-party ad cookies from reaching the site), then Google won't be able to route your contribution to the site, anyway.
At some fraction of $3/month, you aren't going to be giving those sites much for a single impression or two anyway, sounds like.
I wonder how hard it would be to block the script/call on sites you don't want to support (or just whitelist it on ones you do). I'd imagine not very.
There will almost certainly be a way to block Contributor the same way you block ads.
I was thinking the same thing. I'd like the choice to rebalance my donations at the end of the month. Stackoverflow (if it were a charity) is immensely useful to my business while BuzzFeed isn't. If donations are proportional to clicks and time spent, the we maintain an incentive for clickbait and low-value content.
While a good step, personally my reasons for blocking ads rests more from a tracking standpoint than visually.
Google being a middleman makes it logistically easy but removes the main reason why I would pay some amount directly to sites themselves.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, blocking ads isn't going to make a whit of difference to tracking. Unless you aggressively block cookies and javascript as well, you're up large on the radar.
Not by itself no, but you can't block tracking beacons and then leave gaping holes in the form of AdSense, so if your motive is tracking then you're not going to see most ads regardless.
Ideally, something like this could still contribute to the sites visited while the user has an adblocker enabled or JavaScript disabled. I would be quite happy to chip in to help sites display fewer ads, but it would be tedious to whitelist all of the participants just so they can get their contribution from my visit. In principle I am very interested in consciously supporting those who create the content I get completely for free (since I don't even view the ads), but for it to work for me it would need to be very low-hassle.
We just launched almost exactly what you describe. It is called FairBlocker. An ad blocker with a monthly subscription fee (of your choice), which we then split up among the sites where ads are blocked.
We're looking for feedback from people who get the problem - what do you think? Feel free to email me directly if you want: zack@fairblocker.com
Well, if the script would be embeddable from Google's domain, I think it would be easy to whitelist it. Of course it raises some issues with tracking. One could conceive a self-hosted version, but I'm not sure how Google would avoid scammers then, reporting "fake visits".
Good point. Then let's hope that they use a separate script than the advertising scripts I would not be happy about unblocking. Listening, Google?
I don't really do a lot to prevent tracking of my activities, because I'm so paranoid that I don't really believe blocking scripts will prevent it from happening (see the whole Verizon thing a little while back). But I don't want to have to let ads in from other sites just to be nice to ones I like.
Yes, I stand with you here. I also don't really do much about tracking, but I want to be able to let Google Contributor through without enabling normal ads.
> Need an invitation? Join the waitlist
I feel like this is one of the things that caused Wave to die -- it was only something useful if many people are using it, and they didn't let many people use it.
Google's model rests on the assumption that all the ads on the site will be Google ads, and as such this scheme comes with a fairly heavy incentive for content providers to carry Google ads only.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
If the model is that you bid on your own ad views at market value, why would it incentivize content providers to carry Google ads only?
People will likely complain that they paid for Contributor but still see ads on your participating site.
Its really important to be talking about this - the fact that current revenue streams are almost all based around advertising in media creates a bit of a race to the bottom - the more clicks you get the more money you make, so the only intrinsic motivation is to get more clicks (especially if you're a public company). Everything else is secondary even if its not marketed as such.
If the primary goal of a site or project is to make money, then clearly advertising is the way to go. If the goal is something else, like providing a community service, then there are reasonable models. I could see bundled microsubscriptions being pretty popular - you set it once and forget it, they get funding to keep doing what they're doing and everyone is happy. Patreon for artists is a good example of this.
I hope the internet starts going in the opposite direction that MMO's have been going, switching towards subscriptions for higher quality content from fremium user maximizers. I'm certainly willing to pay for that - I'm much more likely to trust an organization that doesn't take advertising/"user as the product" money than one that does.
I just launched a similar concept to bundled microsubscriptions, which I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, called FairBlocker. Its an ad blocker with a monthly subscription that we split up among sites and pay out to the publisher (aggregating microsubscriptions from all our users). Another way to go after a similar goal.
Keep up the good work, FairBlocker is giving content creators a fair cut and users everywhere an ad-free experience.
