from Hacker News

Google Contributor

by sharjeel on 3/6/15, 1:03 AM with 195 comments

• by mcone on 3/6/15, 1:19 AM

  This was launched about 3 months ago. Previous discussion is still available on HN [1].

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365

• by egypturnash on 3/6/15, 2:17 AM

  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.

• by dr4g0n on 3/6/15, 1:18 AM

  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.

  [1]: https://flattr.com/howflattrworks

• by dpweb on 3/6/15, 1:58 AM

  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.

• by zipfle on 3/6/15, 2:58 AM

  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.

• by quadrangle on 3/6/15, 7:33 AM

  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.

• by bcolb on 3/6/15, 2:54 AM

  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:

  https://www.backed.io/posts/post/40

• by boozelclark on 3/6/15, 6:23 AM

  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.

• by sigmar on 3/6/15, 1:23 AM

  "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)

• by nemo1618 on 3/6/15, 1:20 AM

  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.

• by wbhart on 3/6/15, 3:46 AM

  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.

• by IgorPartola on 3/6/15, 2:38 AM

  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?

• by delsalk on 3/6/15, 1:59 AM

  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.

• by dikaiosune on 3/6/15, 1:59 AM

  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.

• by jimktrains2 on 3/6/15, 2:55 AM

  > 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.

• by d_j_b on 3/6/15, 1:50 AM

  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)

• by taurath on 3/6/15, 2:11 AM

  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.

• by greedoshotlast on 3/6/15, 2:07 AM

  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?

• by nicolaskruchten on 3/6/15, 2:16 AM

  I posted something similar a few months ago: http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2014/02/modest-proposal-...

• by ekianjo on 3/6/15, 4:03 AM

  > 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.

• by leppr on 3/6/15, 2:12 AM

     A pixel pattern appears where you would normally see an add   
  

  How about giving contributors the same benefits people using ad blockers already enjoy, set the whole thing to display:none and use the space for something useful?

• by lvs on 3/6/15, 1:34 AM

  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?

• by greedoshotlast on 3/6/15, 2:58 AM

  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.

• by jacques_chester on 3/6/15, 1:47 AM

  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.

• by Animats on 3/6/15, 7:10 AM

  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.

• by hackuser on 3/6/15, 5:16 AM

  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.

• by primitivesuave on 3/6/15, 1:34 AM

  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.

• by libraryatnight on 3/6/15, 5:11 AM

  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.

• by josh2600 on 3/6/15, 7:06 AM

  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.

• by kriro on 3/6/15, 6:49 AM

  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.

• by _nedR on 3/6/15, 6:48 AM

  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.

• by Alexandervn on 3/6/15, 7:31 AM

  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?

• by noahl on 3/6/15, 1:26 AM

  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?

• by plantain on 3/6/15, 7:02 AM

  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.

• by wyc on 3/6/15, 1:33 AM

  I think I would pay most to not be tracked or to avoid video ads.

• by kbart on 3/6/15, 8:26 AM

  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.

• by Nican on 3/6/15, 1:20 AM

  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.

• by r3bl on 3/6/15, 2:07 AM

  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.

• by jonnat on 3/6/15, 5:42 AM

  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.

• by pjmurray on 3/6/15, 6:33 AM

  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?

• by karmacondon on 3/6/15, 6:01 AM

  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?

• by rdegges on 3/6/15, 1:17 AM

  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.

• by zacharycohn on 3/6/15, 4:52 AM

  Enable this for YouTube and I would pay $25 a month starting RIGHT NOW.

• by bufordsharkley on 3/6/15, 2:36 AM

  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"?

• by eforio on 3/6/15, 1:53 AM

  Good to see. Basically, its like paying not to see ads.

• by bsbechtel on 3/6/15, 2:48 AM

  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.

• by suyash on 3/6/15, 1:59 AM

  No thanks, AdBlocker works for me Google. Asking money for reading blogs, articles etc has not worked so far for most content heavy sites.

• by sanxiyn on 3/6/15, 5:34 AM

  Is this something like Reddit Gold?

• by praveer13 on 3/6/15, 4:24 AM

  How does this compare to flattr?

• by cuchoi on 3/6/15, 1:58 AM

  How much is Google's cut?

• by sidcool on 3/6/15, 3:57 AM

  HN's first kneejerk reaction is cynicism. I like to see us proven wrong.

• by JungleGymSam on 3/6/15, 2:51 AM

  Nah. Google will abandon this just like nearly everything they make.

• by cpks on 3/6/15, 1:57 AM

  I would gladly pay big $$$ to not be brainwashed by ads.

• by gcb0 on 3/6/15, 3:31 AM

  judging by what Google search results think is a legit site, fake phone directories would be the next bubble.

• by gcb0 on 3/6/15, 3:35 AM

  does that means advertisers are leaving adsense/adwords en masse?

• by XiZhao on 3/6/15, 1:17 AM

  Must Google do everything?

• by eforio on 3/6/15, 1:52 AM

  Good to see

• by erjiu on 3/6/15, 4:40 AM

  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.

• by shit_parade on 3/6/15, 5:45 AM

  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.

• by KB1JWQ on 3/6/15, 2:12 AM

  I look forward to Google shutting this project down in 1-5 years.

• by kolev on 3/6/15, 1:54 AM

  Finally! What took them so long? And why didn't they acquire an existing vendor (for cheap)?

• by bennettfeely on 3/6/15, 5:19 AM

  Seems now we will see additional ads on every page "Donate to us with Google Contributor!"

• by logn on 3/6/15, 2:42 AM

  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.

• by rdl on 3/6/15, 6:03 AM

  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?