You often see people complain about ads, and claim they'd gladly pay for an ad-free experience if they could. Time to put their money where their mouth is, right?

Not holding my breath.

The thing is, you pay for an ad-free experience. then eventually they start showing ads to paying customers[1] too, just to keep the price down[2].

I'm conflicted, as people need to earn a living, and content/hosting isn't free, but overall I think this is another "nope", as the money will likely go to the wrong people.

[1] Well typically if you're seeing ads you're their product.

[2] aka increase their profits

"then eventually they start showing ads to paying customers[1] too, just to keep the price down"

You'd think that as your customer base grows you could drop the price - in most markets higher volumes mean lower per-customer costs. What happens here is that they grow their customer base to a size where losing a few won't matter, then they sting them with the choice of ads or increased subs for ad-free.

Amazon Prime anyone?

I don't want to pay for an ad free experience. I want to be paid for for my time watching ads. The best UX is being able to set your own rate. The advertiser pays and shows you the ad, or not.

What stops people from setting their price to £1m?

There is a price at which most people will elect to watch ads. Dynamic price discovery will find that point.

"and no user interaction"

And in true Dragon's Den style... I'm out.

True... the ability to pay without any user interaction? May as well just open my pockets now...

Shirley you meant bend over.

Micropayments: A wonderful new world for click fraud, phishing and other mischief.

Exactly what I came here to say.

It's nothing more than another attractive nuisance for WWW publishers to maintain. Lovely.

"Our records show that you've accessed our site seventeen trillion times this month. That's why there are $1497,45 missing from your account".

I assume they're also planning to expand the system so that websites automatically micro-pay me every time they use the data they've taken from me to serve the ads. I'll take a penny a bit - I'm not greedy.

I do find it hilarious that there's a certain cookie-control window that many websites have and it forces you to go through the list of things in order to deny them.

And on that particular dialog there is no "Reject All", you have to turn off all the individual categories one by one.

And, more often than not, SEVERAL HUNDRED companies are listed individually as "Legitimate Interest" users of my data if I proceed (as well as another consent toggle, and the difference isn't explained).

Whenever I see those style of cookie dialogs now, I just close the site immediately. I don't know what they think they're achieving or being compliant with (because they're not) but does nobody working there think "maybe we don't need to have several hundred companies with a legitimate interest in our user's data" or even "is this a legitimate interest to have that many companies using our user's data?" at any point?

Every so often I turn off my ad-blocker in response to one of the guilting "Do you want us to starve?" pop-ups, but swiftly turn it back on when I realise what I'm getting. Smaller sites are suffering because of the decisions taken by big content providers (lookin' at you, Future) to bury the actual interesting stuff in a mixture of ads and sponsored advertorials.

To be honest, having the option to make micropayments in order to browse ad-free is quite appealing, but only to the extent that I'd like to add exceptions to ensure the particularly shitty websites (see previous on Future, or Reach) stay clear of my wallet. And they would be the first to take advantage anyway, probably hiding a million pixel-sized individual ads.

"Keep in mind that not long after Amazon went public in 1997, George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research, referred to the online bookstore as as "Amazon dot toast." "

To be perfectly fair, he was right. THAT particular Amazon has gone the way of the Dodo.

When was the last time you thought "books!" when someone mentioned Amazon?

It's the other way — If somebody says books, I think Amazon.. and if they say Amazon, I think a dozen things, and one of them is books.

I'm old. I think "Dillons". Then I remember that last time I looked it had become a Waterstones.

I'm also old, but as a Yank the word Books has always meant Barnes & Noble .

I misread that as Wetherspoons and had to do a double-take ...

I usually think Waterstones and buy books in person in preference to going online as nothing beats a good bookshop for browsing. Unfortunately in Peterborough where I live we only have a single branch of Waterstones, whereas years ago we had them, Dillon’s, Hammicks, Sherratt and Hughes (not sure about the name) and a few more.

Mostly gone due to the push of Amazon…

Firstly, roll-out: it'd be a brave site that implements this wallet scheme when its competitors still rely on ad revenue: until they get to critical mass, income from their website will drop like a brick.

Secondly - and more worryingly - what happens when (not if) a site gets hacked and the bad actors insert their own micro-payment code that scrapes a visitors wallet - or a coding error means I get double-charged by the host? For any repayment claim, the user would have to provide full details of when they visited the site in question. Chances are, for the fractional sums involved, no individual would bother going through the process. Net result: it becomes very profitable to slip rogue code into legit. sites.

I would imagine it would be the work of moments to demand that a site that wants to comply puts in a DNS entry which specifies the target wallet details. Thus unless someone can completely compromise that site's DNS details, the payments could only go to that site.

I haven't read the protocol, but I bet there's nothing like that in there, or it's in there as HTML that you can modify, etc.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to have, say, the equivalent of a Bitcoin address that you can publish in DNS and thus if someone visiting wants to pay you money, they can click a button and it would pay to the wallet specified in that site's DNS.

But all it would mean is a thousand domain-squatters, Unicode domains, etc. trying to trick you into thinking that they are that same company - the same as any payment page.

Oh look, I was right:

rel="monetization"

href="https://example.com/pay"

onmonetization="sayThanks(this)"

/>

What a dumb protocol.

So from that example the way to get around a paywall is as simple as calling "sayThanks" method? It can't be that dumb. (checks specification) No there is more to it, the receiving function needs an object with an "amountSent" property, then it's all legit!

Superman III did this first.

Attaching any form of payment cards or extra PID with google is just not going to happen.

Giving google and companys a hand straight into my wallet to take whenever they want is just a no no.

What's to stop nefarious actors? 'Accidental' double charge?

Google won't care too much because they'll get their share no matter if its legitimate or not.

I don't trust google to take care of it when they can't even maintain a safe app store or an email account.

There are many barriers to micropayments, such as security, scalability, reliability, and transaction costs

"I've had this great idea. Let's build it first, we can add the security later "

Just say no, it will be abused and open to criminals. Will Chrome hold themselves responsible if their code gets hijacked and starts handing out millions of micro payments. The hackers of the world must be having micro-orgasms at the thought of this revenue stream. This is another reason why my browser has no credit card details permanently stored.

I can imagine many abuse scenarios for an internet wide scheme. However, as a replacement/alternative to subscriptions, it is something I've long believed would be desirable. There are some paywalled news sites where I have wanted to read the odd article but am unwilling/unable to justify a subscription, micropayments per article would be great.

1. I will block all ads

2. I will not give you micropayments

3. I will not pay for a premium subscription either

I might donate you some crypto if I really like your website.

For-profit websites were a mistake, leading to clickbait and SEO spam. Bring me back to the 90s when people made websites because they had something to say.