Should Google be collecting this revenue for the content providers? Or could the individual content providers not collect this revenue themselves without having Google take a cut.
How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Why work with the record label when you could be producing your own work and keep 100% of the profit?
Unfortunately most payment processors hate micro-transactions. And some charge transaction fee's so it wouldn't be feasible with them.
Now bitcoins...that would work.
>How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?
Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )
Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.
I don't think Contributor is intended to directly benefit sites at all.
If you use Contributor, the site receives $0.00136* and a blank ad is shown, paid for by you.
If you don't use Contributor, the sites receives $0.00136 and an Initech ad is shown, paid for by Initech.
It will make no direct difference in revenue for the site, but hopefully they can get indirect benefits from people being less inclined to use ad blockers.
* $2 CPM at 68% revenue share
How much of that revenue did Google take? Is it a 80/20 revenue split or what?
My point is the middle-man must be paid but if there is no middle-man you keep 100% of the profit.
At 68% revenue share it's a 68/32 split.
I don't think that's how it works. It sounds like the CPM for a particular user's visits is determined by that user -- by the amount they choose to contribute per month and the number of pages on participating sites they view.
So, depending on a site's audience and content, it seems like they could end up with a CPM that is much higher (or lower) than with ads.
What you describe is exactly how my product works (FairBlocker). We split up a user's chosen subscription among sites where they block ads... I imagine it is what Contributor is doing, too. The way it is working out for us is that a ~$6.5 / month subscription is equivalent to a ~$12 net CPM, though it varies depending on how heavy a browser the given user is. So, higher than what many small sites normally make, but also lower than many video ads or top-tier sites with their own sales teams.
I am guessing that the $1-3 is subsidized by the sale of your private information.
I posted something similar a few months ago: http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2014/02/modest-proposal-...
So you did. Where'd you get the idea for the mondrian ad-replacement image? It's a bit too in-your-face for me, but the style is interesting.
A few years ago we needed a stand-in for some creative and I was looking for something visually simple that would compress well as a GIF. Mondrian seemed appropriate :)
> Support the people who make the web.
Oh, you mean the ones who are already big enough to generate large amounts of revenues (based on their advertized partners) ? My first thought was that this would be a good way to support smaller websites instead.
A pixel pattern appears where you would normally see an add
The pricing denomination is set both too high and too low at the same time, depending on whom we're talking about. The whole idea of micropayments to support, for instance, content creators was to generally envision a transactional denomination far below $1 -- hence the word "micro." Since even this really never got off the ground in any significant way, isn't it a stretch to imagine that $1/month is a low enough psychological barrier-to-entry for most average consumers. Similarly, for those true supporter zealots, is limiting the top end to $3/month logical? Why should it be limited at all?
Microtransactions didn't work because it either imposed mental overhead or relied on tipping culture.
So either you're guessing whether the article is reeeeaaaally worth 1 cent, or you're wondering if these $0.001 increments are going to add up to a whopper, or you feel annoyed having to press the "tip" button all the time.
This model -- independently invented several times -- removes that entirely.
> Why should it be limited at all?
Small amounts drastically reduce the attractiveness of using this to launder stolen credit card money.
My guess (haven't researched yet) is that Google is taking a percentage, and Google needs that percentage needs to be high enough to make it worth while.
Basically, if this is the project I think it is, all they're doing is letting you act as your own advertiser, with the ad that you're running being an empty pixel pattern.
Good call. Basically, they can turn users with a PREF cookie into additional bidders for ad auctions on their network (and others, maybe?). $1-3 isn't much, but if you pool a large number of users' money, you can both drive auction prices to increase your revenue, and drive users to contribute more when their "contribution" stops removing ads.
One can never be too cynical.
Wouldn't they be basically holding your sanity to ransom at this point, asking for an ever increasing amount of money?
Protection rackets aren't exactly a new way to make money. People don't like ads, and Google serves many of the ads, so they can shake people down, and use the extra money to make their competitors' lives harder. Meanwhile, their tracking business is unaffected.
Perhaps, but I think $1 across enough sites would be fine to me. The problem for me is that my dollar will almost certainly go to one or two of the sites each month. In that case, I'll just go pay for that website's upgraded service.
my dollar will almost certainly go to one or two of the sites each month.
