Ad blocking is here to stay. Some people compare it to antivirus revolution, allowing end users to protect their browsing experience against malware and malicious use of web.
Advertising induces desire to generate economic activity. If desire is suffering, then advertising (in the most extreme sense) can be viewed as a form of paid torture.
> While I'm not going to complain about a price reduction, I'd honestly be more excited if S3 implemented support for additional headers and redirect rules. Right now, anyone hosting a single page app (e.g. Angular/React) behind S3 and Cloudfront is going to get an F on securityheaders.io.
You can setup "Origin Custom Headers" in CloudFront ;)
That's for sending headers to your web server or S3 though, not for sending headers to the user. There are a few extra headers you can send to the user, but not the security related ones.
Saw the presentation last week at ServerlessConf in London and it really looks very promising. The cost behind this solution is what will really make me check this out :)
P.S. Quoting the author: "As you can see for these queries, the reference implementation performs reasonably well; it's nowhere near Redshift performance for the same queries, but for the price it really can't be beat today"
Imagine it's not blurring, but random replacement of alphanumeric characters that quickly replaces the original text in the article. Would you use it that way and which route: micro-payments or ads?
Agree on short reading articles. How about longer size content? And have a direct correlation / Math formula between how much time you need to "invest" consuming the content vs how much time you need to "spend" up-front in unlocking the content: micro-payments vs ads. Would that work for you?
And, regarding the payment, would you connect with Apple Pay or Amazon Payments or PayPal instead of providing publishers your card directly?
That is significantly better than a site filled with banner ads, and a small fee like 5 cents is something I'd actually be willing to pay for an article like that, if the payment process were that seamless.
Thing is though, unless and until we have a standardized web payments API, I'm not sure it can be. If doing this required me to create accounts with every ad tech provider who wanted to offer something like this... no thanks.
It might not be very helpful in this context, but I'm an engineer and our company aims to empower publishers and content providers offer the best reader experience by building this solution white labeled, with low barrier of entry.
If this will evolve into a standardized web payments API, I'm on the same page with you (I don't think so). But quality journalism is struggling and solo micro-payments won't work, we all agree on that, so how can we help the freedom of speech remain free? Think about it ;)
P. S. By the way, like in software engineering, we target to reuse existing e-commerce (or m-commerce) processes for both authentication and payments, so in theory you should not be asked to create a new account. Instead reuse existing ones.
No, that demo really doesn't feel respectful of readers:
- The headline loads, then flashes off, then reappears when a webfont finishes loading
- A "Support quality journalism" popover jumps in front of the content I opened.
- A fifth of the screen height is taken up with a permanent fixed-position header nav
- When I scroll to the bottom, the page gets jumpy and scrolling lags as it tries to on-demand load a bunch of related / recommended articles
I thought when I first saw that page that it could be defeated with a simple inspect element, but it looks like when the atm-blurry is removed from the paragraph id's that the paragraphs themselves were all gibberish! I wonder if the text is randomly generated or if it's some kind of text-cypher.
Either way, this type of paywall experience is significantly less annoying than a pop-up, but I personally would still be unlikely to pay for a subscription
Interestingly the text is garbled after it's loaded. So if you view the page with JavaScript disabled, the original text is completely readable (no blur effect either). I assume this is an attempt to make the page accessible to robots but not to humans.
Cool feedback. Thank you! This approach doesn't get you to subscription (although technically it could), but rather allow you to read without unblocking or whitelisting adblockers, and without subscribing or sharing your personal data.
No. why not just show some reasonable, small ads instead of slowing my page load time with 20 trackers and ad auction scripts.
If you host the ads on the original site and show them without JavaScript you can easily make it almost impossible to block.
Nickel and diming users isn't going to work either, if you want to get paid for the content you'll have to do an all-in deal like Netflix and hope people sign up.
Fair point, but it's not a restaurant and educating readers this etiquette would be really tough. How about pay for reading and refund if you think it's not worth your money? Would you do that?
I'm not sure that educating readers would be that difficult if you cater to a well-cultured audience, personally I like the approach of Smashing Magazine when you use an ad blocker:
If I ran a blog I would include the same element, some wording like "you know, creating quality content requires more effort than spewing clickbait, mind leaving us a tip to let us know that you appreciate our efforts?" and a flattr button.
Although your idea sounds like a good starting point for a website which caters to a massive audience (basically, every news website).
A simple method for that could be if the user closes the tab or navigates away before a fixed time period passes, such that it's clear they didn't have time to read much of the article, automatically cancel the payment.
It's not a bulletproof idea of course, can be gamed. Users could take a screencap, or copy-paste, before the timer is up. But that's probably not worth worrying about until the model becomes widespread.
It looks like post-Austin exit of Uber and Lyft, smart guys jumped on the opportunity to fill the gap. I really hope Arcade City will be able to provide sustainable & scalable solution!
you're betting that a facebook group is a scalable solution?
arcade city is a great example of unintended consequences -- instead of safer rides, austin's regulations led to consumers choosing a much riskier ridesharing option (no GPS tracking, no recourse when something goes wrong, no background checks at all, etc)
Thanks! This article is very informative. DWIs are up thanks to Austin putting more stringencies on drivers than where I live, NYC, which is far more dangerous.
Uber/Lyft claimed that since their services began, DWIs in Austin had dropped by 23%. They have since risen about 7%.
Seems like Mothers Against Drunk Driving needs to get involved with Austin politics so that Uber and Lyft can again operate there. How many deaths will have to happen before Austin decides to not be more stringent than NYC, Boston, LA, Chicago, ....
