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To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I'm sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.
There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.
And then the new meta instead of making you scroll through a million ads to get to the content it will make you go to page 2 then 3 then 4... to get to the content to get many more cents XD
But yea i do agree that if the websites aked us to pay the same amount that they get from ads to not see them it would cost us a fraction of a penny. Just needs some kind of wallet that either the website or ad provider can take from to delete the ads.
Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.
I literally sent a message to google in the ads part of my google account since google is one of the biggest ad provider, about a wallet that would pay automatically to not see the ads. Idk if anyone reads these messages there XD
unfortunately google gains a lot more from getting our data and selling us as potential clients to businesses and would most likely not want to get on that.
Maybe paypal wich already have wallets and widespread addoption could try to replace ads provider.
That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you're OK with that, but business models like that are partly what's wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who's relatively rich and who's relatively poor in the wrong direction.
Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn't.
The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We'd be lucky if it was a dollar.
There's also the question of what constitutes "a page". What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn't load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?
Data caps and charges would be the "better" way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who's on a plan that has those, that they're awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.
Fine have government subsidies that give people $50 credit a month. Or give people the option to opt out. I dont NEED to to exist, I want it to exist. I want an easier way to pay for my internet usage rather than ads. If ads are going to pay someone 0.0014cents for my attention id rather overcut the ad and pay the webhost 0.01cent for no ads.
This is the details and it can be worked out in more detail. At the moment I dont think that is relevant to work out. Just provide a way to opt out and then it can be between the hosts and the users how they set up their payments. If the hosts have prices to high or a scammy model users can switch to paying based on domain vist or choose to not pay at all. Its no different to users choosing to use an adblock when visting a website.
Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don't want to pay for more of it.
I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.
Actually, given Lemmy's usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren't thinking through this proposal.
This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?
Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days
NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.
Not a perfect idea but not the worst?
There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. https://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
This is closer to the idea: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-Micropayment-Markup-19990825/
You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.
First of all, prices already go up for things like netflix. This isnt aimed at subscription sites like netflix its more for pages where you browse for free at the cost of viewing ads like blogs, youtube, substack, lemmy etc. Yes prices would go up over time no doubt but the idea is that the users providing the money should lower the cost. 1000 humans visting your site should be willing to pay more than an advertiser is to show an ad to those 1000 people. Google generally pays around 5cents to 30cents for 1000 views. I dont know about you but I can split 30 cents between 1000 people, hell i'll even double it cause im generous. I think if 1000 people are viewing your website you should get paid for providing something interesting enough for 1000 people to enjoy. If everyone gave 1cent thats $100, if everyone paid double what the ad was they'd be paying $0.0003 each.
I dont want people who write a blog that is read by many people to need to subject their readers to ads all only to get a check from google saying heres a few cents bud. We can do better, and I dont think the answer is asking people to pay a $5 a month.