Why? Do you only visit one or two sites in a given month?
Because of the very few sites involved, yes, I will only visit 1 or 2 of them.
I think I'll setup some "pixel patterns where you would normally see an ad" on my own site and maybe people will start donating bitcoins to my site.
I'll get back to ya'll with the results of the experiment.
I see what you did there :P
It so happens I've been trying to launch in the same area myself. And I'm not the first to think of it -- Contenture, Kachingle, Readability and I forget the others.
Naturally I think I have additional secret sauce, and a patent + patent pending covering a cryptographically-secured scheme for tracking visits.
But I won't lie, competing with a company with 10,000 engineers and $60 billion in revenue seems unfair. So I'm going to give them a head-start on this one.
Persons interested in learning more, or in throwing umptillions of dollars at me to make it happen, can find my contact details in my profile.
Interesting. The cost of providing web services keeps decreasing, but this isn't being passed along to the consumer in the form of fewer ads. With the "contributor" model, pay sites will, over time, be able to undercut ad-supported sites on price.
That's probably not what Google has in mind, though. This presumably requires that the user have a Google account and be logged into Google to get ad blocking. So Google gets to snoop on the user and sell the information they collect.
Google is solving the wrong problem, IMO. I don't mind seeing ads; I care that my actions are tracked and my privacy/confidentiality is violated. I think most people who object to the advertising-based Internet do it for the same reason -- ads are annoying, but privacy is a serious problem.
I looked for a privacy policy or something that addresses what is tracked, but all I see are links to Google's universal privacy policy.
This could be huge if applied to YouTube content, as I'm sure there are many parents of iPad children who don't want their kids seeing ads.
I would love it to be applied to YouTube content for myself, although I doubt it will be. The prevalence and duration of ads on YouTube has steadily increased over the years, up to the point where, just a few days ago, I finally got fed up and installed an ad blocker for that site only. I don't usually use ad blockers because I want to support content creators, and few of the sites I visit have intrusive ads anyway; but it got to a point where enough was enough. However, I would be happy to support video creators with my wallet, and they would probably make more money that way, since I never click ads (so they get CPM revenue only).
When I think about watching TV when I was younger, the details of the shows themselves have faded, but the small but constant miseries of ad breaks are relatively vivid. Sure, the show was good enough to leave an overall positive impression, or else I wouldn't be watching it - although I am sure this is part of the reason I watched relatively little TV - but pleasure and annoyance don't just cancel out; they remain in the mind as parallel memories, each with its own effect. Today, I only watch TV on paid video services that lack ads, and it continues to surprise me just how enjoyable a 'clean high' without interruptions is. Instead of my interest level rollercoastering up as the show plays, sharply down as the ads start playing - ending just before it's gotten low enough for me to abandon ship - it just goes up at the beginning and stays there until the end of the episode.
YouTube videos are different from TV shows, of course - they're typically much shorter, and each viewed as only one element out of many in a session of Internet sensory overload, where no one piece of content lasts long enough to engender the level of concentration characteristic of most other types of activities. When there's constant context switching, an additional switch for an ad isn't nearly as bad. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with it, especially when there's an different possible compensation structure that in theory better rewards both me and the creator.
Somebody posted something similar to this a few weeks ago, and I responded there too that I feel like I'm on a different Youtube than the ones described in these posts. Like 90% of ads I see on there are skippable now, which didn't exist at all a few years ago.
I'm really curious if we just browse completely different subsets of videos or something. What videos are you watching that have so many unskippable ads?
They're experimenting with youtube donations on some channels, also there's a Youtube for kids app on iOS and Android that has ads, but they're limited to children's programming.
YouTube is experimenting with it. However the margin they pay at is still lower compared to say Vimeo for example where the revenue split is 90/10. YouTube is having their content talent being poached and move to other platforms as individual content providers wake up to this reality.
This might explain why imgur suddenly decided to make all accounts equal and refund my subscription fee.
As others have expressed, Google's tendency to abandon things means I don't take this very seriously and would rather see sites that want to use this model go with another company that's committed to the idea as a business.
