Adblock Plus owners commandeer Pirate Bay man's tip jar Flattr Eyeo, the German company behind Adblock Plus, has acquired Flattr, the online tip jar operation co-founded by Peter Sunde, of Pirate Bay infamy. The two companies already had a formal partnership. "Flattr makes micropayments automatic and effortless, thus it will be the most user-friendly payment solution on the internet. …
"every second you donate £1"
Just take £1 once and fly under the radar. There are many who can "donate" out there. When funds run a bit low, you're down to your last but one super-car say, just repeat. Most won't try to chase down a £1 debit they don't recognize.
However, for the model to work it will take someone more informed or serious about the future of news in a civil society than Eyeo or Flattr have so far shown.
That might seem reasonable from a publisher's perspective, but to most end users of the internet adverts have become a plague, blocking up bandwidth, conveying malware, and popping up/flashing/auto-playing video at every opportunity. From that point of view Eyeo (by blocking most intrusive adverts) is still doing a good job.
The supermarket analogy is very good, every major media producer has tried (and mostly failed) to control sales of their goods by legal threats and DRM. And it not really working, while the Pirate Bay may be fading from prominence, most artists are still not getting much from the "legal" replacements such as Spotify or YouTube. And they are not much more than an advertisement vector in many cases.
Nobody really wants to pay for using the Internet, any yet they are - via advertisement or their personal information being whored around - but generally they don't know it. A workable micropayment system and some fair rules for its use (e.g. pay and get anonymity (beyond the pay provider knowing) and no adverts, or free and get infested/whored as usual) could go a long way to "draining the swap" as they say these days, offering artists some reward better than adverts but probably not as much as the big media barons are used to.
So if Eyeo or Flattr are not up to it, who is any better?
Micropayments are horrible, look at DLCs.
What we need is to subscribe to a service, though google, your ISP or whatever, and they pay a monthly fee, that gets shared between what I use.
Some site would have limited access for such "unmetered access", but it would still be better for most people and it would imporve the experience. Ah.. no Ads if I pay a website.
People have been trying to make micropayments on the internet a thing since about 2003. Guys, please, just let us bury the dead already. Stop leaving its festering corpse on public display. In other news, AdBorker Plus has gone over to the dark side and is trying to monetize itself.
I'll make this easy for you: Anyone who's smart and motivated enough to install ad blocking software is also smart and motivated enough not to want to pay someone else. Monetization is what we're trying to avoid -- you're no different than the soul-less marketing flesh bags we're trying to kick into the Sun to us.
This is blasphemy to them but... the internet won't self-destruct if advertising gets a bolt cutter taken to it and yanked out. Nothing of value will be lost if doubleclick and its clones are gathered up and shot into the Sun (we landed men on the moon... I'm sure we can land marketing directors on the Sun -- and don't worry, you'll be landing at night). If your business plan has "advertising revenue" as its sole source of income, I have some bad news: You already failed. People will go right on spending money without images of dancing toilet paper and warnings of erectile dysfunction haunting them, and maybe, just maybe, it's about time companies start making products people want to buy, instead of trying to turn their users into the product and then getting pissy when they don't want to.
Installing an ad blocker does not equate to not wanting to support websites, it mainly means you wnat to avoid being exposed to exploits and irritating ads / bandwidth abuse.
As has been mentioned, Patreon is quite popular, e.g I'm guessing a few reg readers will be aware of Techdirt (which as a bonus lets you disable ads easily as they know some people dislike ads) that allows you to contribute via patreon (makes a change from buiyng T shirts!) and it seems to be working OK for them
> Assume you enjoy venting your spleen on el reg .. how do you suppose it's primarily paid for? Advertising .. I don't see you holding your hand up to pay an elreg subscription.
I would gladly flip them a few bucks. According to their own statistics, 9.5 million people read it. Let's say they have a staff of 150 people or so, most of them support (not writers/journalists). For comparison, the NY Times has a staff of about 3,400; I figure for a very focused niche website that mostly does analysis of other news sources -- ie, not much investigative journalism, that's not an unreasonable figure. At an average pay of $36k USD (for all employees, not just journalists), and assuming labor makes up about 1/3rd of total costs -- a typical business figure, we'll round up to $100k of resource need for the organization times 150 people... that's an operating budget of about $15 million per year. So those 9.5 million people could contribute $1.57 per year and support the organization. Now in practice, most people don't -- We'll say only 5% (a high end figure for advertising responses) do. That 5% of the readership could flip $31.58 per year and cover everyone, or $2.63 per month.
It's not unreasonable to expect $2.63 per year from the top income earners in the field who would be reading this site, and the remaining 95% of slackers who get it for free could keep doing so, but more to the point excerting influence on their peers which increases eyeballs and 'mind space'. By becoming the de facto go-to for IT news through word of mouth, readership grows and revenue grows as well.
That's not an unreasonable business model; There's just one problem -- the people most likely to donate are the ones with the lowest incomes. Those with high income proportionally donate less. A lot less. So we obvious need some kind of tiered system; A combination of one time donations, recurring income (subscriptions), but also a need to keep content free.
When you look at how the news industry has approached this problem, the varying methods from paid-only viewing to donations-only, to premium content, it becomes clear these numbers -- while perhaps not completely accurate -- are illustrative of the overall picture.
Now, me personally... I think the best thing to do, if we take online advertising out of the picture, is to fall back on a tried and true method: Tiered donations with varying 'prizes'. People are much more likely to donate (and in larger amounts) if they get something in return, even as a token. A t-shirt, hat, etc., are all commonly done, and also help fulfill advertising objectives *but with explicit engagement and consent of the consumer*. Wearing an El Reg shirt is both a statement, and a choice. It's not shoved down people's throats and as a result those people become good sources of word of mouth, both actively and passively.
In the United States, we have the Public Broadcasting System, or PBS. It's a television channel and network, supported by tax dollars and donations. They have donation drives bi-annually. Roughly 50% of their revenue is generated through donations, which brings in $220 million (donations only); About 95 million unique people watch it each year. It is a rough analog to the BBC, but with much poorer funding and support at the federal level or the general public.
As you can see, the numbers for donations-only support and what it would take for El Reg to make rent are roughly the same -- PBS gets about $2.30 per viewer per year. I estimated about $1.57 or so for a typical business. El Reg could operate with significantly less overhead (ie, more of its budget would be labor) because it doesn't need all that equipment, transmitters, etc., but conversely wouldn't benefit from any advertisements (commercials), so it would probably break even.
So there you have it: The donation model is viable for journalism, it just requires a radical re-thinking of how to engage its readers/viewers. The most visible problem in the field right now is that the internet generation and the people trying to engage them have forgotten the lessons learned by previous iterations of mass media: Namely, you can't ask people for money without giving something tangible back. A faceless static form asking for credit card information is neither engaging nor effective. Donating needs to be a center-piece of the organization, not a bag hung on the side, with proper care and attention paid to cultivating it. Patron may be successful as a whole, but many of it's content creators are simply clueless on this because they don't have an organizational support or backing from a knowledgable and dedicated staff who handles the donation side of things and promoting it. They are, in effect journalists trying to be marketing directors. Obviously, it's had limited effectiveness, popular opinion notwithstanding.
Did anyone else try browser Brave? https://brave.com/ Seems like a similar idea - no ads out of the box, anonymous micropayments to content providers. From their website: "Readers may choose a monthly contribution amount which is divided among the publisher sites they visit most."
Looks like wallets are handled by BitGo and payments from other currencies by Coinbase. Personally I don't mind paying for things, but get annoyed with ads very quickly.
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