People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off, publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.
I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the regular Bfeed.
I mean , isn't this essentially the idea behind patreon? You batch the micropayments payments into single transactions on the credit card network to reduce the marginal cost of the fixed fees?
Didn't Google already do something similar with new subscriptions?
Didn't flattr do this a decade ago?
It's not a new idea, and as I ranted elsewhere, is only even required because of the fixed fees on credit card transactions.
I'd expect Mozilla to be more invested in the "pay with $, not ads" approach compared to Google. Mozilla owns Pocket, which has been relatively good at finding longreads type material on the net and rendering it in a reader-mode view, so I think they're a better cultural/philosophical fit.
I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.
They’ve repurposed it as an “ad removal pass” service were you pay way more money per month per website that you want to remove ads on. It’s limited to large publishers only. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor-twopointoh.ht...
Based on https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring... it looks like it's a collaboration with https://scroll.com/ and supports sites like:
- Vox
- The Atlantic
- Buzzfeed
- Gizmodo
- Slate
There's just a button to get it. Well, I want to learn more before I commit to something, and I think others would too.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check
> "Until October 2018 MBFC rated China's Xinhua News Agency as "least biased",[205] but the rating has since changed to the somewhat more reasonable "left-center bias".[206] Xinhua has been criticized by Reporters Without Borders as being the "world's biggest propaganda agency",[207][208] and is regarded by Wikipedia as a source "to treat carefully""
Are you sure that Buzzfeed is to the left of the Communist Party official outlet?
Thank you for your interest in Firefox Ad-free Internet!
This product isn't available yet, but we're working on it. Would you please click the Next button to take a short survey to tell us what you think? At the end of the survey we'll get your (optional!) e-mail address so that we can let you know when the Firefox Ad-free Internet beta launches. If you don't want to give feedback, click here to skip to the sign-up page.
Click the 'Next' button to take the survey.
> Thank you for participating in this survey! We would like to invite you to a free trial of Firefox Ad-free Internet, a name we used in this survey for a partnership with our friends at Scroll. You can sign up today at www.scroll.com Thank you very much for helping to make the internet a better place!
EDIT never mind, once you click through to subscribe it's that survey. This whole thing seems a bit disingenuous ...
I do want to block the underlying tracking/fingerprinting/profiling etc.
This is why I'm very much against Brave - I don't really see why they have the right to edit or censor other people's revenue models and replace them with their own. That seems.. unethical.
That said, they may have gone too far with tracking and other excessive bloat that I might just start using one.
If ads were safe (i.e. text-only, no JavaScript, no video) and the publishers actually vetted the products, I wouldn't block them. I don't care that a physical NYT has ads. It's the algorithmic sale and distribution of ads that broke the model.
As soon as I can pay for the content instead, I do it.
Ads is just another way to pay... if it's too bloated (thus too expensive) you just don't get it, or go find something less bloated (aka less expensive), that's it.
Although maybe long term this will happen anyway, so Mozilla has nothing to lose. I mean Chrome will have its ad-tech-friendly blocking-lite, Firefox will be the only real ad-blocking available, and sites will start to make moves to directly discourage Firefox use ("I see you're using Firefox, switch to Chrome to view our crappy site").
I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money, not via ads. Give me that option.
Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.
You often get a ecpm of 50 cents? That seems quite awful, even more so from the US. It should be closer to 10x that.
Subscriptions risk making silos. Once you have paid $5 for site-group-A (one million sites) it's annoying to find that the site you are reading belongs to site-group-B which belongs to some other subscription. This is the HBO-vs-Netflix problem.
Ad-blocking is a lot like using a DVR, or a VCR. Someone sends you data and you have the right to not view all of that data. The company has the right not to send you the data if you don't pay for it, but they don't have the right to tell you that you must view all of it.
Content that is funded by ads is often not content I particularly care about. If it matters enough people will be willing to fund it, if not, let it die.
Clicking the button brings you to a survey where they seem to indicate the intent is to be ad free:
> You clicked a button to possibly subscribe to Firefox Ad-Free Internet for $4.99
* This is yet not available.
* It's not "Ad-Free Internet" but more like "a dozen websites ad-free".
* They expect a monthly payment - which is fine, but the first thing I imagined from the title was a built-in blocker in the browser but this is quite different.
edit: maybe I am being too harsh... maybe this is a starting point to something bigger. Let's hope!
Publishers are already dependent on Google and if Google wants to screw them over, they can. How is this different from that?
Google has the resources to make better products.
Unfortunately, the big successful players seem to make pretty good $$ by selling customer data, so they have little incentive to change this.
Mozilla/Firefox is in a unique position to launch an effort like this, since it controls a decent browsing platform with a significant user base.
I'll sign up the moment this becomes available in the EU.
> Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally.
Having a low number there is a feature.
One of the biggest fees on micropayments are the fixed transaction fees. Stripe is currently 27‰ + 5¢, which on a $1 transaction is nearly 8%! If those fixed fees could be made to go away for low-cost transactions, micropayments would work within the current system. Most people can accept 3% overhead, but most won't accept 8%.
It just seems like the entire problem is manufactured and not really an issue that can be solved until the banking systems just decided to solve it by changing their policies. I'm not even proposing a technical fix, it really seems to be a problem entirely with the current policies.
Edit: yes, I understand that Stripe is a gateway and processor, not an issuer or network, and that banks are often issures, but not the network. Yes, I understand that cards each have their own interchange rates, but many gateways like stripe have been just "averaging" them to provide low-volume retailers a fixed, predicable coat per transaction. I'm just saying that if the networks. E.g. Visa or MasterCard (or even discover or Amex despite being much smaller) could change their policies and requirements regarding fees for low volume transactions to remove fixed fees, and the vast majority of the issue with micropayments would be solved. I trust that the major payment gateways and browsers could work out a protocol to make use credit-card based micropayments very quickly and in a way that doesn't require additional third parties, beyond the payment gateway chosen by the person accepting the micropayment.
This is not for me.
When left unchecked, advertisers are to websites what kittens are to furniture.
a) no publishers sign up
b) no customers sign up
(as long as they try hard to make it happen).
I have no interest in Firefox's initial selection, but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription to a collection of my local news sites.
How do we go from 5 american "online magazines" to a global network? I don't know.
If that's more or less than $14.99, I'd be willing to pay it for an "ad-free" internet. This will never happen, I guess, but just thinking about it...
That said, this is a practical implementation of some patterns that belongs on https://userinyerface.com/game.html ;-)
This is _exactly_ why websites are as bad as they are right now.
> And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't do it.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you want to support an alternative source of funding for content, then this appears to be a great positive step towards an internet without tracking and invasive advertisements, promoted by the only alternative to Google in the browser market.
If you want to take a philosophical stance, you should reject the tracker and leave websites that don't adhere to your strict criteria.
(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)
The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as "ad-free internet" so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.
(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of $4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct digital subscriptions.)
it's not even that! it's not even something that they have! go on click the link to subscribe and see what happens.
"<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"
EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.
The NYT is one of the co-sponsors that started Scroll, so I'm sure that they'll be on board eventually if they're actually not already.
The only way to make this work is to track your id across many properties. (I assume)
I do welcome this effort, which is similar to the Apple News (or whatever they named it, I think) but it would need a lot more content before I am interested.