It's not necessarily Google's fault that they will not treat this seriously enough. They've simply been too successful when it comes to advertising. I do think they should leave this sort of thing to other companies if they feel any sense of social responsibility, though.
I have a friend who works at Patreon.com; it's a different take on this.
It's basically a way to have a direct financial relationship between artists and patrons. I am curious as to how this model might work over time. It could be a good way to deal with the inability of musicians, for example, to sell records.
I really like this idea. I have doubts that it'll work but it shows that Google is trying to stay ahead of the curve. I do have privacy concerns but at the same time the thought of some flat fee that is distributed by how often I visit sites seems pretty great.
There's some obvious issues. One seems like a problem for a startup to solve (exit plan: be bought by Google): Figure out how much a site is actually used in a meaningful and quantifiable way beyound time on site/counting visits
The other is more philosophical for lack of a better term. It's a little strange that Google is essentially responsible for the adds on the sites it now removes with this new sheme. "Modern" thinking would make me belive that sites that participate should probably go for no adds by default. There'll be "freeloaders" but it's essentially film streaming, non-DRM books and the likes all over.
Edit: I hope there'll be a way to blacklist sites as well or maybe more fine grained controls.
I am more opposed to tracking than ads. Unless they devise a system that doesn't require a cookie or tracking id that persists across sessions and websites, I would like to excuse myself from this (still laudable) endeavour.
It's still kinda waste to show paying visitors an empty ad.
It would probably be easy to distinguish between the paying visitors and the regular ones. So you can also show paying visitors more content?
What would the Googlebot do with that?
I like the idea of giving users a painless way to donate to the sites they use. And giving thank-yous in place of advertising is a good way to reduce the incentive to freeload.
I do worry that $1-3 a month is much lower than the value I get from the sites I visit, and consequently not enough to support low-traffic sites that should be supported. They also didn't mention how they distribute your money - equally to all the sites you visit? Proportionally to the number of visits? On a related note, can participating sites choose to eliminate ads only if a user will contribute enough money to them, or must they eliminate ads for every contributor in order to participate at all?
But the real question is, will google.com itself accept Contributor money? And will it eliminate ads for contributors?
I assume that you will pay the same way an advertiser would pay - by bidding for the space. If your bid exceeds the bids of anyone else trying to advertise there, nothing will be shown. Otherwise you'll be shown an ad as normal.
Equally doesn't seem intuitively fair; per-visit is good but has to be adjusted in the face of AJAXy sites and how hilariously easy it is to stuff the ballot box.
I'm going to guess proportionally. Every other such scheme has been proportional. Google can solve the fake visit problem with pattern-matching wizardry. Readability tried to solve it by turning themselves into a proxy server.
I solved it by using a cryptographically-assured end-to-end scheme that requires two mutually distrustful parties to verify that a request was made.
I have been using Contributor for a while and I am extremely excited about it.
No more can you claim to be the product, you're the customer, bidding against the ad networks to show your own ads to yourself.
Just brilliant.
Actually, you're rewarding the sites for using Google Ads in the first place, thereby encouraging the pushing of more ads on everyone else. You may not be the product, but you're a tool not a customer.
I think I would pay most to not be tracked or to avoid video ads.
Interesting idea, but I'd like to see it implemented by a more trustworthy and privacy respecting company than Google. Now it seems just like another way to track users.
I wanted to do a similar thing for game servers a long time ago. People spends thousands every month to keep a game server alive, but rarely gains any benefits back.
So, like Flattr but instead of choosing what pages you want to contribute to you contribute to every web page that is a part of this project?
No thank you, I'll stick to Flattr.
I interpreted as you contribute to the websites that are part of the project that you visit (by splitting the your monthly contribution to the various sites you visit that month). However, it's definitely vague enough on the landing page where either interpretation could be true.
I'm truly trying and failing not to see this as an opportunity to pay $3/mo to give Google the right to track and record all my web visits.
I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And my lack of explicit consent while simply visiting sites limits what they can do with my data - something tells me that this consent will be in the ToS of this product.
