VirtualLarry
Premium
join:2003-08-01
| said by IGGY  :If someone has a better way of doing things. Please present it. Ted Nelson's concept of "transcopyright", and micropayments, come to mind.
said by IGGY :If someone has a better way to make sure websites get paid for sales from ads shown. What if they got paid for the content itself, directly? In such a way that the annoying advertisements weren't even necessary? Not a pre-paid subscription, but a tiny "pay-as-you-go" thing, almost just like pre-paid phone cards, which were/are all the rage.
said by IGGY :Then definitely present it and help get it into place. Many would say just do away with the commercialization of the web. I honestly don't see this happening. Well, if you remember the state of the internet/web around '94-95, and the state of it now... what do you think? I think that the commercial interests have almost totally destroyed what it used to be, on the order of carpet-bombing Iraq, in order to "save it".
I also blame the speculators and "the bubble" for doing a lot of damage too, over and above those that sought to commercialize the medium. If they had never shown up, things like hosting/bandwidth costs would never have shot up either. Kind of like the Gold Rush, those selling sevices to those that hoped to "strike it rich", often overcharged, simply because those customers would be willing to pay the price, in a manner that the "locals" were not able to afford any more.
Some of the biggest obstacles preventing something like I outlined from happening, are simultanously the biggest, existing transaction merchant companies, although Paypal is making significant inroads, and ISPs, whom want to "stay out of the loop" as much as possible, and yet, are really the "key" to the whole thing. Local leaf-node caching of content, using a protocol that can differentiate between "wholesale" and "retail" information, and have a capability for direct local billing, with a certain cut going "upstream", and eventually reaching the actual root content-provider/content-creator, would going a long way towards the creation of this sort of infrastructure.
I know that a lot of people believe that everyone on the internet should be free, and that feeling is probably never going to go away, but realistically, would paying pennies per day, for you favorite websites, be too high of a cost?
It also greatly reduces the risk that prevents many people from pre-paying for a subscription for content, because they could visit the site once, at a tiny nominal cost (under a quarter or dime, perhaps, for the average site), and if they don't like the content, simply never go back. |