There's a reason mozilla switched to yahoo - Google refused to honor do not track and live up to mozilla's privacy standards. This fits into their tracking strategy and they'll also likely get a big cut being the middle-man.
I've lost a lot of respect for google in general, going from innovator to me-too copy-cat in everything from social media (G+) to cloud computing (GCE).
Google's version of freemium?
I'd love to know the numbers behind this. Anyone have an idea of what Google's Adword visitor LTV is for these sites?
Honest question: Do online ads have any redeeming value?
No one seems to have anything nice to say about them. Ever. I can only recall two or maybe three times when I've clicked on an ad, and even then I can't remember what they were for. The only ads that have any real utility for me are television commercials that are particularly funny/quotable or remind me that a tv show is coming back on the air.
Can anyone report a single positive experience with online advertising?
The best use case for ads, I think, are in retargeting– meaning you only hit people who've already visited your site before, and you hit them maybe with an offer they might be interested in. But you have to be sensitive to the context, etc. I don't envy ad folks.
The only time I've (purposely) clicked on an ad was in Feedly. With all the feeds their users are subscribed to, Feedly have must a very detailed profiles.
This looks interesting. Not sure who would be putting money into this, to be honest, but it seems like a fair idea since there are so many companies out there asking for donations to keep running.
I can imagine someone like Wikipedia making a small fortune off of this if it takes off.
How will Wikipedia make anything off this? You have to show Google ads by default in order to participate. This is more about punishing sites for not using Google Ads than about funding creative work.
Google would like everyone's donations to be exclusively given to sites that use Google ads and not to sites that forgo advertising like Wikipedia.
Enable this for YouTube and I would pay $25 a month starting RIGHT NOW.
I get some warm-and-fuzzy feelings when I first see this (and signed up for the waitlist), but it also makes me a bit uncomfortable with what this implies.
Has anybody else here seen Black Mirror, "Fifteen Million Merits"?
The status quo is living with harrassment, in the form of advertising.
Signing up for this system is implicitly endorsing that the harrassment is justified. It feels something like being extorted. (Or, perhaps, negotiating with terrorists)
Good to see. Basically, its like paying not to see ads.
On the surface this sounds great, but I also get the feeling this is solving a problem that doesn't exist. The billions of website that exist on the web should be proof of that.
Its a problem that doesn't exist, but will in a few years from now. Those billions of sites depend upon advertising revenue. As ad-blockers have become more popular, the rates that advertisers are willing to pay has fallen. Eventually we could see a majority of users block ads and sites would have to shut down for lack of revenue. This initiative can preempt that.
Also remember the overused line "if you're not paying, you are the product". This could lead to a web that doesn't depend on violating the privacy of its users to make a dime.
Fair points, although the fact that Google is offering this product makes your point about violating the privacy of users a bit moot (in this particular instance...not the solution in general).
You could still browse the web with Ghostify (or µblock…), and only load the Contributor tracking code when you want to support an article. That would both minimise Google's tracking and prevent you from accidentally contributing to crappy link-bait content. Basically a copy of flattr on Google's infrastructure.
Rates have fallen because global inventory has exploded and increasingly sophisticated programmatic systems, not because of ad blockers.
The problem that exists for Google is sites that don't use Google ads. This solves that problem because now Google can say, "you may not like our ads, but all these people want to just pay you, and you can get their funds if you first show our ads by default".
>>problem that exists for Google is sites that don't use Google ads.
That's like saying the problem that exists for my business is the millions of people who don't want to use my product because they meet their needs in other ways. Trying to expand your customer base is fine, but I don't see trying to do it by forcing your customers on to your other products as effective. Look at Google+.
That's exactly what I mean. Lots of business set out to solve the problem of "we're not making all the money we could" rather than actually provide increased value to the world. Google Contributor makes perfect sense from Google's interests. The design makes only more questionable sense in terms of society's interests.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
No thanks, AdBlocker works for me Google. Asking money for reading blogs, articles etc has not worked so far for most content heavy sites.
I think there's something to be said for an ad-free content "subscription" to the whole internet. I block all ads right now but I would still get the warm and fuzzies if I knew that I was free of ads and I was still paying a little bit to the people who create content online.
So... the product I just launched is identical to what you described. An ad blocker with bundled contributions, check it out if you want: fairblocker.com
Interesting. So the difference between Fairblocker and Google Contributor is that Google allows sites to opt-in to blocking with payment, whereas Fairblocker blocks regardless and allows them to opt-in to getting paid.
Pragmatically, it may make sense as an individual website operator to buy into Fairblocker, since adblocking is going to happen anyway, but I can definitely see not wanting to legitimize this system ("I'm blocking your ads whether you like it or not--want some money in compensation?"), whereas GC doesn't have that issue. (But it also doesn't block non-participating ads, so as a user, I'd want an additional adblocker, so may as well just use Fairblocker.)
I dunno how I feel about "we hold your money in escrow until you claim it", since you will literally owe this money to millions of websites and very few will ever claim it, but it's better than "we distribute the money just amongst those that have signed up".
I hope Fairblocker gets big among those who aren't satisfied with blocking ads just on GC participants websites. Definitely seems like a really good idea, and it needs to reach a good scale to be worth the time for website owners to sign up. I may give it a try (as a user).
Nice idea. This deserves a hacker news post on its own.
Is this something like Reddit Gold?
How does this compare to flattr?
How much is Google's cut?
HN's first kneejerk reaction is cynicism. I like to see us proven wrong.
Nah. Google will abandon this just like nearly everything they make.
I would gladly pay big $$$ to not be brainwashed by ads.
judging by what Google search results think is a legit site, fake phone directories would be the next bubble.
does that means advertisers are leaving adsense/adwords en masse?
Must Google do everything?
Google runs the largest advertising network on the web.
They already pay for much of the content you see online.
Only they have the ability to say "pay $1-$3 a month, and we'll replace those ads with a thank you", and have it actually affect a significant fraction of what you see.
This is a great thing for Google to do, I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
I take it as saying something like "why does it have to be Google that does this; someone should have done this a long time ago", maybe.
Google starts a lot of cool projects, it'd be neat to see other companies taking the same initiative in certain areas (I'm sure there are, I just am not well versed in that area).
I don't know of any other companies who control as many display ads on the web, which can be replaced by a "thank you for donating."
There already are other similar services, like Flattr, but it becomes hard to ensure that you get a steady revenue stream by serving ads to some people and getting donations from others, and being able to turn off the ads for those people who donate.
Yes, please. Because they seem to be one of the few companies who make things that don't suck.
That's subjective. I don't recall a single product from them that came after search and didn't suck. But the real problem with them is these solutions are being pushed down people throats whether they like it or not similar to what Microsoft was doing in the 90s. This is just another example.
I say GMail and Google Maps are examples of products that were both significantly prettier and better (feature and UX-wise) than any alternative available at that time. But you're right, it's subjective.
No one seems to do any kind of pushing. You're free to not use GMail or Google Maps or whatever; people use it because it sucks less than alternatives.
Good to see
This is very subtle attempt to increase publishers from google ( supply side ). I work in ad-tech and inventory quality is something considered prime importance. So what google is trying to do is get publishers sign-up. Those who contribute will not see any ads and those who don't will still see ads.
Now if we get very large number of people contributing and site visit increases then both sites and google could loose revenue as they would have been better off with ads.
Its interesting experiment by google to see what alternative model to ad can be built while simultaneously increasing publisher supply. Good move. They are trying set feet on both stones.
I've noticed more blogs using Patreon, interesting to see google joining the scene, always wonder how much VISA et al takes out when you are contributing 1/month or similar.
I look forward to Google shutting this project down in 1-5 years.
Finally! What took them so long? And why didn't they acquire an existing vendor (for cheap)?
Seems now we will see additional ads on every page "Donate to us with Google Contributor!"
This is great and much needed. However as it's from Google I will never use it. Sorry, Google has about the same reputation as Microsoft circa 2000 at this point.
This feels like something Google will abandon in 3 years tops, probably more like 1-2 years. I wonder how projects like this work within Google -- is it a reward given to someone who has an idea and has done something great in the past, or is this a curse if you're an engineer and get assigned to what seems like an obviously stillborn thing?